On Wednesday, we were watching a documentary and something came up about people tampering with votes. Mainly, we were shown how in North Carolina, Harris won but was proven guilty of tampering with the ballots. People were picking up ballots from homes and tampering them before turning them in.
This reminded me of an article I read recently about people telling some community false information to get them to not input their vote. There was a series of tweets that Twitter was working to take down that said "Save Time Avoid The Line, Vote from home." They sent this out so that Clinton supporters would, mistakenly, vote only by text to a certain number and therefore their actual vote wouldn't count. When it was first noticed, Twitter first said that it didn't violate any of their rules but after BuzzFeed brought it up again, Twitter said, "Not sure how this slipped past us, but now it's fixed." They made it so that after you sent your vote for Hilary to the number, you got a text back noting that the ad wasn't real.
I'm not sure how many people this actually tricked or if it actually did have an impact on the votes for the 2016 presidential election, but it definitely sends a message about our politics. As much as we want to have fair elections, there are always going to be people who try and cheat the system whether by tampering with ballots or by sending false information.
Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2016/11/3/13508378/twitter-removes-voter-disenfranchisement-tweets
And the documentary we watched in class
What an interesting article! I remember hearing about the confusion on Twitter involving the 2016 election and was uncertain about what exactly happened and if it was really true, so this post cleared up a lot of my confusion. I think you bring up an really important point about voter suppression and voter fraud: there will always be people out there who want to ignore the rules to get their candidate to win. While this is concerning in and of itself, what concerns me most is the seeming ease with which people can tamper with voting. By secretly changing a ballot or even simply tweeting false information, voters' power can be manipulated rather quickly to serve a particular person's goals. While most of these acts of voter suppression end up being caught or addressed, it is still unsettling to think of the many ways votes could be manipulated within the system. I think this is a large reason why people feel their votes don't matter; they think that even if they do vote, it might not make a difference because of the way the system works. This left me wondering, is there a way to try and prevent potential voter suppression before it occurs? The countless and unpredictable ways that voter suppression could occur surely makes finding a solution difficult. However, as individuals, we can attempt to combat this issue individually by being aware of potential misinformation and by casting our votes.
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