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Last Week Tonight

19 Nov, 11 tweets, 3 min read

Hello to all our new viewers who've encountered our 2019 segment on voting machines through conservative media using it to push Trump's voter-fraud claims! First: sorry we swear so much! But second: the way people are using that segment is horseshit!

If you watch our segment through to the end, you'll notice that we say the biggest vulnerability is if a state uses direct-recording electronic voting machines, or DREs, especially those without a paper trail.

Good news! Of the states where the Trump campaign is contesting the election results – PA, GA, MI, WI, AZ and NV – only Nevada still uses DRE machines, and even those produce a paper trail.

On top of which, a huge proportion of votes this year came in on absentee ballots, which are... y'know... paper ballots.

In the story, we also suggest that a good failsafe is to perform a risk-limiting audit after an election is completed. GA is wrapping up its risk-limiting audit. PA, NV and MI are piloting risk-limiting audits this year. AZ and WI are performing more limited audits this year.

Would you like Wisconsin and Arizona to perform risk-limiting audits? Maybe their Republican-led state legislatures should get on that!

(Is now the time to point out that in 2019, the House passed the SAFE Act, which would've required every state to have risk-limiting audits in federal elections, but McConnell didn't bring it up for a vote in the Senate? It sure seems like a good time to mention it.)

Finally, and most importantly: There is no evidence that any voting-machine fraud happened. In fact, some of the experts we consulted for our piece signed a letter regarding the Trump campaign's allegations. Would you like to read it? Here it is!
mattblaze.org/papers/electio…

If you didn't click through, here's the important part:

@PolitiFact

And here's @PolitiFact's writeups of the Dominion Voting Systems and Hammer/Scorecard rumors that you may've seen -- both of which they rate "Pants on Fire". (Note: "Pants on Fire" is bad.)

politifact.com/factchecks/202…

politifact.com/factchecks/202…

And here is a GIF of an all-mouse band.

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