Trump legalist Sidney Powell is an utter imbecile. Here's why.

While everyone is peeing themselves with laughter over Rudy Giuliani's thigh-suckingly deranged, performance art press conference the other day, it seems most folks are overlooking an even more nad-grindingly idiotic presentation by Trump legalist Sidney Powell (Twitter handle @SidneyPowell1), who demonstrated beyond any doubt that she has not the foggiest fucking idea what she is talking about when it comes to computers.

Powell (Twitter handle @SidneyPowell1) can be seen and heard ranting like a loon here on YouTube, and the stunning dumbassitude starts at around 1:30, when Powell (Twitter handle @SidneyPowell1) describes the voting machine in part thusly:

"... one of its most characteristic features [sic] is its ability to 'flip votes.' It can set and run an algorithm that probably ran all over the country to take a certain percentage of votes from President Trump and flip them to President Biden which we might never have uncovered had the votes for President Trump not been so overwhelming in so many of these states that it 'broke the
algorithm' [sic] ...

Pause with me and consider the crippling idiocy of the claim above.

Accept, for the sake of argument, that the voting machines in question had been hacked to, in some way, "flip" a certain number of votes from Trump to Biden. OK, so far, so good. So if this is what was happening, then it logically follows that the total number of votes would have been around the same nationally and, based on the final tally, that number would have been around 150 million or so (give or take a quatloo).

Now, I don't mean to brag, but I've spent a number of years in the IT industry, and I can assure you that, even if you're using legacy 32-bit processors, 150 million is not an unmanageable number, and any decent embedded system would have no trouble dealing with that value. But that's not quite what Powell (Twitter handle @SidneyPowell1) is claiming. No, she is claiming that the number of votes cast for Trump was so "overwhelming" that flipping a bunch of them for Joe Biden somehow "broke the algorithm."

What in the name of Ivanka Trump's cosmetic surgery does that even mean?

I can well imagine that, in a hacked voting machine, one might -- after much investigation -- uncover the nefarious snippet of code "if (some random selection value) { flip Trump vote to Biden vote }" ... OK, fine, that would certainly represent a hacked system. But under what conceivable circumstances would running that statement too many times cause the "algorithm" to "break?"

I have written a great deal of code in my time, and I can assure you that very little of it came with a shelf life such that, after being run too many times, the algorithm would simply throw up its hands and holler, "Fuck it, I can't do this anymore!!" Yet that is exactly what Powell (Twitter handle @SidneyPowell1) is describing here -- that Trump's votes were so "overwhelming" that the poor "algorithm" simply could not process a simple "if" statement anymore, and packed it in.

This is, of course, ridiculous nonsense, and rather than pressing Powell (Twitter handle @SidneyPowell1) for evidence of her idiotic claim (which we all know will not be forthcoming), I suggest it would be far more useful to ask her to simply describe what in the hell she's talking about with respect to some "algorithm" being faced with such an "overwhelming" number of votes that it simply refuses to run anymore, since the claim is utterly absurd on its face.

So if anyone wants to politely and diplomatically put this question to Powell (Twitter handle @SidneyPowell1), let me know how it turns out.

Sincerely yours,

Someone who actually knows how computers work

 

AFTERSNARK: What a delightfully relevant question:

HOLY CHRIST, but Powell is batshit fucking crazy.