Re: Discussion of the 2020 American Federal Election
Trump only won the election by a ridiculously small margin in 2016 while losing the popular vote. I don't know if hacking was involved, but you can set up an anonymous LLC in an afternoon if you don't mind breaking some laws with basically no chance at being caught out, then you can register that LLC with Facebook and Google Ads. After that, you literally get charged per click on whatever you want to put in front of people, where people means "please show this to white men under 30 who own homes and 2 cars and have at least 1 pet" basically. There is nothing at all in place to stop you doing this from outside the U.S, it probably happened, every time the democrats bring it up the Republicans don't want to touch it because they've spent too long saying it's all a witch hunt.
But as someone with the technical know-how to have a good go at tipping a local election, provided I had the money at any rate, it's absolutely possible to pick out some cities or states and go "I need my candidate to win here" and because of how U.S. elections work with the electoral college, we're super super vulnerable to techniques like that because you only need to convince a very small number of people to tip it. So I'd take it seriously. I don't know if Russia will again, but I believe Russia at least tried in 2016, and it's definitely more than possible.
Whether it happened or not is beside the point though, election cybersecurity helps everyone, blocking actors from using the social media platforms plus money to accumulate power helps everyone, etc. It should be even less controversial than making election day a holiday so that everyone has a chance to get to the polls. People have demonstrated hacks on voting machines lots of times.
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