I think that we can take it as given that the 2008 Presidential Election the first time that anyone saw the power of social media in organising large groups of people in the middle of a political campaign. I also think that it's fair to say that within ten seconds of Barack Obama being elected as President, the opposition was already circling the wagons and trying to work out how best to fight.
Politics very quickly worked out that all you needed to do was make people angry, and by 2012, rightist parties around the world had already realised that simply making people angry was enough. Truth as we know it as a useful weapon, was probably abandoned in the political process by the end of 2012. In Australia 2013, Tony Abbott's Government was elected on the basis of nothing more than making the electorate angry and repeating three word slogans at them. By about 2015, leftist parties finally caught on to the idea that making people angry was reasonably effective and elections since have mostly been about who can be the either the angriest or loudest.
The Tories, Trump, Abbott, Morrison, Biden... I would not be surprised that the interested parties who would benefit from having certain outcomes of elections (which includes nefarious foreign state actors, business groups, media companies, and the political parties themselves) have probably all engaged in hiring armies of lower paid people in troll farms in places like Vietnam, Cambodia, India, Laos, and the granddaddy of them all The Philippines, to act like people in the countries where they want to change election results, and present disinformation. If you are being paid a wage to present lies and you don't really care about the results at the other end, then I suppose that for the people in the troll farms, that it's just like any other job because it is.
It makes sense for people in the west to blame designated enemies like Russia over the interested parties in our own countries because we like to cling to the belief that we're somehow better; even though all the evidence points to the contrary. It is probably part of the budgets of political parties to pay keyboard armies to spread propaganda and attack critics. Political parties and media groups alike probably think nothing of using paid commentators, trolls, and bots to harass journalists and erode trust in the media, if it means influencing elections.
This is why I don't understand the latest wave of obvious trolls on Twitter and Facebook. I have been told several times over the last few weeks that the voting machines in the upcoming 2022 Australian General Election have been supplied by Dominion Voting Systems and that we should be very very suspicious of them. This is obviously designed to erode trust in the validity of the election and give even angrier and more militant organisations, licence to do very nasty things if the election doesn't go the way they want. The 2020 Presidential Election and the subsequent insurrection on January 6th 2021, is often cited as supposed evidence that if it can happen there it can happen here.
Except it can't.
That chain of events with regards voting, is impossible in Australia. Why? Because we do not use voting machines and we do not elect a President. When it comes to the latter, we have a Prime Minister who is head of the executive cabinet and who is selected by the party which has gained control of the majority of seats on the floor of the House of Representatives; so the suggestion that we even vote for the Prime Minister, is stupid and the people spouting this idiocy are reprehensively stupid. When it comes to the former, we do not not use voting machines and to say that we do means that the person reading such a suggestion has to deny reality itself.
If you want to call it a voting machine, then this is the 'machine' that we use:
Australia uses paper ballots and always has done. Whether it is for the House or the Senate, you get your little green paper ballot or your big white tablecloth of a ballot, go over to a booth and number the boxes according to your preferences. There are no voting machines. Voting in Australia has been compulsory since 1921 and so not only are there no voting machines but every single voter in Australia who is alive, knows that there are no voting machines.
What kind of idiotic trolls can not even bothered to do this basic research into how elections work in Australia? If you're going to tell us lies, then at least have the decency to tell lies that can't be verified. In this case, every single voter knows that this is a lie.
For the people that have forwarded this to me on Facebook, I have something quite scary to tell you. You are stupid; really stupid at that. Stupidity which is distinct from intelligence, happens when a person who is in command of the facts, then actively decides to do a deliberately bad/injurious/idiotic thing. If you have forwarded on an article or a meme which tries to tell people in Australia that we have voting machines when quite literally everyone including yourself knows that that simply isn't true, then you have chosen to tell a lie and a stupid one at that.
The second part of this stupid that the voting machines in the upcoming 2022 Australian General Election have been supplied by Dominion Voting Systems, suggests that the counting can not be trusted.
Again, if you want to call it a counting machine, then this is the 'machine' that we use:
After you put you ballots in the boxes, the boxes are either sealed when they get full or remain out on the floor of the polling place until they come back to be opened and the ballots counted. The boxes are overseen by representatives from the interested political parties and the people that do the counting are volunteers who mostly come from community groups like the Parents and Citizens associations attached with schools.
I can tell you, having done counting at a polling place that on the Saturday night of an election, that the people from the various political parties hang around like a bad smell and so if you want to accuse anyone of collusion, then it would mean that the political parties themselves would have had to come to an agreement. That's a stupid suggestion. The counting 'machines' if you want to call them that, are mostly older ladies who are fuelled by tea and coffee, sandwiches and scones and pizza.
I think that its fair that on top of having one of the best parliamentary systems in the world with preferential voting for single-member districts in the House and proportional representation in the Senate, with compulsory voting, voting on a Saturday, with a culture that has sausage sizzles a cake stalls at polling places, that the actual method of voting on paper ballots that are then counted by hand, is also the best system in the world.
It might be possible to hack our elections but it can not be done electronically from overseas. You can not hack the voting machines because we do not use any. You can not stuff ballot boxes with papers because the amount of cross scrutiny from parties who nominally dislike each other is immense. Attacks on the integrity of a paper system don't scale very well either. There are 151 electorates in Australia with thousands of polling places; so to hack such a system would need thousands and thousands of people all in on it to begin with and such a conspiracy would be so massive that ordinary police would have found out about it, as well as the Federal Police and ASIO. You can not even hack the counting machines because old ladies and especially old ladies from the P&C are the most formidable opponents in the universe.
Political parties, media groups, and nefarious foreign actors would think nothing of paying keyboard armies to spread propaganda and attack the integrity of our elections. I fully expect that knaves and very bad people would do that. Spreading obvious lies that can be easily debunked by every single voter in the country and which require people to deny their own lived reality, is a special kind of stupid. If you have chosen to do this, then why shouldn't I put you in the same category as the unscrupulous parties, media groups, nefarious foreign actors, knaves and very bad people. If you have chosen to be that stupid, then you deserve to be judged as such because it was your choice.
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