Techno-Democracy is Coming to the USA

This is a piece from Research fellow, Andreas Wilmes concerning voter fraud one week after election day in the US. It is the first piece of a future correspondence piece to be written by Andreas and PhD Researcher, Andrew Keltner. Previous interviews concerning protests in the US, political climate, and technology can be found here : Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.

November 9, 2020.

The last time you suggested talking “about real problems without being political.” As for me, I mentioned Georges Bernanos’s idea that our technological age amounts to “a universal conspiracy against all interior life.” Today, I sketched out some thoughts regarding the current debates on electoral fraud which are related to those two points.

 In what follows, I will pay attention to both sides of the political spectrum regardless of any questions pertaining to the truth of their claims or the reliability of their sources. We may deal with the issue of whether there has or has not been electoral fraud later. I have my own personal views on this matter. However, let us leave this aside for now. According to me, it is better to wait and see how the lawsuits will pan out.

The stance of the Democrats is well-know (that is why I will dwell much less on them than on Donald J. Trump and his supporters). To them, Joe Biden’s victory is now undisputable and Donald J. Trump’s concerns about electoral fraud are merely part of a high scale disinformation campaign.[1] They further state that this disinformation campaign is extremely dangerous in that it aims to instill an unwarranted distrust regarding the democratic process and may thereby kindle civil war or even lead to an attempted coup d’état. What is more, this disinformation campaign would be very perverse in that it is aiming at overthrowing democracy in the name of democracy. Ultimately, the censorship practiced by news media and social networking services (which extends to the tweets and speeches of Donald J. Trump himself) would be a necessary evil. Democracy cannot tolerate a flow of information undermining its very imbalance. Strict limits, unfortunately, must be placed on freedom of expression. Right now, this point is more important to the democrats than legal issues. For the legal battle initiated by Donald J. Trump is part of his rights.

On November 7, Donald J. Trump issued a statement in which he argues : “We all know that Joe Biden is rushing to falsely pose as the winner, and why his media allies are trying so hard to help him: they don’t want the truth to be exposed.”[2] Needless to say, he is implying that the power of media arbitrarily dismissed his claims about electoral fraud as a disinformation campaign. But his statement also alludes, of course, to the censorship and dismissive attitudes experienced by himself and his supporters on both mainstream and social media.

As you know, the role played by “Big Tech” in the US elections has been and still is a prime concern for Trump supporters. Much has been said and written on Twitter’s and Facebook’s conspicuous interferences in the last months. Another key issue is the Search Engine Manipulation Effect (SEME) on which psychologist Robert Epstein conducted many experiments.  The psychological effects related to search algorithms are often hardly visible but incredibly significant. Already in 2015, Epstein stated that:

“Google, Inc., has amassed far more power to control elections—indeed, to control a wide variety of opinions and beliefs—than any company in history has ever had. Google’s search algorithm can easily shift the voting preferences of undecided voters by 20 percent or more—up to 80 percent in some demographic groups—with virtually no one knowing they are being manipulated…”[3]

It is worth noticing that SEME is not solely dependent on people’s awareness to the bias of the search algorithm. Quite the contrary:

“when people do notice they are seeing biased search rankings, their voting preferences still shift in the desired directions—even more than the preferences of people who are oblivious to the bias. In our national study in the United States, 36 percent of people who were unaware of the rankings bias shifted toward the candidate we chose for them, but 45 percent of those who  were aware of the bias also shifted. It’s as if the bias was serving as a form of social proof; the search engine clearly prefers one candidate, so that candidate must be the best. (Search results are supposed to be biased, after all; they’re supposed to show us what’s best, second best, and so on.).”[4]

On October 31, in an interview on Fox News, Epstein said that recent research suggests “substantial pro-liberal bias in … 9 out of ten search results on the first page of Google search results.” He further estimated that Big Tech’s interference in the elections may “shift 15 million votes without any people’s awareness.”[5]

         Hence, Republicans have a technological disadvantage which cannot merely be compensated for by alternative media (to many people, Twitter and Facebook are indispensable from a lucrative point of view, and Google, as anybody knows, is the world leading search engine). So, it is not hard to understand that they want to get sure technology may work in their favor for the process of voting and vote counting.

Let us dwell on this. As we shall see, from the perspective of Trump supporters, technology is at the same time the remedy and the poison. To begin with, part of the alleged evidence regarding fraud consists in insider information, footage from polling places, testimonials from citizens who noticed procedural irregularities, and so forth.[6]  To Trump supporters, this alleged evidence has been brought by, in Michael T. Flynn’s words, “digital soldiers.” Digital soldiers are the right-wing counterpart of the BLM digital activists. Digital activists use communication technologies as a counter-power against police brutality, whereas digital soldiers use the same means as a counter-power against what appears as anti-democratic procedural irregularities. Both approaches are intended to lead to legal decisions. Both are a peculiar re-actualization of the idea of the panopticon.[7] 

We cannot go through all the accusations levelled against the Democrats here. However, it is easy to notice that they may be divided into two categories. The first category is that of gross fraud, that is fraud reminiscent of, for instance, corrupt communist regimes : deceased people who voted, manufactured ballots, people voting without ID verification, mail-in ballots delivered without significant supervision, observers kept out of the count rooms, clerical errors, etc. The second category is that of sophisticated fraud and irregularities which points to the idea that the voting process would be vulnerable to cutting-edge technology. This pertains, for instance, to software glitches that would have caused miscalculation of the votes in Georgia and Michigan.[8] Counties in the two states used

“the Dominion Voting Systems election management system and ballot tabulators. The tabulators are programmed to scan hand-marked paper ballots. The paper ballots are retained and a totals tape showing the number of votes for each candidate in each race is printed from the machine.”[9]

Should errors be attributed to man or machine? That is apparently the question here. In Michigan, for instance, department officials reported to the Associated Press that “The software did not cause a misallocation of votes; it was a result of user human error.”[10] Why not, I do not know. To decide the question, more specific information about what happened, and the skills required by the technical device would be necessary here. On the top of that, there are also technical issues about the authentication, trackability and alleged manufacturing of ballots.  But there are also rumors about a direct and aggressive interference of cutting edges technologies on the US elections. Very recently, Sidney Powell stressed the need to investigate the possible use by Democrats of

“the Hammer program and a software program called Scorecard that would have amounted to a massive change in the vote that would have gone across the country explains a lot of what we're seeing. In addition, they [the Democrats] ran an algorithm to calculate votes they might need to come up with for Mr. Biden in specific areas.”[11]

From what I understood, those programs would work in tandem and have allegedly been designed by the CIA. “Hammer” would enable to spy on digital voting, whereas “Scorecard” would be an application meant to change the votes in micro-seconds during the data transfer. 

As I mentioned from the outset, the point here is not discussing the truth of those various claims. The only thing we know is that something went wrong.  My situation, I believe, is comparable to that of many other Americans: my knowledge of the technological apparatus of voting and vote counting in the US is rather superficial. And I cannot even imagine how long it would take me to acquire even halfway satisfactory knowledge on this topic. So, ultimately, I have the unpleasant feeling that I no longer understand anything about democracy because I do not have a PhD degree in engineering, computer science, or mathematics. The Washington Examiner reported that, according to an anonymous source of Donald J. Trump’s re-election team, the data collected in Milwaukee would suggest  that “ballots in favor of presumptive President-elect Joe Biden, the individual alleged, violates Benford’s Law.”[12] However, the applicability of this law to the current electoral context is disputed among experts. Given the complexity and technicality of all the issues raised, I think many people should show more intellectual modesty. Those issues are quite puzzling and frightening to me. Do we even know the extent to which the gigantic technological system of voting and vote counting may be able to correct itself? Once everything is counted by the machines, are there satisfactory ways back to assess the whole process?

In any case, a couple of things are certain. Regardless of the truth of their allegations, both sides of the political spectrum are raising legitimate concerns. No one would disagree that democracy should not be undermined by disinformation campaigns. Also, no one would disagree that the technological apparatus of voting and vote counting must be flawless. The risk is either that the latter concern may be used as a disinformation campaign, or that the former concern may be a means to conceal the technical flaws of the voting system. And yet… it is easy to notice that future attempts to solve these two problems at the same time may lead to terrible consequences. Imagine a monopoly on search engines and news media accompanied by a flawless technological apparatus of voting and vote counting. Totalitarian control over information could then wear the benevolent mask of democracy. What is more, it is only by being tamed by technology that men would learn democracy. In other words, democracy would no longer have anything to do with any kind of inwardness. Democracy would amount to a “conspiracy against all interior life.”

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[1] See, for instance, CNN’s “Misinformation Watch” webpage : https://edition.cnn.com/business/live-news/election-2020-misinformation/index.html (Accessed November 9, 2020).

[2] The Associated Press, “Text of statement from President Donald Trump,” SFGATE (November 7, 2020), https://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Text-of-statement-from-President-Donald-Trump-15709616.php (accessed November 7, 2020).

[3] Robert Epstein, “How Google Could Rig the 2016 Election,” Politico Magazine (August 19, 2015), https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/08/how-google-could-rig-the-2016-election-121548 (accessed November 7, 2020).

[4] Ibid.

[5] Robert Epstein, “How Big Tech bias could shift 15 million votes in 2020 election,” Fox News (October 31, 2020), https://video.foxnews.com/v/6205966487001#sp=show-clips (accessed November 8, 2020).

[6] I do not have enough space here to mention all the documents I went through. As a starting point, I accessed the links shared by the webpage of the French Donald Trump Support Committee [Comité de soutien français au president Donald Trump] : https://www.trumpfrance.com/single-post/la-liste-des-fraudes-d%C3%A9mocrates?s=09&fbclid=IwAR2Nm2EfDqzqp5uBKXoW1xbDfyhvxU16B-r8seWJRLP4BA3qZ9vtzxepsxs (accessed November 8, 2020). 

[7] See here what we already touched upon in part one of “Violence and the Technological Impasse,” GCAS Magazine (July 2, 2020), https://www.gcasreview.com/magazine-1/2020/7/1/usa-2020-violence-and-the-technological-impasse-part-1 (accessed November 8, 2020).

[8] See, for example, Jordan Davidson, “Software Glitch In Michigan County Tallied 6,000 Republican Votes As Democrat,” The Federalist (November 6, 2020), https://thefederalist.com/2020/11/06/software-glitch-in-michigan-county-tallied-6000-republican-votes-as-democrat/ (accessed November 8, 2020). See also Law Officer, “Two Georgia counties using same software of Michigan counties encounter software glitches,” Law Officer (November 7, 2020), https://www.lawofficer.com/two-georgia-counties-using-same-software-of-michigan-counties-encounter-software-glitches/ (accessed November 8, 2020).

[9] The Associated Press, “Officials: Clerk error behind county results favoring Biden,” Associated Press News (November 7, 2020), https://apnews.com/article/joe-biden-donald-trump-technology-voting-michigan-6beeef230376e75252d6eaa91db3f88f (accessed November 8, 2020).

[10] Ibid.

[11] Fox News, “Sidney Powell: Trump has to fight for election integrity,” Fox News (November 7, 2020), https://www.foxbusiness.com/shows/lou-dobbs-tonight (accessed November 8, 2020). In a second interview on Fox News (November 8, 2020), Powell stated that at "At least 450,000 Ballots in key states only had a mark for Joe Biden on them.” She also implies that the glitched in Georgia and Michigan may be directly related to Hammer and Scorecard. I have been unable to retrieve the video on Fox News’s website. However, the video can be accessed here : https://www.bitchute.com/video/5CNRbzOzT78U/ (accessed November 9, 2020).

[12] Joseph Simonson, “Trump campaign staff claims to have statistical evidence of fraud in Wisconsin,” Washington Examiner (November 9, 2020), https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/news/trump-campaign-staff-claims-to-have-statistical-evidence-of-fraud-in-wisconsin (accessed November 9, 2020).

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Image credit to Joseph Chan