If it were me, I’d ignore November 8 entirely, and find some way to put pressure on a critical number of electors. Much easier to sway 538 people than 200 million.
Buy votes in the Electoral College.
Only 538 of them, and even if all the swing states* go against you, you’re probably starting with 244 EVs at worst if you’re a Dem, and 180 if you’re a Republican. So you’d need to buy at most 26 or 90, depending on party, with your $1B.
I don’t know if there are any laws pertaining to Electoral College vote-buying, but even if there are, the decision of the EC is still final, and presumably you’re willing to go to prison, if that’s what it takes to forestall a candidate ten times worse than Trump.
- In addition to those states that appear to be genuinely up for grabs this year (AZ, NV, IA, OH, NC, FL, ME 2nd district), I also included CO, NM, WI, and NH as swing states, to at least be somewhat challenging in terms of Dem vote buying.
Republicans have a structural advantage in the Senate because rural states get the same number of senators as heavily populated ones. This is not more than they “should” have, since the senate was explictly designed that way as a check on the power of the larger states. A feature, not a bug.
Republicans have a structural advantage in the house because of gerrymandering, and the gerrymandering has been due mostly to
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State governments draw the lines, and Pubs control most state governments (Dems do the same in their states). Politicians in both parties have been intent on making as many “safe” districts for their party as possible, even if that means making safe seats for the other one, too.
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For multiple reasons, there have been efforts to make “majority minority” districts where African-Americans (or other minorities) make up 51% of the population. In gerrymandering to create these, the side-effect was making multiple other districts disproportionally white and heavily pub-leaning.
This conspiracy nut went on Alex Jones to say how he " discovered Hillary’s fraud". http://www.anonews.co/election-fraud-us/
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Get access to voting machines way before the election, when they are less likely to be secure. Tamper with them significantly in many different ways; unreliable touch screens, broken ballot printers, vote flipping, etc. Code in some timed booby traps - digital, not literal - to spring 3-4 days before the election.
Force the media to hype the “voting machine disaster” right before the election. (Bribes, cajolery, concern trolling by the candidate, etc.) Call for a nationwide move to backup paper ballots right before the election.
Election process now takes 2-3 times longer on-site and is a confusing, onerous mess to deal with.
My candidate has, of course, run a massive campaign to have his decided voters vote in advance by making it really, really convenient for them to do so.
Loyal, decided voters are encouraged to gently malinger in the on-the-day voting locales. Loyal voters in open-carry states encouraged to take that advantage.
Schedule huge entertainment events aimed at opponent’s strongest demographic for midday in key swing cities.
Aaaaand, reality trumps fiction again!!
No, you can’t text your vote. But these fake ads tell Clinton supporters to do just that.
*First things first: There is no such thing as voting by text message. Period. If you want to cast a ballot, you can vote at your polling station or vote absentee. That’s it.
But ads circulated on Twitter recently would have you believe otherwise.
Lifting imagery directly from Hillary Clinton’s campaign materials, the ads encourage supporters of the Democratic nominee to “vote early” and “vote from home” by texting their candidate’s name to a five-digit number.
“Save time. Avoid the line,” one reads.
“Vote early. Text ‘Hillary’ to 59925,” says another.*
The only thing missing is at the bottom “I’m Donald Trump and I approve this message”.
Ah, the grand old Republican tradition of “ratfucking.”
A billion dollars can buy you a lot of terrorism, especially if you have 1000 patsies willing to fight for the cause.
Oh, you didn’t think people weren’t going to get hurt doing this, did you?
It’s actually quite easy. In Ohio in 2000, a week or so before the election, the state removed a lot of voting machines from black neighborhoods in Cleveland, where they were really needed, and moved them to rural districts where they weren’t. Yes, some precincts in Cleveland didn’t close till midnight, but people were waiting up to four hours and many must have gotten discouraged and left without voting. Do this in enough states and you can rig the election.
Some great ideas here, and a billion dollar budget allows you to try many of them.
I think it would be important to avoid tactics that call the integrity of the election into (too much) question - otherwise you’ve just kicked the can down the road and set yourself up for impeachment/court challenges. To me, that rules out voting machine hacking (probably - exit polls would raise questions), violence (definitely), and bribing electors (c’mon).
Keep your criminal conspiracy tiny, and don’t let your confederates know they’re part of the conspiracy.
I think boffking has the best idea so far in terms of deniability: fund a likeable third-party candidate that will draw significantly more votes from the opponent. Use dark money wisely, and no one will know it’s you (besides your lawyers and friendly billionaire funder).
I watch a lot of a computer podcast network called Twit.tv. One of their shows is called Triangulation, andthe guests this week are two computer scientists from verifiedvoting.org - David Dill and Ron Rivest - the “R” in the RSA encryption system. Well work watching or listening to if you’re interested in election security.
He told us this was going to be a rigged election. We just misinterpreted how he meant that.