2022 US elections

Mendel

Senior Member.
Starting off early (excerpted):

Article:
The evening before Michigan's state primary, Wayne County GOP leaders held a Zoom training session for poll workers and partisan observers -- warning them about "bad stuff happening" during the election and encouraging them to ignore local election rules barring cell phones and pens from polling places and vote-counting centers.

During the Wayne County training call, obtained by CNN, the presumption that Democrats cheat -- thus justifying Republican rule-breaking -- permeated the discussion. It offers a snapshot of one of the ways Trump-backing, MAGA-minded conspiracy theorists are intervening in the election process across the country, sometimes encouraging poll workers or volunteer observers to violate election rules in hopes of finding evidence that Democrats might be doing the same.

It's an approach election experts fear could spur chaos and conflict in November's mid-term elections and in 2024.

The training sessions are providing a thinly veiled, read-between-the-lines instructions that essentially show "people how to break the law without expressly telling them to break the law, in most cases," said Timmer, an advisor to the Lincoln Project, a political action committee founded in 2019 by Republicans and former Republicans opposed to Trump.

And fueling distrust in the election process is the ultimate goal, said Timmer, the former Michigan GOP executive director.

"Their plan is to be a wrench in the gears of democracy," he said of the Republican-led effort. "That's their motive. Whatever lipstick or qualifying words they put on this pig, that's what they intend to do, to cause chaos as the 2022 election unfolds, as a dress rehearsal for the even bigger election in 2024."
 
In related Michigan news:
On Friday, Sept. 2, the Macomb County Republican Party, a candidate for Michigan governor, a non-profit organization, voters and a county clerk — who allegedly turned over a vote tabulator to a group espousing unfounded claims of fraud in Michigan’s 2020 election — filed a federal lawsuit challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election in Michigan.
...
Despite President Joe Biden’s decisive 154,000 vote victory in Michigan in 2020, Republicans remain unrelenting in their efforts to challenge this outcome and continue to promulgate conspiracy theories about rampant fraud in the 2020 election in Michigan and other states.
Content from External Source
https://www.democracydocket.com/new...he-results-of-the-2020-presidential-election/
 
Article:
Trump and his supporters used long lag times in the count in 2020 to whip up false claims of a rigged process. They were aided by the “red mirage,” in which many Republican candidates took an early lead as votes were being tallied. The phenomenon occurs because Republicans disproportionately cast votes on Election Day and those votes are usually counted first, producing strong early margins for GOP candidates.

But that Republican lead is often eroded as absentee ballots, favored by Democrats, are counted in the hours — and in some cases days — after the polls close. Trump incorrectly claimed in 2020 that officials had stolen the election for Democrats as Americans slept, with the results whipsawing in Pennsylvania from a Trump lead on election night to a Biden advantage days later.


Article:
In 2020, an influx of mail-in and early ballots due to the pandemic caused major slowdowns in vote counting and reporting election results. It took four days for enough votes to be counted for the major decision desks to call the presidency for Joe Biden. Vote counting isn’t expected to be nearly as slow as it was last time around, but there’s a chance we won’t know the outcomes of some key races — and possibly even control of Congress — on election night.


Article:
Republican-led legislatures in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin have resisted entreaties from local election officials to allow mail ballots to be processed earlier.


It really depends on state regulations, when mail-in ballots get counted, what triggers a recount, whether there may be run-off elections, that can delay a final result from being posted.

The NYT and WaPo article cited above have a state-by-state rundown on when results are likely to be in this year.
 
The GOP (evidence-free) claims of crooked voting machines have caused some places to demand all-paper ballots only, which of course will take longer to process ...which they are protesting as evidence of rigged elections. Here's a recent article of a suit brought by people who actually want to "overturn" the elections of 2020.


Michigan Republicans Sue To Overturn the Results of the 2020 Presidential Election​

September 7, 2022
WASHINGTON, D.C. — On Friday, Sept. 2, the Macomb County Republican Party, a candidate for Michigan governor, a non-profit organization, voters and a county clerk — who allegedly turned over a vote tabulator to a group espousing unfounded claims of fraud in Michigan’s 2020 election — filed a federal lawsuit challenging the results of the 2020 presidential election in Michigan. In their complaint, the plaintiffs claim that the electronic voting machines and tabulators used during the 2020 presidential election “were not certified or accredited in accordance with” Michigan election law nor were they “certified by the US Election Assistance Commission.” Accordingly, the plaintiffs request that the state “rerun the Michigan 2020 presidential election as soon as possible, by way of a special election, with paper ballots only, on a single election day, with the votes being counted by hand, with members of all political parties present to observe, with a public livestream of all vote counting.”
Content from External Source
https://www.democracydocket.com/new...he-results-of-the-2020-presidential-election/
 
The GOP (evidence-free) claims of crooked voting machines have caused some places to demand all-paper ballots only, which of course will take longer to process ...which they are protesting as evidence of rigged elections.
Thankfully, through the work of Ed Felten and others, voting machines used in the US today have a "paper trail" that can be hand-counted, and IIRC has been hand-re-counted in Michigan in the form of an extensive audit that proved the accuracy of the machine count.

You can do all-paper voting. Voting machines are currently illegal (unconstitutional) in Germany, but we have smaller ballots (less races) and typically smaller precincts than the USA, and more helpers (I think). Each precinct only counts a couple hundred ballots, so we get quick results anyway.

The problem is, while it's possible to set up a voting system for fast and easy paper voting, from my news feeds I don't get the impression that the GOP has a good track record in that respect (remember postmaster DeJoy?). And with the current paper trail and audit system, the advantage from switching is marginal.
 
voting machines used in the US today have a "paper trail" that can be hand-counted,
one state

Article:
In Indiana, there are four voting machine vendors that counties can choose from. Marion County chose ES&S which includes the paper trail. 56 other counties use MicroVote machines which do not include the paper record.

Verified Voting tracks election equipment and reported nearly 41% of Indiana’s voting equipment could not produce a paper record for all voters during the primary election.

Indiana’s Secretary of State’s office told 13News 44 counties still needed paper trail equipment during the primaries, but that's slowly changing. A new law now requires all counties to make sure at least 10 percent of their voting machines can create a paper record during this general election.
 
@Ann K mentioned Michigan, where Republicans demand paper ballots:
Article:
All paper ballots

Because Michigan uses all paper ballots and prints paper tallies of the counts, there is always a physical record of all votes. Additionally, the physical record ensures reporting errors are caught and corrected before or at the county canvass. This paper trail provides Michigan with yet another layer of security.


@deirdre mentioned Indiana, with the incomplete paper trail. Per Wikipedia:
The 51st, and current, governor is Republican Eric Holcomb, who took office on January 9, 2017.
Content from External Source
Currently, the Republican Party holds supermajorities in both chambers of the General Assembly. Republicans outnumber Democrats in the Senate by a 39-11 margin, and in the House of Representatives by a 71-29 margin.
Content from External Source
Article:
Indiana counties that use electronic voting machines are finally getting enough money from the state to equip all those machines with paper backup systems.
A new state law, HEA 1116, requires counties that use electronic voting machines to, by 2024, install “voter verifiable paper audit trails” – a backup system that lets people check their ballot selections on a paper printout before confirming their vote.


I claimed that voting machines in the US generally have a paper trail; this is not true. The Brennan Center for Justice notes:
Article:
In 2012, for example, the majority of Election Day voters in some or all counties in 16 states voted on direct recording electronic (DRE) voting machines that do not produce a voter-verified paper audit trail (VVPAT). Security experts have long identified DREs as a unique security risk. By 2022, jurisdictions in only six states (Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Jersey, Tennessee, and Texas) relied on those machines as their principal voting equipment — that is, the technology used by most voters on Election Day in an election jurisdiction.


This could have been regulated at the federal level:
Article:
The For the People Act, introduced as H.R. 1, is a bill in the United States Congress intended to expand voting rights, change campaign finance laws to reduce the influence of money in politics, ban partisan gerrymandering, and create new ethics rules for federal officeholders.

The act was originally introduced by John Sarbanes in 2019, on behalf of the newly elected Democratic majority in the United States House of Representatives as the first official legislation of the 116th United States Congress. [...]

Election security

The bill contains election security provisions, including a voter verified paper ballot provision mandating the use of paper ballots that can be marked by voters either by hand or with a ballot marking device and inspected by the voter to allow any errors to be corrected before the ballot is cast. The bill would also require state officials to preserve paper ballots for recounts or audits, and to conduct a hand count of ballots for recounts and audits.[19] The bill would require the voting machines used in all federal elections to be manufactured in the U.S.[19]

The bill would also direct the National Science Foundation "to make grants to study, test, and develop accessible paper ballot voting, verification, and casting mechanisms."[19]

Alas, despite being reintroduced in 2021, this bill has so far failed to pass the Senate, for lack of Republican support for some of the other provisions in the bill.
 
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Alas, despite being reintroduced in 2021, this bill has so far failed to pass the Senate, for lack of Republican support for some of the other provisions in the bill.
Since the 117th Congress had the Democrats in the majority that statement is misleading.
 
Which bit? Each clause looks facty to me. Didn't the Republicans filibuster, which would make any "majority" irrelevant.
Yes.
It's all explained in the wikipedia article I quoted, but I thought that led too far afield to include in my post.
 
https://www.texastribune.org/2022/11/04/dan-crenshaw-election-deniers/
GOP Congressman Dan Crenshaw says election deniers know they’re lying

The representative from Houston said fellow Republicans admitted behind closed doors that the 2020 election wasn’t stolen, and he warned that such messaging could dangerously mislead voters.
Content from External Source

maybe not a good idea to quote clickbait paraphrased headlines as alleged 'sources' on MB.

i dont hear him saying anything like that headline is claiming. The messaging he is talking about that can be dangerous is that there is a way to overturn the results.

Nov 2, 2022
The case for Rank Choice voting/ Nick Troiano

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hold-these-truths-with-dan-crenshaw/id1498149200
18:40

"none of these people will ever have any power to overturn elections.

It was always a lie. The whole thing was always a lie. And it was a lie meant to rile people up...


19:05 the promises you're making, that you're gonna challenge the electoral college and overturn the election, there's not even a process for you to do that.it doesn't even exist. what the hell are we doing? and i would tell people that behind closed doors, esp the rabble rousers..like the political personalitites, not even the politicans.We definately had the arguments behind closed doors.

19:30 [they are ]like 'yea we know that, People just need their last hurrah. They just need to feel like they fought one last time.
 
Which bit? Each clause looks facty to me. Didn't the Republicans filibuster, which would make any "majority" irrelevant.
Also, the Democrat majority in the Senate was illusory. Sinema and Manchin were unreliable members of the caucus. They break with the bulk of the party on a variety of topics (including several of Biden's priorities), and Manchin several times expresses a weird unwillingness to be the "tie breaking" vote when it's 50-49, even on bills he ostensibly supported. Chamber control is a big deal, but it's not really a big part of the picture when it comes down to any given vote, especially when the senate is close.
 
Also, the Democrat majority in the Senate was illusory. Sinema and Manchin were unreliable members of the caucus.
I think that was Landru's point. But it's irrelevant to this discussion as only budget items get a 50/50 vote in the senate, if you are trying to allow 16 year olds to register to vote (HR1) then you need a 60 vote.
 
maybe not a good idea to quote clickbait paraphrased headlines as alleged 'sources' on MB.

i dont hear him saying anything like that headline is claiming. The messaging he is talking about that can be dangerous is that there is a way to overturn the results.
Is this a better selection of quotes?
the Texas Republican said fellow members of his party were merely trying to signal their disapproval of former President Donald Trump’s loss

... [edit: remove redundant bit] ...

“This extreme willingness to say the most extreme things just to grab people’s attention and then the people’s willingness to believe some of it,” Crenshaw said on the podcast. “There just doesn’t seem to be a limit to how far some people are willing to go.”
Content from External Source
Or how about this one:
He also claimed he would confront lawmakers and "political personalities" over the talk of overturning the election and they would confess they knew it was a lie, even saying there were "arguments behind closed doors in the Republican Party before" the public declarations of being able to overturn the 2020 election.
Content from External Source
-- https://gazette.com/news/us-world/d...cle_9baf0e88-5c54-5343-8132-c4218fd96c47.html

Do you really think that's not anything like what the headline claimed? Please pinpoint the most significant difference, so that we can give it an autopsy, perhaps there's some nuance either you or I are not picking up. We do speak different dialects of the language, but I'm not seeing any potential for "could care less" type cross-talk in what is ostensibly a rather simple headline.
 
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I think that was Landru's point. But it's irrelevant to this discussion as only budget items get a 50/50 vote in the senate, if you are trying to allow 16 year olds to register to vote (HR1) then you need a 60 vote.

The arbitrary distinction you are drawing is purely in your own mind, not codified into law. You need 60 votes to close a debate (cloture). and an antagonisic party who doesn't want to see the majority's will excercised can - for any bill - engage in unlimited debate and refuse consent to go to a vote.
 
The arbitrary distinction you are drawing is purely in your own mind, not codified into law. You need 60 votes to close a debate (cloture). and an antagonisic party who doesn't want to see the majority's will excercised can - for any bill - engage in unlimited debate and refuse consent to go to a vote.
and then you can suspend cloture for that bill with a simple majority, but not all democrats would support that even if they supported the compromise bill that was up for voting on.
Like I said, all explained in that wikipedia article:
Article:
Democrats attempted to pass the Freedom to Vote Act again on January 19, 2022, as part of a combined bill with the John Lewis Voting Rights Act, but again failed to invoke cloture after a 50-50 party-line vote. They then attempted to change Senate rules to exempt both bills from the filibuster, but Senators Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema joined Senate Republicans in voting against the change.

For this bill to pass in the next session, it's probably going to have to be changed to have bipartisan support.
 
For this bill to pass in the next session, it's probably going to have to be changed to have bipartisan support.
Yup, and there's nothing wrong with that. One of my biggest complaints about the US legislature is how a whole bunch of often unrelated things are bundled together all to be decided under one vote. Typically you loudly include something that no-one can disagree with in order to have some blackmail leverage when the whole thing doesn't pass - "they voted against being nice to puppies!". Or you hide something scandelous inside a mound of innocuous stuff that is likely to get approved without too much argument. I may disagree with large chunks of his politics, but I do respect Rand Paul for always reading every page, and finding the things that are being sneaked in, and objecting to the bundling - calling them out on it. He inherited that from his dad before him, of course.
 
One of my biggest complaints about the US legislature is how a whole bunch of often unrelated things are bundled together all to be decided under one vote.
Yes, and there's nothing wrong with that. These acts can embody compromises of the type, "I'll vote for something you want if you vote for something I want". Otherwise, some things could not get done at all.

AFAIK the main problem with the election act isn't unrelated bundled stuff, but different opinions on campaign finance, which many people feel is really the most important issue.
 
Article:
If one calculates the vote for each major party candidate for the office at the top of the ballot in 2022, one finds that Republicans would have got the most popular votes. But applying those same results to the electoral vote for each state, Democrats would have won the electoral vote 280 to 258.

Adding up the vote for the top office in 2022, Republicans got 52,661,573 votes. Democrats got 50,328,897.
 
Article:
Facebook’s fact-checkers will need to stop fact-checking former President Donald Trump following the announcement that he is running for president, according to a company memo obtained by CNN.

While Trump is currently banned from Facebook, the fact-check ban applies to anything Trump says and false statements made by Trump can be posted to the platform by others.

The company has long had an exception to its fact-checking policy for politicians.

The memo noted that “political speech is ineligible for fact-checking. This includes the words a politician says as well as photo, video, or other content that is clearly labeled as created by the politician or their campaign.”

In case anyone was wondering about facebook's role in spreading bunk...
 
Article:
Facebook’s fact-checkers will need to stop fact-checking former President Donald Trump following the announcement that he is running for president, according to a company memo obtained by CNN.

While Trump is currently banned from Facebook, the fact-check ban applies to anything Trump says and false statements made by Trump can be posted to the platform by others.

The company has long had an exception to its fact-checking policy for politicians.

The memo noted that “political speech is ineligible for fact-checking. This includes the words a politician says as well as photo, video, or other content that is clearly labeled as created by the politician or their campaign.”

In case anyone was wondering about facebook's role in spreading bunk...

It's not a change of policy, it goes back at least 3 years, it seems to consistently uphold this policy of inconsistency:
Facebook this week finally put into writing what users—especially politically powerful users—have known for years: its community "standards" do not, in fact, apply across the whole community. Speech from politicians is officially exempt from the platform's fact checking and decency standards, the company has clarified, with a few exceptions.

Facebook communications VP Nick Clegg, himself a former member of the UK Parliament, outlined the policy in a speech and company blog post Tuesday.

Facebook has had a "newsworthiness exemption" to its content guidelines since 2016. That policy was formalized in late October of that year amid a contentious and chaotic US political season and three weeks before the presidential election that would land Donald Trump the White House.

Facebook at the time was uncertain how to handle posts from the Trump campaign, The Wall Street Journal reported. Sources told the paper that Facebook employees were sharply divided over the candidate's rhetoric about Muslim immigrants and his stated desire for a Muslim travel ban, which several felt were in violation of the service's hate speech standards. Eventually, the sources said, CEO Mark Zuckerberg weighed in directly and said it would be inappropriate to intervene. Months later, Facebook finally issued its policy.

"We're going to begin allowing more items that people find newsworthy, significant, or important to the public interest—even if they might otherwise violate our standards," Facebook wrote at the time.

Clegg's update says that Facebook by default "will treat speech from politicians as newsworthy content that should, as a general rule, be seen and heard." Nor will it be subject to fact-checking, as the company does not believe that it is appropriate for it to "referee political debates" or prevent a polician's speech from both reaching its intended audience and "being subject to public debate and scrutiny."
Content from External Source
-- https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy...irms-its-standards-dont-apply-to-politicians/

Politifact and snopes, etc., exist for a reason - don't rely on facebook fact checkers, do your own research! :)

However, it dovetails nicely with US laws - there's apparently nothing wrong with lying in political ads:
The truth in political advertising: 'You're allowed to lie'

Political candidates can say some outrageous things.

Sometimes, those things are even lies, like in an ad from Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake.

Lake, a Republican former TV anchor who has been endorsed by former President Donald Trump, got lots of attention with an introductory ad in which she invoked the lie that the 2020 election was rigged (and that the news media won't cover the rigging).

"If you're watching this ad right now, it means you're in the middle of watching a fake news program," Lake said in the ad. "You know how to know it's fake? Because they won't even cover the biggest story out there: the rigged election of 2020. And rigged elections have consequences."

...

While it may have gotten her some attention to curry favor with the Trump-supporting base — the former president's Save America political action committee even pushed it out — it raises an old question: Can candidates simply lie in their paid ads?

The short answer is yes.

"Unfortunately, you're allowed to lie," said Tom Wheeler, former chair of the Federal Communications Commission under President Barack Obama.

The Lake campaign did not respond to emails requesting comment on the fact that the ad's premise is a lie.

While the Federal Trade Commission regulates truth in commercial advertising, the FCC does not do the same for political ads.

Some have called for a "neutral government regulator" to oversee political speech, but there's no broad, serious movement in Congress for something like that.

In fact, various courts have repeatedly upheld the First Amendment right of candidates to essentially say what they want on federally regulated broadcast channels. Local broadcast television stations (think ABC, NBC, CBS) can't reject ads, even if they're blatantly false.

Where it can get confusing, though, is that cable TV channels don't fall under the same umbrella and are able to reject ads. CNN did this a couple of times with Trump campaign ads that had falsehoods in them, for example.
...
Wheeler: There's a First Amendment hurdle that has to be crossed, and that has traditionally proven pretty high insofar as making judgments about factual statements.
Content from External Source
--
Source: https://www.npr.org/2022/03/17/1087047638/the-truth-in-political-advertising-youre-allowed-to-lie
 
It's not a change of policy, it goes back at least 3 years
yes. that's what I quoted: "The company has long had an exception to its fact-checking policy for politicians." Nobody claims this is a general change. But Trump was neither a candidate nor held an office in the past 2 years, so it's a change with respect to him.
“We define a ‘politician’ as candidates running for office, current office holders – and, by extension, many of their cabinet appointees – along with political parties and their leaders,” the memo stated.
Content from External Source
 
But Trump was neither a candidate nor held an office in the past 2 years, so it's a change with respect to him
He wasnt on FB the last 2 years. But did they EVER fact check Trump? FB is a public forum, i can't imagine they were ever allowed to fact check any American politician's speech.

add:

Article:
November 22 2019
Facebook started its fact-checking program in December of 2016 to engage third-party organizations to rate and review the accuracy of content on Facebook for false news and misleading information.

...

As a reminder, under our policies, content, including ads, from politicians is not eligible for review by our third-party fact-checking partners. Ads from politicians continue to be subject to our transparency requirements and Advertising Policies.
 
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He wasnt on FB the last 2 years. But did they EVER fact check Trump? FB is a public forum, i can't imagine they were ever allowed to fact check any American politician's speech.
arguing from incredulity

https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-n...fact-checking-trump-voting-mail-he-s-n1241339
Sep. 29, 2020, 1:20 PM EDT

By David Ingram

When President Donald Trump's Facebook account Monday posted an evidence-free assertion that mail-in ballots "cannot be accurately counted," the social media giant responded, placing a label on the post that said simply: “Visit the Voting Information Center for election resources and official updates.”

That did not sit well with some of Facebook's critics.
Content from External Source
 
arguing from incredulity
i provided a source from FB itself.

offering additional resources is not fact checking. that's like when youtube puts a contrail encyclopedia link under Mick West's videos. They aren't fact checking him.
 
I don't think this warrants its own thread, so I'll just drop this here (excerpted):
Article:
After introducing a feature in 2022 for users to report a post they considered misleading about politics, X in the past week removed the "politics" category from its drop-down menu in every jurisdiction but the European Union, said the researcher Reset.Tech Australia.

Users could still report posts to X globally for a host of other complaints such as promoting violence or hate speech, the researcher added.

"It would be helpful to understand why X have seemingly gone backwards on their commitments to mitigating the kind of serious misinformation that has translated into real political instability in the US, especially on the eve of the 'bumper year' of elections globally," said Alice Dawkins, executive director of Reset.Tech Australia.

As previously reported by Reuters, Reset.Tech Australia found X failed to remove or label a single post containing misinformation about the Australian referendum over a three-week period, including after it was reported using the now-disabled feature.

Musk has said X's "Community Notes" feature, which allows users to comment on posts to flag false or misleading content, is a better way of fact checking. But those notes are only made public when they are rated as helpful by a range of contributors with varying points of view, according to X's website.

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC), which will oversee the Oct. 14 referendum, has said the spread of electoral misinformation is the worst it has seen.
 
... "It would be helpful to understand why X have seemingly gone backwards on their commitments to mitigating the kind of serious misinformation that has translated into real political instability in the US, especially on the eve of the 'bumper year' of elections globally," ...
Also X-and-[dm]isinformation-related, from just a day or so back:
https://apnews.com/article/disinfor...ropean-union-9f7823726f812bb357ee4225b884354f
Musk’s X is the biggest purveyor of disinformation, EU official says

LONDON (AP) — A top European Union official said Tuesday that the social network X, formerly known as Twitter, is the biggest source of fake news and urged owner Elon Musk to comply with the bloc’s laws aimed at combating disinformation.

Ahead of upcoming elections, Google, TikTok, Microsoft and Meta also have more to do to tackle disinformation, much of it coming from Russia, which is using social media to wage a “war of ideas” against democracy, European Commission Vice President Vera Jourova said.

Moscow’s disinformation operation “is a multimillion-euro weapon of mass manipulation aimed both internally at the Russians as well as at Europeans and the rest of the world,” she said at a press briefing in Brussels.
Content from External Source
But the good news is that [elided dogwhistle name] now has his show on both Russia 24 and X, so that people on both sides of any blocks can see him.
 
But the good news is that [elided dogwhistle name] now has his show on both Russia 24 and X, so that people on both sides of any blocks can see him.
Article:
Tucker Carlson has denied that he is launching a television show in Russia after a bizarre advertisement with his face and name popped up on Vladimir Putin's state TV.

And you were just talking about "Moscow's disinformation operation" ...
 
The post says Carlson "finds a new booster" in Russian TV. The Daily Mail says Carlson denies that he will have a new show. They could both be correct. There has been speculation that his older statements will be aired in Russia, which might happen with or without his knowledge or consent. He has previously said many things that the Russians might find to be useful as propaganda.
 
There has been speculation that his older statements will be aired in Russia, which might happen with or without his knowledge or consent.
AFAIK this has already happened.
Article:
“It is essential to use as much as possible fragments of broadcasts of the popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson, who sharply criticizes the actions of the United States [and] NATO, their negative role in unleashing the conflict in Ukraine, [and] the defiantly provocative behavior from the leadership of the Western countries and NATO towards the Russian Federation and towards President Putin, personally,” advises the 12-page document written in Russian. It sums up Carlson’s position: “Russia is only protecting its interests and security.” The memo includes a quote from Carlson: “And how would the US behave if such a situation developed in neighboring Mexico or Canada?”
The document—titled “For Media and Commentators (recommendations for coverage of events as of 03.03)”—was produced, according to its metadata, at a Russian government agency called the Department of Information and Telecommunications Support, which is part of the Russian security apparatus. It was provided to Mother Jones by a contributor to a national Russian media outlet who asked not to be identified. The source said memos like this one have been regularly sent by Putin’s administration to media organizations during the war.
 
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