Could the US election be stolen？
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Summary
Over the weekend, we learned that there are problems in the voting machines that will be used in the November vote. But apparently it s just too late to do anything about it. In a democracy, trust in the system is nearly as important as a system itself. So the question remains: why does the managerial class care so little for both?
Transcript
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And we are going to fight like hell against the tyrannical Democrats and any Republicans who do
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deals with them. It will be your peril if you underestimate this movement again.
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It's been four years and we're still talking about Donald Trump's concerns that the 2020
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election was stolen. A majority of Republican voters certainly seem to think it was. And so
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you think that the federal election commissioner would do everything in its power to ensure election
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integrity this time around? Apparently not. Over the weekend, we learned that there are pages of
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problems in the voting machines that will be used in the November vote. But apparently it's just too
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late to do anything about it. In a democracy, trust in the system is nearly as important in the system
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as a system itself. So the question remains, why does the managerial class care so little for both?
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I'm Rachel Parker and you're watching Rachel in the Republic.
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Hey everyone, welcome back to Rachel in the Republic. I wanted to start by taking a look at
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the story that I didn't see getting a ton of media attention elsewhere. Probably the bombshell interview
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between Elon Musk and Donald Trump was what everyone was paying attention to early this week. And
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understandably so, there was a lot of good tidbits there. But I thought this story was important to
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mention just because it's something I cover closely here in Canada and Alberta as well. This story was
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from Politico released earlier this week. It said that some of the best hackers in the world gathered in
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Las Vegas over the weekend to try to break into voting machines that will be used in this year's
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election. And guess what? They found multiple pages worth of problems in the voting machines that will
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be used. From Friday to Sunday, this event, which happens every year, it's called Voting Village.
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Their hackers clustered around tables with all shapes and sizes of voting machines and equipment
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to verify voters' identities or tabulate ballots, trying to get past firewalls or other security measures.
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And just like every year since the Voting Village began almost a decade ago, attendees found problems.
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Organizers of the Voting Village intend to put out a full report in the coming weeks,
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detailing the vulnerability findings from the cycle. According to Voting Village co-founder
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Harris Hertsey, these vulnerabilities ran multiple pages as of Saturday afternoon. And according to
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Politico, the problem is that those findings will likely come too late to make any fixes before the
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federal election on November 5th. Now, in order to try to reassure the public, Politico also mentioned
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that this happens every year and that every year they find problems. That does very little to reassure
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me and it should do absolutely nothing to reassure you. If they're finding problems every year, the
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question remains, why are they not doing this further in advance of election day to try to figure out what
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the issues are and solve them well in advance of November 5th? Additionally, why are we still using
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voting machines in elections at all? We used to count the ballots by hand and we had a lot less problems
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when we did that, as we'll get into later. Additionally, this also reveals that these problems
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have been piling up for years and very little is being done to fix them. Voting Village organizers
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told Politico that they are frustrated that despite years of security findings, voting machine vendors
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aren't moving more quickly to make fixes. In a statement, Hertsey told Politico, quote,
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there's so much basic stuff that should be happening and is not happening. So yes, I'm worried about
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things not being fixed, but they haven't been fixed for a long time and I'm also angry about it.
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So rather than being reassured that every year they find problems and the election cycle seems to go as
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normal without issues, what this actually reveals is that some of these problems are being carried over
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year after year and those responsible for fixing them, like the vote machine manufacturers, as well as
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the Federal Election Commission, are doing nothing to fix it. The story goes on to say that there have been
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no foreign cyber attacks taking wide swaths of voting machine offline on election day or evidence
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of hacks that affected results, but the risk is always there. The organizer went on to say,
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if you don't think this kind of place is running 24-7 in China, Russia, you're kidding yourselves.
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We are only here for two and a half days and we find stuff. It would be stupid to assume that the
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adversaries don't have absolute access to everything. So I think that really sums up the crux of the
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issue. These are a couple of American hackers who spent a weekend working on this problem and they
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found pages worth of problems in voting machines that will be used in the November 5th vote,
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including some problems that had been found in previous years and weren't fixed. And they're
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saying that America's adversaries, their foreign adversaries, are working on this around the clock
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to try to break into these systems. So if they were able to find pages worth of problems in just a few
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days, you can only imagine what a country like China, who might be spending a year working on
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these problems, is able to uncover in these voting machines and the sort of havoc that they could
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wreak if they desire to do so. Now, I just wanted to add one little bit of clarification. In Canada,
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we do not use voting machines. In Alberta, we do use voting tabulators, which basically counts voting
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results. But voting machines is a machine that's actually used to record votes in an election without
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paper. And we'll get into the distinction a little bit more later when I explain what some of the
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problems actually are. Now, the reason that this is so important is that voting machines have come
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under a lot of scrutiny in the US since the 2020 election, when Donald Trump said that the election
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was stolen. He continues to say that he did not have trust in the process. And we know that a majority
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of Republican voters say that they did not have trust in the process as well. This largely had to do with
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mail-in ballots as well. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, voters were able to send their ballot
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in. And even if their vote was received past election day, but was postmarked on election day,
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it was still able to be counted in some cases almost as to the Friday. So the election was held on Tuesday
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and some states were counting votes on Friday. I think this just reveals that we really have a
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crumbling system around us. We used to have an election day and we would know the results of the
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election that night or early into the next morning. And in recent years, it's become more common to
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accept the fact that it will take days to know the results of the election. Does that sound like a
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situation that should happen in a free and fair democracy where it's days to actually know what
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the results of a democratic election will be? And in this case, it was because states like North
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Carolina and Georgia, they were continuing to receive these mail-in ballots well past election day
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and they were still being counted. And that's, you saw that clip there where they're saying,
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stop this deal. Donald Trump and his office began making calls saying, this is not fair.
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We would like them to stop counting the ballots. We know that the ballots will continue to be
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counted. This is a story from NPR at the time of the 2020 election. NPR wrote at the time,
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North Carolina and Georgia, which looked like healthy Trump wins and then started to shift after
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midnight. So that was really when we saw some panic begin to set in upon with Donald Trump and
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the Republicans seem like they had won the election and then more ballots continue to come in.
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But what a surreal thing to read. It seemed like they had won the election. And then after midnight,
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things began to shift. They continued counting ballots until Friday. We know that Trump did
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ultimately win North Carolina and Georgia, where a host of the mail-in ballots problems were risen.
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It ended up going to Biden. So Donald Trump still maintains that he was right to be concerned
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about the results of the 2020 election. Here's a clip of him talking just about 10 months ago.
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I listened to myself. I saw what happened. I watched that election and I thought the election
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was over at 10 o'clock in the evening. You were listening to your instincts.
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My instincts are a big part of it. That's been the thing that's gotten me to where I am.
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So the truth about voting machines is that they have been littered with problems from the get-go.
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If we take a look at the history of voting machines in America, they actually began in the late 19th
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century with a sort of an automatic booth system where you would pull a lever and it would
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automatically count your vote system. That originally did not have many problems. But as
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soon as things started to become more updated, more elevated, more electronics involved, that is
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when real problems began to emerge. First and foremost, with the punch card system that came
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out in the 1960s. And at the time, it was sort of considered the great innovation. And it was thought
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that these ballots could be counted by computer. So you would essentially go, you'd punch a hole in your
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ballot to who next to the name of who you would choose to vote for. And a computer would then
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count that based on the punch card where you had punched the hole. Now, that became very
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problematic in the 2000 election, which was the only American election so far that has been decided
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by Supreme Court. Essentially, that race came down to Florida between Al Gore and George Bush. It was so
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close that it came down to the swing state of Florida. And ultimately, Florida, the count was so
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close that they had to call a recount. And then the recount was so close that they called a further
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recount. And it was at this point that they began pulling ballots. And they realized that 29,000
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ballots were where the hole was punched improperly. 29,000 ballots had the hole punched improperly in
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Palm Beach County, Florida alone. So just in one county, the machines were not doing an adequate job
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of being able to count those ballots. And so eventually, the Supreme Court decided to uphold Bush's
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electoral victory. And he became the president, as we know. But many Americans for years maintain their
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lack of confidence in the system. And of course, the punch card system was no longer used because
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of the issues that it caused. And so there you already began to see some problems and some fear
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emerging among Americans that their electoral system, that their democracy was not safe. And
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that in this case, it had been decided by the Supreme Court, with critics arguing that it was simply
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decided based on party lines. Now, they tried to to fix that issue the following year with voting by
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the iPad. In the wake of that horrible recount process, Congress passed the Help America Act,
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Vote Act of 2020, which mandated higher standards for the voting equipment used in federal elections.
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States and municipalities spent millions of dollars upgrading their voting equipment.
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Not all of the new touchscreen voting machines were created equal. And software glitches produced some
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glaring errors in voting tallies once again. Then in the 2016 presidential election, electronic voting
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machines in 21 states were targeted by Russian hackers. As a result, several states have scrapped
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their expensive touchscreen voting machines and switched back to paper-based ballots. So it just
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seems in this case, everything that is old is new. Once again, I think that was sort of the comment
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of the Elon Musk and Donald Trump debacle. Basically, we're going back to the days of listening to the
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radio. Everyone's crowding around these little machines, listening to two people having a
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conversation. Of course, it was over X. But it seems that everything that was old is new.
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It is new once again. And in this case, certainly it seems that we really just need to go back to
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paper ballots. People do not trust these voting machines. Now, when I was doing research on this,
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it says that the Scantron of voting, which is essentially a vote tabulator. So in that case,
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you enter in your vote and then you put it into a tabulator and it tallies the vote. And the purpose
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of that is to save time on election night by spitting out the final tallies for a given
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candidate and to save that time of manually hand counting the ballots. But we ran into our own fair share of
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issues with those in Alberta. In Alberta, we do use tabulators. Our Premier, Alberta Premier Daniel
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Smith, has promised to get rid of those tabulators. There's been legislation put forward that would do
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that. But essentially, in our last election, which was last spring in 2023, we had these tabulators
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used for the advanced vote anywhere. So you could go to any riding in the province and cast your ballot
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for your home, your candidate back at home. And then on election night, the tabulators spit out
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the tallies. However, we had our own issues on election night where results were delayed by
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hours, typically in a provincial vote with only about four million people, not all those people
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obviously even eligible to vote. You should have the result of the election fairly quickly, but the
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results were delayed for hours on election night because volunteers then would receive the paper that
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was spit out by the tabulator with the tally and they would have to manually enter everything
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into a computer that was not connected to the internet. So it actually ended up delaying the
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process by several hours. And I think in the case of Alberta, many conservatives, they don't trust the
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tabulators. There's a lot of mistrust in technology that has been introduced into elections. So the answer
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seems fairly straightforward to me. It would obviously be better to end this obsession with electronic
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voting, with vote tabulators, with voting machines, and simply go back to the good old paper ballot,
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vote on election day in person. And therefore we have the most trust in the process. You know,
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I understand that America is an absolutely massive country, far bigger than Canada, but that also just
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means there's more people who are able to volunteer on election day and to get those votes counted and
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to ensure election integrity, which is really what separates us from countries where they are not
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democracies and they don't have free and fair elections. So everyone, that is the topic of the day
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today. Are you concerned about voting machines? Do you think that it is time to end reliance on
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technology in our elections and to get back to paper ballots and counting by hand? Let me know what you
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think in the comment section below. That's everything we have for you today. Thank you so much for tuning
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in to Rachel and the Republic. I'll be back next week with more content. Have a great weekend and God bless.