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.

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.

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.

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.

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?