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Voter suppression and electoral issues with the Musk/Thiel theft of our government data. [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2025-06-04

Last Friday morning I was reading a Substack post by Joyce White Vance and something caught my attention. This is a free to read post of hers and I encourage you to take a few minutes to read it.

x I have questions about Musk’s departure from DOGE, and we don’t really have good answers. Sometimes, it’s important to just put down the markers. open.substack.com/pub/joycevan...



[image or embed] — Joyce White Vance (@joycewhitevance.bsky.social) May 30, 2025 at 5:48 AM

Here’s the part that caught my attention:

Among the unanswered questions here is whether and what personal data that was in the possession of agencies DOGE infiltrated Musk will continue to have access to. That data could potentially be used for a number of different purposes, but one that comes to mind is using that data to secretively microtarget voters. In 2024, Musk reportedly funded an ad campaign that targeted “Jewish and Arab voters in battleground states with contradictory advertisements about Kamala Harris’s position on Israel.” Government agencies like Social Security hold a great deal of sensitive information about individuals that could be used to assess approaches that would influence them. Emphasis mine

We already know that wide swaths of voters were targeted in the 2016 election, and that it influenced the outcome of the election.

I wrote a diary in February 2023 about the 2016 election — A new look back at the Russian attack on the 2016 election from Timothy Snyder.

In the diary I talk about, and include some excerpts from:

the must see documentary, The Great Hack on Netflix

A September 2018 New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, How Russia Helped Swing The Election For Trump

How Russia Helped Swing The Election For Trump a book by Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President , that “offers a forensic analysis of the available evidence and concludes that Russia very likely delivered Trump’s victory.”

Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President “offers a forensic analysis of the available evidence and concludes that Russia very likely delivered Trump’s victory.” The January 2023 Substack post by Timothy Snyder, The Specter of 2016; McGonigal, Trump, and the Truth about America

Fast forward to 2024 and the micro-targeting of voters. I also wrote a diary about that in December 2024 — Wake up and smell the foreign attacks on our democracy!

Here’s what Timothy Snyder had to say about micro-targeting in the 2024 election in his November 2024 Substack — The Phantom Campaign; Digital Oligarchy vs. the Democratic Future. It’s an excellent read and well worth your time.

Snyder opens with this:

I remember distinctly when the phantom Kamala ad hit me. It drew me in with a photo of Vice-President Harris and a positive and appealing summary of her policies. And then the ad exposed me, in the same cheerful tone, to a policy that I would not like -- and which the candidate did not in fact advocate.

And later…

People who supported Harris were drawn in and then put off; people who did not support Harris were deliberately given the sense that they were seeing something they were not meant to see, that they were being given a glimpse of the campaign ads of the other side -- when, in fact, they were being targeted themselves. To some audiences, Harris was presented as too pro-Israel, to others as too pro-Palestinian. (Like Ukraine for the last ten years, Harris was portrayed simultaneously as too Jewish and anti-Jewish). The degree of precision was extraordinary: white men in the Midwest were told that Harris was going to take away their Zyn nicotine pouches, whereas Black people in North Carolina were told that she was coming for their menthol cigarettes. Emphasis mine.

Still later...

None of this is good news, but it should alter how we consider the aftermath. Democrats have collapsed into arguments about what went wrong. How could she have lost? How could it be that Harris lost in states where Democrats won senatorial races? Why did she get millions fewer votes than Biden did? Why did the enthusiasm of real people in summer not seem to translate into high turnout in autumn? No doubt there are lessons to be learned. But even if the Harris-Walz campaign was perfect, Harris was also dealing with a phantom campaign, one which targeted her own voters with an untrue version of herself and her policies. The votes thus suppressed are the phantom votes, the ones that were never cast. The phantom also accounts for some confusion in the media analysis of the election. We keep hearing that Harris's defeat had to do with her identity politics, even though her campaign was based on other themes. Racism and misogyny figure here, of course: some people can't look at a Black woman without regarding her existence as identity politics. But some of it likely has to do with the phantom campaign. The whole Trump campaign painted Harris as an extremist focused on identity issues. But even people who were beyond that target area, the moderates who end up on television, were getting the phantom messages on their phones, deceptively inviting them into the same set of associations. And then some of them repeated the association of Harris with identity politics out loud in front of millions of people, themselves becoming part of the disinformation campaign. Emphasis mine

As it turns out, Timothy Snyder is not the only one that noticed the disinformation. The Washington Post also wrote about it in an article. (gift link provided) from November 2024 as well — Inside the Republican false-flag effort to turn off Kamala Harris voters.

An excerpt from the article and what Joyce White Vance was referring to in her Substack post at the top of this diary.

Take the excerpt below all in, along with Snyder’s words and think about what it means for a Democratic candidate in 2026 and 2028. These tactics aren’t about actual policy. How do you run against a phantom campaign? Who has the big bucks to counter this kind of advertising?

Another group promoted “Kamala’s bold progressive agenda” to conservative-leaning Donald Trump voters, while a third filled the phones of young liberals with videos about how Harris had abandoned the progressive dream. Black voters in North Carolina were told Democrats wanted to take away their menthol cigarettes, while working-class White men in the Midwest were warned that Harris would support quotas for minorities and deny them Zyn nicotine pouches. What voters had no way of knowing at the time was that all of the ads were part of a single, $45 million effort created by political advisers to Tesla founder Elon Musk who had previously worked on the presidential campaign of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R), according to a presentation about the group’s efforts obtained by The Washington Post. The project, funded with anonymous donations, micro-targeted messages across the battleground states, often with ads that appeared to be something they were not — a tactic the organizers sometimes referred to internally as “false positives.” With digital spots, direct mail, text messages, influencer marketing and mobile billboards, the overall project was a high-tech experiment in misdirection — an old political tactic that has been sharpened in recent decades with increasingly precise targeting techniques. Ads tested better if Muslims felt they were seeing a message meant for Zionists, “Bernie bros” felt they were hearing from the far left, and “Zyn bros” felt they were hearing from activists who wanted “a world without gas-powered vehicles,” a ban on fracking and affordable housing for undocumented Americans — policies Harris did not actually support during her campaign. Emphasis mine

These attacks are voter suppression, plain and simple. Same goes with the bomb threats that happened on election day last November. Our elections are under attack by republicans who can only win by cheating, and foreign bad actors who want to defeat us from within.

Whenever we start discussing how to win in upcoming elections, or what went wrong last November, we HAVE TO remember how our elections are getting hacked.

If we want Democrats elected WE have to do the hard work overcoming these sometimes illegal and definitely shady attacks it takes, and it starts today. It’s critically important that we not only vote all the Democrats on our ballots, but help out in vulnerable House districts and Senate seats.

We also have to get over that candidates aren’t ‘perfect’ — we can’t let perfect become the enemy of the good, as the saying goes. A reminder that House members represent a portion of their state, they have to get elected every 2 years. My House district is different than your House district; so what’s important here is not necessarily important in your district.

I’m going to close with the wise words of Marc Elias of Democracy Docket in his, 10 Things We Can All Do to Protect Democracy.

Items 2 and 4 really are central to my closing message:

2. Help Democrats

The success of any opposition movement rests on the opposing party taking power. This is not a minor detail; in our system of government, it is the essential goal. Next time you want to attack a Democrat for being too much of this or too little of that, realize that you are only helping the GOP. Instead, find a Democrat you support and volunteer or contribute to their campaign.

4. Don’t grade on a curve

This goes both ways. Do not hold Republicans to a lower standard and do not hold Democrats to a higher one. When a Republican does something normal, recognize it is normal not exceptional. When a Democrat does something normal, recognize it is normal and not terrible.

Thank you for reading!

You get extra credit if you read the linked Substacks and skim the other diaries I linked, hehehehehe.

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