Too Much Ado About So Little – Russian Hacks

How effective was Russian propoganda on social media? Who many votes were switched? What other voter numbers are more significant?

But just how many Facebook users who saw this propoganda, actually bothered to vote? A 2010 study of Facebook users showed a small increase of 340,000 votes, nationwide, based on a direct get out the vote plea.

Then there were tens of millions who just didn’t vote, and Texas was worse than the nation, see table below.

Also, there was the GOP Operation Cross Check that eliminated upto 7 million minority votes from the 2016 election results.

And what about the large increase for third party candidates. In Galveston county Texas third party vote went from a historical average of 1.4% to 4.5%. Nationally the vote change for third party went from 1.7 in 2012 to 4.1 in 2016. And according to WikiPedia election results, the change in third party votes from 2012 to 2016 was 4,962,440 additional votes.

Many factors affected the 2016 election. This also includes media favoritism. Remember the CEO of CBS saying that DJT may be bad for the country but he’s great for the bottom line – profit. Tens of millions were spent on TV campaign ads telling voters what they already knew about DJT instead of investing in ground troops to make calls or go door-to-door to encourage voting. According to Steve Phillips in his book Brown Is the New White, some $20 million spent on TV ads for a 2014 losing Democratic Senatorial candidate could have resulted in 56,000 more votes for the loser if that money had instead been spent on the GOTV ground game.

Metrics on voting results show that voter turnout is increased by 5% with that kind of ground game. Add to that all the new voter suppression laws past by Republican controlled states with the help of ALEC and since SCOTUS ransacked the Civil Rights Act.

Elections are complex, multi-variant processes and blaming the results on one thing is grossly problematic and suspiciously distracting.