Still Life With Luddites

Mike Lindell is an idiot.  But you knew that. 

The serial election denier says he has contacted some state election officials to promote his new device that supposedly detects if a voting machine is connected to the internet, a key debunked claim made by supporters of former President Donald Trump in the aftermath of the 2020 election.

“We hope to have them in all 50 states,” Lindell told ABC News. “It’s already been checked out … 100% legal.”

There’s just one problem: Election officials say they don’t need or want Lindell's gizmo. They say election machines aren’t equipped with WiFi, so the devices are not needed, among other issues. 

Kentucky Secretary of State Michael Adams said through a spokesman that Lindell seems to believe that because there is WiFi in a polling place that the ballot counting machines are linked up to the internet.

Which, it occurs to me, would have been my cellphone (or my wife's) when we voted (early) this week.  Or probably every cell phone in that room, since none of us (likely; I didn't; she didn't) turned them off or even put them on "Airplane mode" while we voted.  Yes, the elections clerks said not to "use" our cell phones, but they didn't exactly confiscate them until we had turned in our ballots.

Lindell's device is going to identify wi-fi somewhere in the municipal center used by many people on a daily basis where I vote. That doesn't prove anything about the voting machines.  Wi-fi is as ubiquitous as...well, cell phones. My phone emits a wi-fi signal even when it's not connected to the internet. Unless I turn off the wi-fi feature, it’s looking for a signal.

He is such an idiot.

(aside from the fact we have new voting machines that print a ballot you put into a scanner.  The old ones stored information on a hard drive, which was taken to a center to be read.  So are the scanners, now.  The paper ballot is silly, IMHO.  Nobody is reading that fine print (especially on Texas ballots, where we had 14 constitutional amendments to vote on, 25+ mayoral candidates to select, and a raft of other offices/issues.  No one in that room was younger than me, and none of us read our printed ballots carefully before sticking them in the scanner.  And if the "algorithm" in the old machines was going to change my vote, why can't the same thing happen in the new scanners?  I suppose the printed ballots could be reviewed, but you'd need one hell of a case to get a court to order that, especially if you claimed the scam was statewide.  Hell, even countywide, in a county as populous as the one I live in. The physical examination of every printed ballot would take months; isn’t that kind of delay what they are complaining about? And didn’t they learn the lesson of the “Cyber Ninjas” in Arizona, who went looking for fraud and found more votes for Biden?

Too bad that count wasn’t certified.

It’s like living among Luddites who want to smash the very machines they earn a livelihood on.)