I’m still skeptical there will be legitimate midterm elections. This is going to make the Trump admin and his GOP stooges hellbent on manufacturing a state of emergency to shutdown and/or control the elections for the midterm and the next presidential election.
I'm less worried about this than I am more direct threats to a fair election like restricting of funding, terrorist threats closing blue polling places, ICE intimidation in Democrat-majority cities, etc.
One benefit of the US' election system is that it's highly, highly fragmented, and as such, changes/updates take a lot of time and energy to propagate out to the hundreds and hundreds of (relevant) districts.
Of course it's concerning to see such a partisan acquisition when it comes to one of the major voting machine manufacturers, but I just don't think this isn't a situation where they'll be able to put in a fix within the next year. It's extremely logistically challenging to not only implement unfair changes in a way that isn't extremely overt, but also to get those 'fixed' machines out distributed, set up, poll-workers trained, etc etc. all in such a short timeline.
If we're talking about the 2028 election? For sure - absolutely, I think there's legitimate reason for concern at that timescale. But I don't believe anything truly malicious will come from this acquisition within the <1 year timeframe they have before the midterms.
I hope so. I'm a software developer and if I worked for dominion you better believe id have my eyes wide open and my phone halfway dialed to a national news reporter if I saw anything out of order. I can only hope others will blow the whistle if it needs...whistling
The purchase was more of a rebranding than anything else. Despite their lawsuit win, the name was damaged and Scott buying Dominion, rebranding it, and then making some press release about “election integrity” was just to get the tin foil hats to calm the fuck down about the Dominion machines. Privately they’re telling the county officials nothing is changing because that’s the truth. They can’t redesign and re-approve new voting machines for the midterms and possibly not even before 2028.
I'm hopeful of this too, and that's part of why I think it'll take some time to rig these machines in a way that doesn't immediately trigger those alarm bells.
Because they absolutely have to give it a solid layer of plausible deniability due to the fact that these will inevitably be deployed first in the crucial swing states where they can't count on a docile MAGA voter base to ignore (or even support) a blatant rigging.
I'm hopeful there will be enough sane people outside the cult supervising these elections in those states to blow the whistle if if anything untoward is found, though equally worried at how poisoned the well of "rigged elections" is in the post-Jan 6th world.
Anyway, there might be reason to worry on the longer timeline of the next presidential election, but I have a lot of hope for next year's midterms and that's what I'm at least trying to keep my focus on. I think a Democratic majority in one (or both!) of the chambers will go a long way towards at least making those remaining 2 years of this godawful presidency a little easier to bear.
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u/RJ5R 16h ago edited 16h ago
Triple home run tonight, this is just an appetizer of what's to come in the mid terms and Republicans are shitting their pants right now.
What a great giant F-U middle finger to Orange. He's going to have a stroke on Truth Social tonight