Comment by rcpt
5 months ago
There is nothing spooky or nefarious about the existence of that test suite.
But that this skill set gets you into E's inner circle definitely goes onto the ever-growing pile of circumstantial evidence that something is not right.
Your point is if you're interested in writing code to verify the validity of elections, that is evidence to the suspicion your employer sonehow corrupted the election? That does not sound like a sane line of reasoning.
My point is that in the context of Elon and the 2024 election, where there is objectively a lot of suspicious activity, the fact that his inner circle contains people with expertise in generating ballots is also suspicious.
Yes I will conceed that all this talk is circumstantial. It's like Lab Leak (even the desire to gaslight anyone who talks about it)
> where there is objectively a lot of suspicious activity,
The word "objectively" does a lot of work here, and most of it is unpaid. Every election has irregularities, and every election has the losing side casting suspicions around. No, I literally mean every single one. We have search engines now. Just go and look up. It's literally every time.
Sometimes, those suspicions turn true - there are really people who conduct fraud in elections, in various ways. Most often, though, those suspicions are thrown around by partisans unable to comprehend how their side, being obviously morally superior, the only sane side and widely popular, still lost the election. In other words, they are just junk. Without a substantial evidence base, any amount of them do not constitute any evidentiary base. Zero times millions is still the same zero.
> people with expertise in generating ballots
Did you ever actually see a real US election ballot? Generating something like that is beyond trivial. There are many official sites that just let you download a sample ballot. Even if that ballot is somehow modified from the actual one in subtle ways, the actual one is quite simple too. It may be a problem to get the paper exactly right if they check that, but having the code to generate a ballot does not help you there in any way. And also generating something like that would be pretty useless by itself, if you have electoral fraud in mind, because the problem is not producing the paper, it's getting it into the system and getting it counted and not getting caught while doing that.
Summarily, this "expertise" does not enable you in any non-trivial way to perpetrate election fraud, and does not make any hard part of that any easier. Also, you can find people with such expertise - and better - at any design and print shop. They can reproduce any of it - and much more complex designs - without any problem, that's literally what they do all day.
> Yes I will conceed that all this talk is circumstantial.
No, "circumstantial" is way too generous a word for this. "Empty fantasies" is more fitting.