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Thousands of Bots Are Retweeting Claims of Voter Fraud In Kentucky (msn.com) 314

"It's deeply concerning to see shady coordinated disinformation campaigns trying to undermine our democracy," says the man who apparently defeated Kentucky's Republican governor Bevin in a close election last Tuesday.

The New York Times reports on what happened in the hours after Twitter user "Overlordkraken1" decided to tweet to his 19 followers that he'd "just shredded a box of Republican mail-in ballots." [H]yperpartisan conservatives and trolls were pushing out a screenshot of the message, boosted by what appeared to be a network of bots, and providing early grist for allegations of electoral theft in Kentucky. High-profile right-wing figures were soon tweeting out their own conspiracy theories about the election being stolen -- messages that were in turn pushed by even more trolls and bots -- and the Bevin campaign began talking about "irregularities" in the vote without offering any specifics or evidence.

The talk has only intensified in the days since, though it has yet to be matched by any evidence of actual election rigging. But with Mr. Bevin's choosing not to concede, and Kentucky authorities' preparing to recanvass all of the votes at his insistence, Kentucky is shaping up to be a case study in the real-word impact of disinformation -- and a preview of what election-security officials and experts fear could unfold a year from now if the 2020 presidential election comes down to the wire...

Data compiled by VineSight, a start-up that detects disinformation on social media, showed that many of the accounts that tweeted the screenshot of @Overlordkraken1's ballot-shredding claim appeared to be bots. Their tweets, in turn, were spread by other bots. Of the more than 3,800 accounts that VineSight detected tweeting the screenshot, at least 2,350 appeared to be bots, based on an analysis of the accounts' activities, including how quickly and how often they tweet... @ConservaMomUSA's post about the ballot shredding was retweeted about 1,300 times, and nearly 60 percent of that traffic was from bots, VineSight found...

By Thursday, the online campaign was melding with real-world action. A supporter of Mr. Bevin, Frank Simon, had set up a robocall network telling people to "please report suspected voter fraud" to the state Department of Elections. There are no indications of any voter fraud in Kentucky, according to Alison Lundergan Grimes, the Kentucky secretary of state.

"The Kentucky secretary of state's office said federal law enforcement officials were investigating both the tweet about shredding ballots and the subsequent rapid amplification," the Times reports.
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Thousands of Bots Are Retweeting Claims of Voter Fraud In Kentucky

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  • Never Change (Score:5, Insightful)

    by yuriklastalov ( 4536597 ) on Monday November 11, 2019 @03:37AM (#59402088)

    Never change, Putin. You crazy Russian bastard.

    • Re:Never Change (Score:5, Interesting)

      by barc0001 ( 173002 ) on Monday November 11, 2019 @04:23AM (#59402176)

      A few hundred people on keyboards and some internet connections are WAY cheaper than a 6th gen fighter program and new ballistic missiles, it turns out. Why fight when you can convince your enemy to tear themselves apart from within with a few nudges here and there?

    • Now I'm confused!
  • if it was the same source as the ones pretending of vote fraud in Bolivia...

    • by Nidi62 ( 1525137 )

      if it was the same source as the ones pretending of vote fraud in Bolivia...

      So, are you saying the Bolivian election authority didn't suspend counting for 24 hours and when they started back up the vote count for Morales shot up significantly?

  • by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Monday November 11, 2019 @04:02AM (#59402132)

    YOU put the spotlight on Twitter!

    Twitter is completely and utterly meaningless drivel, made of 100% PR accounts and bots, if you count by number of original posts, and still moszly bots if you count by institutionalized parrotings... ... until you give it attention and feed it!

    A lone nutjob can scream all day. It means nothing and he has no power... until you spread it like it does and like he has.

    YOU are personally the cause of it. It is only a fuse. YOU are the bomb! YOU do the damage.
    So would ya fuckin shut it?! And treat Twatter like it doesn't exist UNTIL. IT. DOESN'T.

    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Monday November 11, 2019 @04:59AM (#59402242) Homepage Journal

      Because after all this happened in 2016 it seems that little has changed 3 years later. The current election in the UK and the 2020 presidential election in the US are both going to get flooded with fake news and we still haven't figured out what to do about it.

      Presumably there will be a response from the Whitehouse. Trump is very concerned about fake news and will want to take action before the campaign really gets started.

    • This is informative? You know what 100% actually means, right?

      To me, it means that you're probably using social media wrong. Trim out the political BS and your feed is better. Or at least marginally better. :/ And surprise, when you personally know the people that you interact with, it's pretty easy to disprove "100% PR accounts and bots".

  • by k2r ( 255754 ) on Monday November 11, 2019 @04:22AM (#59402166)

    One important point of a voting process is convincing the loser and their followers that they lost.

    Facebook, Twitter now provide the coordinated, high performance amplification of the contrary message for no relevant amount of money. P oliticians, lobbyists and foreign powers to do exactly this.

    So basically destroying the voting process is free now, and thus it will be done.

    • by h33t l4x0r ( 4107715 ) on Monday November 11, 2019 @04:34AM (#59402206)
      It feels like the KGB may be laying the groundwork of declaring a 2020 Trump loss a "coup", which is consistent with POTUS's language. It's certainly a rough time for US democracy and I do not envy you poor bastards.

      But then I remember how much you interfered with elections around the world and I think, "Yeah, those Mother F'ers really have 4 more years of Trump coming.". Maybe a taste of your medicine will help you appreciate your crimes.
  • by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Monday November 11, 2019 @04:34AM (#59402202)

    All of the commentary of "Trump losing the suburbs" is pretty much on par with the Kentucky Data. Kenton & Boone are Cincinnati Suburbs and the GOP lost 19,287 & 18,003 votes respectively. In Boone county Trump won by 18744 votes and Bevin lost by 543.

    Trump won Campbell, Warren, Kenton and Madison counties by more than 10k votes, but Bevin lost.

    https://imgur.com/a/c8d0u1H [imgur.com]

    In the smaller more rural counties of Hancock, Boyd, Bath, Wolfe, Nicholas, Breathitt, and Elliot Trump had more than 2:1 votes, & in Floyd, Magoffin, Carter and Knott he had a 3:1 margin and Bevin lost.

    https://imgur.com/84uxD5N [imgur.com]

    *If* there really was voter fraud they really went wide and deep into a lot of counties.

    https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... [wikimedia.org]

    Or occam's razor the combination of:

    - One two punch of Coal Jobs didn't come back and trying to take away Health Care from people with black lung is slightly unpopular. (Losses in Coal Country.)

    - Trump's toxicity in the suburbs (Losses in everywhere around Lexington and Cincinnati) and Louisville going bluer.

    - "White women without college degrees" [primepatriot.com] in the towns of Owensboro and Bowling Green flipping those counties.

    OR, a simultaneous coordinated shedding of votes across all of Kentucky and only this person 'talking'. Hell, the final Season of GoT leaked to Reddit.

    • What's missing is for people to understand the procedures used to seal and account for ballot boxes. If those are airtight, how could ballots be shredded?
    • by Nidi62 ( 1525137 ) on Monday November 11, 2019 @06:57AM (#59402390)

      It probably didnt help that by all reports Bevin was a really shitty governor and the Democrat is the son of a very popular former governor. That'll cause a fair number of flips.

    • by thereddaikon ( 5795246 ) on Monday November 11, 2019 @09:51AM (#59402890)

      As a Kentuckian I find it funny when outsiders try to draw conclusions from our politics. Saying we are pro this or anti that. When the truth of the matter is that Bevin specifically was unpopular. We recently went through a crisis with the state pension system, an issue that has been a long time coming and Bevin did the stupid thing and blamed the state employees for being entitled. This pissed a lot of people off. It wasn't the teacher or state troopers who were robbing the pension, that was the legislature. It wasn't the state workers who were refusing to hire replacements when people retired and instead hired contractors who don't pay in, that was the executive branch.

      So Bevin shot himself in the foot by claiming that people who were promised a pension as part of their job contract were somehow entitled freeloaders. That didn't hurt the GOP in the state though. Look at the rest of the election. The GOP controls the legislature now and we have our first Republican Attorney General in decades.

      This doesn't change much in terms of federal elections. McConnell and Paul will get re-elected. And in 2020 Lexington, Louisville and Frankfort will go blue while the rest of the state goes red. This happens every election regardless of who is the governor.

  • Twitter user "Overlordkraken1" decided to tweet to his 19 followers that he'd "just shredded a box of Republican mail-in ballots.

    Overlordkraken1 just admitted to committing a crime. How's he going to recant this? If the ballots were never counted then they can't (easily) be accounted for (requested ballots aren't always used) and he can't (easily) prove he didn't do what he said he did. Even producing a box of shredded ballots will be problematic.

    Hope he enjoys prison -- I'm sure the other inmates will enjoy his Twitter handle. If he didn't actually do this, he'll get out -- after all the mail-in ballots sent out have been ac

    • Over under on the IP address being *in* Kentucky?

    • by Sique ( 173459 )
      If I post on twitter that I shred another bunch of democratic ballots, it won't change anything. I wasn't in Kentucky at all at the time, all I did was making a public statement (a untruthful one in this case).

      The same could have been with OverlordKraken1. You don't have any prove that a) he was in Kentucky, b) had access to the ballots, c) and that any ballots are missing. All you have is a statement of an anonymous Twitter user making bold statements.

      Maybe the crime he commited was false pretenses?

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Ksevio ( 865461 )

      If only it were that easy then Trump would have been in jail years ago!

  • Me lose Kentucky? That's unpossible!

  • by neuroklinik ( 452842 ) on Monday November 11, 2019 @07:00AM (#59402400)
    So, they claim rampant election fraud against republican candidates, but block efforts to secure our elections? Funny, that.
  • Voter fraud bots retweet you!
  • Twitter doesn't matter, since only journalists (and bots!) are subscribed to Twitter. Ordinary folks can't be bothered by it.
  • Route twitter to 127.0.0.1. It's causing more problems than any *chan or right wing site.

  • Social media is a pox upon society.

  • "Twitter, in response to questions from The Times, said the trolling and spread of disinformation about the Kentucky race appeared scattershot and haphazard, but largely appeared to originate in the United States. The company described @Overlordkraken1, whose profile said his name was Luis, as a user with a history of small-time trolling."

    Sounds like both sides are playing up "irregularities" with little to support their case.

  • Alas we'll never know. People are required to pay attention to and believe all that is said on that shithole, right?

  • We should be asking the question right now is "are they wrong"

    5000 votes is a razor thin margin in a state wide election! As much as certain political actors want to pretend otherwise and as much as other actors want to leap to conclusion the scale is massive: there are document cases of people ineligible to vote casing ballots.

    We have had other elections like Al Franken's senate run that were even closer; and his might be looked at as the deciding vote that gave us the ACA - an example of landscape alterin

  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by Ksevio ( 865461 ) on Monday November 11, 2019 @10:43AM (#59403092) Homepage

      There's fortunately a simple equation for whether something is disenfranchising legitimate voters, you take the number of fraudulent voters, and subtract the people that are prevented from voting. If the number is negative then your policy has failed. What makes it more difficult is the number of fraudulent votes has been roughly zero, so any policy really needs to increase voting at the same time to make it worth it.

      Since there's virtually no cases of voter fraud (no, states neglecting to remove voters that have moved isn't voter fraud), nation-wide Voter ID would be a big expensive way to discourage people without IDs from voting. Voting is already a hassle for a lot of people, but if they have to visit the DMV to get an ID, many will likely just skip it

  • by kenh ( 9056 ) on Monday November 11, 2019 @11:41AM (#59403378) Homepage Journal

    But with Mr. Bevin's choosing not to concede, and Kentucky authorities' preparing to recanvass all of the votes at his insistence

    The results are within four-tenths of one percent [nytimes.com], is it really so incredible that the loser wants to make sure the results are correct?

    Stacy Abrams lost the Georgia election by one point four percent (over 50,000 votes) [washingtonpost.com] And STILL insists she is the winner of that election...

    By comparison, Bevin is within about 5,000 votes of his challenger.

    I think Bevin has a reasonable argument for challenging the results - never mind anything posted on Twitter.

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