Exclusive: clip from canvasser for Musk’s America Pac reveals apparent ease in which GPS location can be spoofed
Donald Trump’s ground game in Arizona and Nevada may be undercut by canvassers working for America Pac using GPS spoofing to pretend they have knocked on doors when they haven’t, according to multiple people familiar with the practice and a leaked how-to-fake-location video.
The ramifications for Trump may be far reaching, given America Pac has taken on the bulk of the Trump campaign’s ground game in the battleground states, and the election increasingly appears set to be decided by turnout.
A bootleg how-to-spoof video, made by an America Pac canvasser in Nevada and obtained by the Guardian, shows the apparent ease with which locations can be changed to fake door-knocks, calling into question how many Trump voters have actually been reached by the field operation.
The video, shared with a few hundred canvassers, walks through the setup: a user downloads a GPS-spoofing app to falsely place themself at the door of a Trump voter, fakes responses to the survey and takes steps to cover up the fraud by varying the survey responses to make it believable.
Almost 20 years ago I was friends with a bunch of Red Bull girls. Their job was to take the Red Bull mini cooper every morning, fill it up with cases of Red Bull and drive it around handing out free Red Bull any place they found people congregating. They would often just drive down to the river and dump the cases there and then go home and get high and watch TV all day. Red Bull seemed to catch on to how easy it was for their employees to do this, so they issued them PDAs with GPS that would track where they went all day. I was a Windows CE mobile app developer at the time, so they asked me to see if it was possible to spoof the Red Bull tracking app, which turned out to be ridiculously easy to do since it just logged the raw GPS coordinates into a plain text file once every 15 minutes.
I did this for a pretty obvious reason (they were all very attractive) and because they gave me cases of diet Red Bull which I actually liked for some reason, but I think I was also doing humanity a service by preventing at least some people from ever even trying that vile concoction. I don’t think it helped the fish though.
So it’s people being paid to knock on doors for trump. Lying about knocking on doors to still get paid.
At least this time the fraud is fucking trump and Musk.
Although it’s likely this shit will be used to claim trump had “more voters than votes” but they’ll claim Dems cheated no matter what
Although it’s likely this shit will be used to claim trump had “more voters than votes” but they’ll claim Dems cheated no matter what
This is the worrying bit. It will get debunked but they’ll still make the claim and their faithful will believe it, and that will be a justification for messing up with the vote counting and the certification processes post election.
Excuse my ignorance here, but what is the data that they’re collecting being used for? We see polls every day suggesting that Trump and Kamala are closer in votes than anyone on Lemmy would like, but now I wonder who exactly is being grifted. Is this Trump being lied to and paying for a service he isn’t receiving, or is this data being falsified to make Trump look more popular than he is, lending weight and legitimacy to his claims of widespread voter fraud?
I’d love, for once, for Trump’s own philosophies to be biting him, but based on the past, I’m worried this is just another tool in the misinformation arsenal.
This isn’t about gathering data so much as it is encouraging Trump supporters to get out and vote, is my read.
We see polls every day
Some polls are bullshit, but polling aggregators still use them.
So if you look at respectable independent polling, it doesn’t matter at all.
If you blindly follow aggregators, then it would effect the overall numbers.
But from the article it’s grifting from Musk’s PAC, they’re the ones paying for the canvassing that’s not happening
Well, the question here is - if they know the canvassers numbers are bunk, would they still try to use them? It’d be a way of creating more respectable fake polls, I suppose.
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Given that Trump-era Republican politics is ideologically about self-serving grift, one could argue that the canvassers who do this are the Trumpist true believers, and the idealistic shlubs who actually knock on doors because they care are RINOs.
Campaign run by fraudster attracts fraudsters, news at 11.
Good for these people for grifting an asshole who has grifted so many others.
They have concepts of door knockers
Fake knockers sounds very on-brand for Trump, though…
When your entire philosophy is based around a more base, animalistic interpretation of human nature, is it really all that surprising when your own people take advantage of you?
We get more of the behaviors we role model to our fellows, whatever those are. If you role model being a little shit, then more of your followers will be little shits to you.
Exactly. He’s getting out what he put in. This is what he deserves and he has no one to blame but himself.
This doesn’t hurt anyone but Trump does it? I’m trying to figure out the election fraud angle - it’s really just defrauding Trump and his campaign for payment of services not rendered, correct? Not that it’s OK if so (I mean, it’s funny, but they should still be prosecuted), but how does this fraudulently influence the election (if at all)?
he might be using the whole thing as a means of laundering money.
One thing this does is amplify the false narrative that the election will be stolen away from Trump.
These canvassing results make it look like there are more Trump supporters than there really are. It looks like it’s going to be a very close race anyway, but if Harris gets a higher number of votes in states like Nevada or Arizona than this canvassing data suggests, then Trump and his supporters will ignore the prospect that their numbers are bad and will instead use these corrupted numbers as evidence that either a) fake voters are in the mix or that b) votes for Trump are being suppressed.
And this will then be extrapolated across all battleground states that don’t go their way, not just Arizona and Nevada.
Edit: clarified a couple of sentences.
Great point, thanks for pointing that out.
I think in a lot of cases this is just a big rabbit hole for anyone who wants to fix it or prove it even happened.
- The best option is to start over and start canvassing again from scratch.
- Proving and then holding someone accountable can’t be automated in a trustworthy way, so you’d have to invent that process and then run everyone through them.
Both of those are just expensive, in both time and money terms. I think it’s got to be damage control, and then maybe some attempt to round people up and find the fraud after the election?
But the bottom line is that it’s the PAC that shoulders the entire cost, for now, and the Trump campaign just has to eat the damage for now. These aren’t federal crimes or really even actual crimes, so any eventual outcome is most likely to just be lawsuits or legal threats against supposed fraudsters?
I don’t know shit about american polling but isn’t there a software solution that guards against it? I assume pollsters are given android tablets by the orgs, and that it would be pretty trivial to lock them from installing apps if someone is interested in that. Like, parent control with a pin code or whatever.
Trivial, smart, and likely amongst the first operational considerations when “real” political advocacy organizations do it.
I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if they had a BYOD policy and the “PAC” exists mainly in three forms: A hastily made app, Leon’s drug fueled rants, and the media’s overestimation.
What little canvassing I’ve done has been using your own device, and that was where I was volunteering for a cause I believed in. If the canvassers are paid and not ideologically motivated you could imagine tablets walking off.
This is because they are paid for the canvassing, right? I can’t fathom a reason why to bother with this, if not for that. Other than maybe some Dem tomfoolery to skew the ground game reporting, I guess.
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