It's weird that you can bribe individual EJ's in Philadelphia like this. In Chicagoland, every polling place has a team of 4-5 judges, and they all have to sign off on the final election result, and all the procedural steps that arrive at that number; every individual vote is recorded in the pollbook. I don't even know how you'd generate fake votes in the first place, even if you bought off all 4 EJs.
You can't just make people up! Every vote is tied to a specific registration. We do same-day registration, but those votes are cast provisionally, with a paper log; there aren't many of them, and they can all be set aside and audited after-the-fact.
You certainly can't just make up a final tally. The numbers from the individual voting machines and the paper ballots have to match up; we had to stay an extra 2 hours after the polls closed last time I did this (in 2020) because of an equipment screwup that kept us from doing the final certified count/reconciliation.
Yes. Specifically, pro-Democrat media and organisations have spent the last several years arguing that measures to make fraud like this harder, such as unregistering people who aren't living in that state anymore and checking ID when voting, are themselves election rigging. There are endless headlines counting every single entry removed from the electoral roll or even just marked for extra checking as a vote suppressed. Again, this includes people who won't vote because they're not living in that state anymore! They've been campaigning against checking if votes are being cast under the same person's identity in more than one state too, so using their identities is basically an easy and safe way to add fraudulent votes in much of the US. There was even a theory in widespread circulation on social media that the 2016 election was rigged in favour of Trump, based on counting every person whose voter registration was flagged as inactive and requiring further confirmation as a stolen vote for Clinton.
> But I can easily say that checking ID, without first making sure valid voters can easily get the needed ID, is unacceptable.
Agreed. The issue is the Democratic solution is to never ID, instead of coming up with a way to easily get people IDs. That makes me rather suspicious of their motives.
I think they do that because nuance gets lost so easily. And some of those laws going through are anti-voter in so many ways that getting lost in the weeds of hypothetical situations weakens the pushback.
ID is required to register to vote in the first place though? It's literally a crime to not present ID when demanded by police. I'm all for removing the (negligible) fees associated, but it's not exactly a huge barrier to voting.
> It's literally a crime to not present ID when demanded by police.
No, it isn't, anywhere in the US. A bare majority (26) states have stop-and-identify laws which allow stops to determine identity based on reasonable suspicion of crime, but many don't, and those that do don't (and cannot Constitutionally) require presenting identification.
Everywhere in the US, the law around Terry stops[1] applies. In fact every time the police “pull you over” on the road is a Terry stop.
In such a stop, mere “reasonable suspicion” is required for police to require you to identify yourself. You’re not required to present ID but you must tell them your name (you could lie, but that’s another crime). You can be arrested for refusing to identify yourself.
In order to determine if your are experiencing a Terry stop, ask the officer “Am I free to go?”, if the answer is no, ask “Why am I being detained?” and the officer should state his cause. If it’s not valid you won’t be able to fight it until after the encounter, possibly after you’ve already been arrested.
Egregious example: The infamous NYC “stop and frisk” policy[2] was essentially a massive Terry-stop program.
IANAL, either, but I passed Con Law in law school, and it is.
> Everywhere in the US, the law around Terry stops[1] applies.
Yes, that’s what we are talking about.
> In such a stop, mere “reasonable suspicion” is required for police to require you to identify yourself.
Wrong. In such a stop, it is not federally unconstitutional for such a demand to be made, but it still requires that there is actual state law authorizing it. In 26 states there is, and in the rest there is not.
> You’re not required to present ID
Yes, that’s what I said, that even in the 26 states with stop-and-identify laws, permitted by the Supreme Court, you are still not, as the upthread commenter, required to present ID.
You’ve literally repeated what I said (except for confusing the federal limits of state authority with what police can do without supporting state law), after saying “It’s not that simple”.
The funny thing about politics is that good ideas presented by the wrong source can be rejected because the source is simply untrusted. The concept of rejection of ad hominem attack is great if you are a Greek rhetorical student in the lyceum, and has never been how actual decisions are made.
Regarding this topic, there are historical and recent reasons for suggestions of cleaning, trimming, purging etc. the vote roster to be met with extreme scrutiny and skepticism. The United States simply has a bad history of using tools like that for shaping the electorate to meet a desired outcome.
I despise the inefficient media screeching just as much as anyone with a few brain cells, but the cause of why it happens is pretty clear, because there is a lot of partisan fuckery around voting in many states.
Leaving aside the question of whether it's realistic for the system to depend on non-voters checking their vote's status - what would be the procedure if someone claimed they were wrongly shown as having voted?
After all, it's easy to imagine a situation where certain groups might want to manufacture evidence of voter fraud.
In Pennsylvania at least, that is handled by the filing of a provisional ballot followed by a court system. One challenge to that solution is that there are hard limits on how long it can take for the election to resolve, so it is possible for that window to close before an investigation on an allegation of voter fraud to complete, and if it cannot be proven that that provisional ballot should be counted, the ballot is discarded.
The recourse should a person's vote be stolen that way is proof that the vote was stolen followed by punishment for the thief, and that punishment can be fairly severe because vote tampering cannot be taken lightly given the impact it can have on the process itself.
Spoiled ballots go into a separate lockbox. At the end of the night everything is tabulated (winners, losers, provisional ballots, spoiled ballots) and posted at the voting precinct. The spoiled ballots box is sealed and taken to the election office to be inspected. This is for 1 state. Every state manages elections differently.
BTW, if you can sign up to be a poll worker. It’s a thankless job that takes 1 day a year. Most poll workers are retirees and I was one of the youngest there.
Isn't this exactly what (in theory) systems like PKI or even PGP are supposed to fix?
I know this is probably techno-utopianism, but it'd be pretty cool if every resident were issued a certificate (for free) with their state or federal government as the certificate authority, which would be used for voting, paying taxes, etc. instead of ad-hoc verification systems like Name + SSN + Address.
I can imagine so many horrible problems with implementing such a system in any US state (let alone federally), but it would be pretty damn cool.
Our new voting machines in our county are awesome, I hope they are used across the state (NJ).
You get a blank piece of paper that you insert into the machine. You vote electronically, and it prints your vote out in plain readable text on the paper, and presents it to you protected under a piece of glass (maybe pexiglass?) to validate your choices. If there is something wrong, you can reject it at this point. If you accept it, it records your vote electronically, and swallows the paper ballot as a record.
That is how voting with electronics should be. It's great for entertainment/news etc to get early results but ultimately it doesn't matter if it takes a day or two with analog counting. Same day results really don't help with anything.
The French presidential election got results within hours of closings, as does Germany in every election cycle. Without voring machines. How? Tons of ballot stations that count individually. Those preliminary results are recounted before it is official, usually without any deviations.
I agree so, that if a system isn't set up that way, early results should not be important.
As someone who’s done this before, it relies on tons of manual volunteer labor. You need around 0.75-1.25% of the population counting votes + the people running the polls.
The way French elections are run is insanely elegant though, it’s basically perfect from a security/transparency l POV.
But isn’t there something poeticly sound about this? It’s kind like “the family that eats together stays together” and other platitudes like that. A nation that requires a heavy involvement in the whole process is going to value it more. In the states, we worship money and automation, so we automate it true point where very few are involved. And then we’re surprised when “win at all cost” incidents start to rise over “determine the public will.”
It almost guarantees that the electorate won’t be consulted often, though. That’s something you can afford to do every 4 years, but not every 6 months.
I just checked, France has 70000 polling stations and 280000 volunteers for each election, so it’s rather 0.4% of the population.
We just had presidential elections and are electing representatives for parlement next week, we had local elections in 2020, nation-wide elections are not that rare.
Similar to Australia. We have mandatory voting, with paid staff, most being hired just before elections, and from my experience working there, it is well organised, with plenty of redundancy, in case of challenges and recounts.
I love the mandatory voting. Back the day I barely ever voted, that did change. Mainly because I saw political parties rise that I fundamentaly disagree with, meaning that the outcome all of a sudden actually did make a difference for me.
Having mandatory voting would mean that non votes don't screw up the results when one side manages to mobilize morw voters than others. And intentionally voting blank actually sends a pretty strong signal.
Yeah the volunteers you’re talking about here are the all-day (7am to 9-10pm!) volunteers, not the counting people who come for just the evening the day of the vote. They outnumber volunteers by a factor of 3-5 where I am.
I don’t know. Switzerland works the same way and they have votes more often than every 6 months. (Also the average German will vote more often than just every 4 years due to European, national, state-level and regional elections.)
And yet they do it, not every 6 months, but regularly. There are presidential elections (2 rounds every 5 years), general elections for the parliament (2 rounds every 5 years), elections for local (2 rounds every 6 years), department (2 rounds every 4 years), and regional councils (2 rounds every 6 years), and European elections (1 round every 5 years). Plus the occasional referendum. This year there will have been 4 voting days.
Sure, they don’t vote for judges and sheriffs and stuff, and it’s a system that’s more representative than participative as in, say, Switzerland. But it works.
One of the things that helps is that voting happens always on Sundays, when most people do not have to take a day off work to vote or to help counting.
In France it is done four times in a row every five years (presidential + parliament) and also two times in a row every six years (municipal elections, a few places have two simultaneous elections for the city mayor and "associated city" mayor) and I think once every five years (European elections, not sure of the modalities in France as I was never in France at this time).
It has a cost but most people involved are not paid. Referendums are uncommon but that has more to do with political culture than costs I think.
- substantial social services that don't directly require individuals to have disposable income and aren't tied directly to employment
- humane policies for vacation days in general, and
- national holidays for things like election day.
In the USA, we teach our children that civic engagement is important, but then corrupt politicians at all levels make civic engagement as hard as possible, abetted by moralizing reactionary conservatives.
No wonder Americans are generally cynical and don't participate in politics.
The UK pays its vote counters, and other people who assist at elections (such as the poll clerks who check names off the electoral roll and issue ballot papers). Sunderland South, which takes pride in being the first constituency to return its result each year- aiming to do so within two hours of polls closing- uses bank tellers to count the votes.
Pay rates vary by locality (as elections are run by local councils)- typically it seems to be around £200 for the day.
The printed paper "ballot" may not be what the voter intended.
There are multiple stories of electronic voting machines changing the vote on the screen. The voter corrects it, and the correct ballot is printed. But, if the voter misses the change, then an incorrect ballot is printed. Sometimes, the voter has to correct it more than once.
Here in New Hampshire, we use paper ballots marked with a felt tip pen. They are scanned with an optical reader, but it's straightforward to do a manual recount of the official paper ballots.
Electronic balloting machines are an invitation to programmatic fraud.
I attended a Free Software Foundation annual meeting some years ago. The assembled group was asked whether they preferred electronic voting systems over paper ballots. Not a single hand went up.
The most common cause of mis-vote is operator error. I've watched people use the touchscreen devices; with so many voters both unfamiliar with the mechanics of a touchscreen and unsteady on their feet (the median voter age is about 50), and with the machines made of cheap plastic resting on a table, they grip the machine to stabilize it and themselves. Their gripping thumb rests on the screen and creates phantom signal that makes it hard to localize the touch coordinate.
This is the best argument I'm familiar with against the electronic machines we used to use, and our state switched to paper oval-fill ballots that are then electronically tabulated. But, I haven't seen the statistics yet on how many mis-counts we now have as a result relative to the old system and I'd be curious to see them... Ask yourself how confident you are that 100% of voters know how to successfully fully darken the oval. And since the system is anonymous, nobody looks over their shoulder to verify they understand how to do it before the vote is dropped in the box (though in the event of a close race, a manual recount will be automatically triggered and at that point, at least it'll be human eyes deciding whether the voter circling the oval indicates their intent to vote for that candidate).
I had a paper ballot print out under plastic after I made my in person vote in california. you have to agree that everything matches up with what you actually voted for. the times that the "system messes up and the voter has to change it" it's almost always either user error or the touch screen being calibrated incorrectly.
This is why designs usually require the voter to be able to inspect the paper ballot before finalizing it. Shenanigans like that would be caught, as the machine has no way of knowing how close the voter will look.
In yesterday’s California election (Los Angeles County, specifically), it had me review all of my choices on the screen (after I was done), then it printed out the form so I could review the printed copy. Then (very confusingly) the final step was to insert the form back into the machine. Basically everyone was confused by this review and reinsert process, but still it seemed like a good system for ensuring there are no glitches.
I have had arguments with disability activists about this- apparently, some interpretations of American disability rights legislation require electronic devices to be made available to allow voters whose disability prevents them using a pen to mark their ballot unassisted.
In the UK we count ballots manually. We have 90%+ of results overnight.
There is even a race between a few constituencies to be the first to officially declare a result. These guys are really well organised, and for a few days it is a huge piece of civic pride.
With the results announced by a line up of all the candidates, almost always 2 or 3 mainstream candidates surrounded by candidates in clown or animal costumes…
It doesn't matter until the incumbent uses that delay to his advantage by declaring themselves the winner and trying to lead their followers into believing votes counted after that declaration are fraudulent.
We have those in NJ now. They are very cool. The printed ballot is presented to the voter, protected under glass, to verify that it is correct. It is then swallowed by the machine and the vote registered.
I am from Brazil, our current president been trying for years to introduce a paper trail, but the congress politicians (of all parties mind you, it is not a partisan thing) and the election judges are happy to find more and more reasons to block the effort.
Meanwhile the few politicians that DID attempt to do go along with this effort... died. Maybe they "died", who knows.
It is possible to have paper ballots that can be counted by machine for fast results, but that can also be published afterwards so that anybody can check the count, and that allow individual voters to check to see if their vote was counted correctly (but not to prove to someone else how they voted--this is called coercion-resistance), using "fill in the bubble" ballots that can be counted by widely available inexpensive optical scanner with the only new equipment needed at the polling place being special pens for marking the ballots, with all the cryptographic magic that that allows the verifiability and public counting being in the ballots themselves and put their when they are printed. For voters that aren't interested in verifying later that their own vote was correctly counted, they can ignore all that and it appears just like a regular "fill in the bubbles" process that many places have used for decades.
Here's a paper with details in PDF form [1], and here it is in HTML [2]. Here's a paper proving that it is coercion-resistant [3]. Here's a Wikipedia article [4] on it.
Voting systems with these kind of verification/auditing capabilities are called "end-to-end auditable" or "end-to-end voter verifiable" systems, and here is some information on them in general [5].
I don't know the scheme used, but _you_ also need to be able to verify that the vote was counted correctly in this situation. So make sure you read the receipt.
It's better than what we have. Vote-changing can be uncovered by an audit. ... But I still prefer the coercion-resistant systems that let you verify your own vote was counted correctly after the fact. Someone else posted a link to a bunch of papers.
As several people have commented, many systems print the receipt, which you then hand in to be counted. That’s the way my state does it, too. So you can see who your vote is being cast for.
In CA when you vote, there's a tracking mechanism you can use to see your vote was counted. A few years back I remember the ballots had a receipt you could tear off and use to verify it online later.
What would be cool is if you combined that serial number with a hash generated by filling in the ballot after the fact.
Eg you go to a page, supply your serial number and the things you voted for, and it tells you if it was counted and matches what you're saying.
Of course, this could still be used that way... but in CA ballots usually have enough options that it would be difficult for a malicious actor to have that much intent haha.
Most people would probably forget which smaller issues they voted for though.... so I dunno if it'd be reliable.
This is a weird caricature of how a union works. Unions protect workers from being fired by their employers so I’m not sure what a union “boss” could do to someone who upset them.
It happens now and has happened in recent times among all types of employers. The historical and union specific example wasn't necessary.
Companies can strongly suggest who employees should vote for and solicit donations to specific candidates.
As far as checking a record of actual votes, that's old days Tammany Hall kind of stuff. Not to say it wouldn't happen again if people could easily get away with it.
FWIW, the union example may be relevant because it's actually the origin of the anti-voter-interference laws in most states. Pennsylvania specifically is rooted in precisely the scenario up-thread described due to the heavy-industry history of the state.
It is good that these laws continue to protect the voter's right to autonomy against new threats to it.
Searching "vot" brings up one hit on that page, about a union election. Searching "elect" has several hits, none of which have to do with fraud. What part of that Wikipedia page shows unions operating like that?
So "it's an accurate representation of how many unions acted, and to prove my point here's a biography of a criminal with union ties." I don't see how that's proving their point.
> So "it's an accurate representation of how many unions acted, and to prove my point here's a biography of a criminal with union ties." I don't see how that's proving their point.
Since you are asking me, If you read or scan the page you will see how unions historically operated in the US.
Always bugged me too, but the good news is dirty jerz just got new machines that are auditable this year. Just voted yesterday in primaries and the machines print a paper ballot with answers ready to review. Before it drops into a lockbox, it gives you a final chance to accept or reject what is printed.
Step one, check the signature, the voter roles, and remove the envelope. Throw the ballot into the bin to be counted.
Step two, count the ballot. This ballot now has no identifiable information on it at all. There's no way to verify that a person's ballot was correctly tallied.
So if you wanted to ballot stuff, you could do so prior to step two. Recounts wouldn't identify fraud, you're just counting anonymous ballots again.
And still this never happened in any other democratic country doing paper ballots. Simple reason: If there are more votes in the ballot box then registered voters (ideally this means everyone above voting and eligible to vote) you know someone tempered the ballot box. And having more than one (where I live I'm always puzzled how they find the hundreds of people to monitor the dozens of polling places since we have at least four people per polling station) person monitoring the handing out of ballots. having dozens polling stations, with a limited number of voters, means any ballot stuffing has close to no impact on results, doesn't scale and easy to catch. same goes for properly set up mail in ballots and voting, I know for a fact that all that works without any signatures and other things, a central registry of residents goes a looong way in solving this.
You find a bunch of people that can't or wouldn't vote and collect their automatically mailed ballots, fill them out and have them dropped off in boxes.
That's one way to illegally harvest votes. One that almost certainly occurred in nursing homes around the country in the last election.
See, that's why ballots are only sent out when people explicitly ask for them. otherwise you get a single-use invitation that is changed against a ballot at the polling station. Showing up with an ID but without invitation gets you struck from the voter list for that polling station, and it gets you a ballot.
So that leaves people that are coerced into asking for mail-in ballots and are then forced to vote a certain way. Without being caught doing it at a scale enough to tip an election. good luck doing that in a system that isn't gerrymandered to the point that one district in, e.g. Florida, can decide a presidential election with only a handful of votes. In a normal system not election is ever close enough that this small scale tempering has any impact on results. Which is exactly why it happens so rarely, and is almost always detected.
> See, that's why ballots are only sent out when people explicitly ask for them. otherwise you get a single-use invitation that is changed against a ballot at the polling station.
All over this thread I shared details from other Democracies that shiw that paper based, save, secret election cam, and do, work at scale. I'm inclined to consider this to be helpful as it provides additional perspective and context.
Obviously you should only be able to get a mail-in ballot if you request it. But I live in California, and ballots are mailed out to all registered voters. While convenient, it's bonkers to do it at all, let alone in any state that, unlike California, has close elections.
I still fail to understand why the US has such a hard time figuring out the simolest of things: elections, healthcare, gun control... I mean almost all developed countries did figure those out ages ago.
EDIT: Thinking of it, I'll add policing to the list. Made worse by the fact that even dictatorships solved it better then the US, totalitarian regimes tend to have better rules and control over law enforcement resulting in targeted brutality, and not the random variety, inflicted by badly trained and scared officers, the US seems to have.
Yet, it's weird how the U.S. is doing pretty well overall.
Maybe it's luck?
Or maybe something to do with the prescience of several men who laid out a framework for federalism and distributed power with clear checks and balances, ensuring resilience and the longest running constitutional democracy in the world [1], understanding that reasonable people can disagree and that the most effective form of governance is a non-centralized distributed system that serves the needs of state citizens first.
No, every other country outside the US is the best at everything. That's why every American is desperate to make a better life for themselves in the EU, Australia, New Zealand and Canada while the reverse almost never happens.
Seemed like a tongue-in-cheek quip to demonstrate that there are a lot more folks in the world who are trying to come to the U.S. than the opposite, which as far as I know is pretty true.
"According to a Gallup poll from January 2019, 16% of Americans, including 40% of women under the age of 30, would like to leave the United States."
In my experience of talking to said Americans, that many can't is largely a case of restrictive immigration policies in most places Americans would like to move to.
“ Though relatively average by global standards, the 16% of Americans overall who said in 2017 and again in 2018 that they would like to permanently move to another country -- if they could -- is higher than the average levels during either the George W. Bush (11%) or Barack Obama administration (10%).”
So usually America has lower than average citizens wanting to emigrate. Trump made Trump haters want to leave, bringing it up to global averages.
That’s a significant jump, but being globally average does not fit the narrative you’re trying to portray.
It’s possible. But it’s certainly more likely that if every other developed western country agrees on how we should approach those topics, and the US disagrees, that the US is the one who’s wrong here.
But there’s no way to really know either way, can’t really do blind testing of this can we!
And yet they are all a lot closer to one another than they are to the US wrt. healthcare approach and gun access. The US's much more laissez-faire free-market approach to healthcare and gun control is a difference of kind, not of degree, compared to say Canada and Australia.
In the case of elections, it's because one party has decided that making it as easy to vote as possible helps them win elections and so insists that election fraud does not exist and any protective measures are an attack on democracy itself. And they have the support of most of the media and organisations like the ACLU, so those claims are part of the mainstream beliefs in the USA and other countries' experiences with stuff like vote-by-mail fraud are ignored. At least, that's the kindest explanation I can give, given that one of their former congressmen just got caught rigging a bunch of elections...
You may have noticed that between 2016 and 2020 there were a bunch of media articles about voting security and how poor it was despite this. That's because the US media has no problem concluding that the voting system can't be trusted when the wrong party wins something important, like the presidential election. I'm not even exaggerating here, whether (say) voting machine security is portrayed as a non-issue that's impossible to exploit or a gaping hole that throws into question the entire results aligns exactly with who's winning.
Other countries have NOT figured out gun control, as the recent fall of Hong Kong and imprisonment of the entire continent of Australia have illustrated.
The solution is not a simple one as you imply, otherwise it would have been solved already. Give people some credit!
> Other countries have NOT figured out gun control, as the recent fall of Hong Kong and imprisonment of the entire continent of Australia have illustrated.
Australia, imprisoned? Because of our gun laws?
I have access to four different shooting ranges within twenty minutes travel, and my friends go hunting every other weekend. How exactly are we imprisoned?
Yes, although to the grand-parent it's not clear how guns would have "helped" had you wanted to leave.
I mean, who exactly would you shoot? And after shooting them how would the outcome improve?
If you go to the airport how do you find a plane big enough to take you somewhere? Or enough people to prepare it to fly? And when you get to where you are going, how do you avoid getting arrested?
Ditto a boat. And a boat to where exactly?
Having a gun would literally have made zero difference on anything. Oh, wait, you meant that enough gun owners would get together, and perform some coup-like action to replace the government? Sure. That seems likely to turn out really well.
You seem to underestimate the intelligence of government officials. They would not put themselves in harm's way to stop thousands of armed people from doing what they wish to do. No shots need be fired by anyone.
No Australian government agent is going to shoot fellow Australians, or be shot by fellow Australians, to enforce such an absurd prohibition on free and peaceful movement.
Such unilateral authoritarian nonsense can only occur when the majority of the population is disarmed first.
You'll note that the same thing happened in New York City during the 2004 RNC, during Bush's term and Bush's invasion of Iraq. There were unlawful mass arrests by NYPD of thousands of peaceful protesters, who were kettled and housed with limited food and water for 24-48h in large high-density camps along the river. Most were released without charges several days later (when the RNC was over) which, years later, resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money being paid out as settlement for the illegal actions of the police. This never would have happened if the protest were not approximately 0% armed; the police would not have attempted to kettle a crowd where even a few dozen were able to defend themselves from police violence.
This is why Hong Kong no longer has a free press, fair elections, or due process. They were forced to "fight" well-armed authoritarians with nothing more than umbrellas and laser pointers. Such a battle simply would not have happened in the first place were the population sufficiently armed. Police are not stupid; they will only engage with violence where they are nearly certain not to lose or be harmed (as we observed recently in Texas).
A well-armed population keeps the state from overstepping its bounds without a single shot being fired.
Ehat exactly do you think would have happened in Hong Kong if the protesters were carrying AR-15s? Eould the Chinese just have said "sorry, never mind, clearly it's our fault", or woupd they have cracked down really hard?
Not that this whole "armed people against the government" thing works in the US, after all the Jan 6th insurrection wasn't an armed mob storming the capitol. Despite being from groups that are peretty well armed.
No unorganised group of people will ever beat state actors just by being armed. Another counter point that often brought up is the rose of the Nazis and how the Nazis took away the guns first. Wrong, because there loads of illegal militias equipped with military grade weaponry around that time. It was exactly those grouos that enabled the Nazis rise to power and formed the core of the SA. The Nazis took the guns awau from the SA, a long with the leadership and the whole organisation, once they were firmly in power.
>> No Australian government agent is going to shoot fellow Australians, or be shot by fellow Australians, to enforce such an absurd prohibition on free and peaceful movement.
So then if Australians wanted to mass-disobey the stay-at-home order they could. As you say "No Australian government agent is going to shoot fellow Australians." So guns or no guns, if there was sufficient demand citizens who wanted to could simply have moved around. (Lacking planes and boats travel out of Australia would likely still be restricted.)
By your own point, it's not lack of guns that caused the population to follow the guidelines. It was rather a respect for authority, and the rule of law, that kept the masses at home. Sure a few would reject those guidelines, and be arrested, but that is literally the "few" - not the majority.
>> Such unilateral authoritarian nonsense can only occur when the majority of the population is disarmed first.
I'm not sure I agree. There is plenty of unilateral authority in places where people have guns.
>> You'll note that the same thing happened in New York City during the 2004 RNC, during Bush's term and Bush's invasion of Iraq. There were unlawful mass arrests by NYPD of thousands of peaceful protesters, who were kettled and housed with limited food and water for 24-48h in large high-density camps along the river. Most were released without charges several days later (when the RNC was over) which, years later, resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money being paid out as settlement for the illegal actions of the police.
Indeed the police committed illegal actions, and have paid out well for it. Perhaps they will learn from that, perhaps not.
>> This never would have happened if the protest were not approximately 0% armed; the police would not have attempted to kettle a crowd where even a few dozen were able to defend themselves from police violence.
um. So you're saying they were reasonably sure that out of thousands of protesters there weren't "a few dozen" who were armed? I agree that sounds reasonable. but if there had been say 100 armed those 100 would have opened fire on the police, and everyone would just have gone home? Given the follow up from another incident (Jan 6) I suspect anyone who fired would have been speedily prosecuted. Anyone who even brandished a gun would have been prosecuted. A bunch of people (likely from both sides) would be dead - and that's somehow a _better_ outcome?
On the other hand it doesn't really matter if the protesters were armed or not - ultimately it was the _perception_ that they were not which allowed them to corral the protest?
>> This is why Hong Kong no longer has a free press, fair elections, or due process. They were forced to "fight" well-armed authoritarians with nothing more than umbrellas and laser pointers. Such a battle simply would not have happened in the first place were the population sufficiently armed. Police are not stupid; they will only engage with violence where they are nearly certain not to lose or be harmed (as we observed recently in Texas).
I think you perhaps are miss-conflating local police in a small Texas town, to the discipline and willingness of well trained armed forces of authoritarian regimes. I don't think hand-guns in Hong Kong would have made the slightest bit of difference to the Chinese authorities in Hong Kong.
>> A well-armed population keeps the state from overstepping its bounds without a single shot being fired.
That's certainly a point of view, and it's obviously a very popular view with a lot of US citizens. I respect that you have that point of view, and respect your right to have that point of view. Personally I don't see that your view is accurate to the reality in the US, much less anywhere else.
It's widely reported that at least 40% of Americans believe the election was rigged. Whether they are correct or not is irrelevant. If 40% of a population _believe_ that democracy has been usurped, and are armed to the teeth, and yet clearly there has not been an (armed) uprising then I'm wondering what has to happen for said armed population to actually take action? Even the Jan 6 incident is laughable for how small, unarmed, and ineffective it was. Apparently there were lots of conspirators, much planning behind the scenes, all sorts of machinations in play, and yet all we got was some folk wandering around a building, then going home. If the outcome of the 2nd amendment is Jan 6, well that seems like a wasted effort.
> It's widely reported that at least 40% of Americans believe the election was rigged. Whether they are correct or not is irrelevant. If 40% of a population _believe_ that democracy has been usurped, and are armed to the teeth, and yet clearly there has not been an (armed) uprising then I'm wondering what has to happen for said armed population to actually take action?
I don't think we're in the final inning yet. The only thing I know for sure is that I don't intend to be in North America for any day in January 2025, and that I will have full and complete backups of all my irreplaceable data on my person whilst traveling.
The type of populace that willingly disarms themselves is the same populace that willingly accepts totalitarian lockdowns.
In America, if the government had tried anything near that, there'd have been riots immediately. And yes, rioters with guns are a lot less likely to be stopped.
Well for one thing there's 50 states. But also people are VERY individualistic and simply lookout for themselves and their interest at all costs. Why would a state send out ballots to everyone, because they know it works to get the people they want elected. It doesn't matter if it's fraud as long as they win. Why would a state delete 100,000s of thousands of active voters a few days before elections. Exact same reason.
Everything in the US is the way it is because it's best for SOMEONE, but rarely everyone.
because it's a physically massive Republic of 50 independent States, with lots and lots of disagreement over whether the State or Federal government should have more power.
How come the same things - healthcare, gun control, elections, police work in Switzerland, but not in US nowadays? Maybe because ~15% of population are not “angry getto”/“kill whites” people and illegal immigrants get deported ?
We know it’s not an issue because if people were returning mailed ballots without the knowledge of the intended recipient, there would be a ton of people who would be logged as voting twice (once the mail in ballot and once in person or after requesting and submitting a replacement mail in ballot).
This was one of the issues in 2020. If a person voted in person, but a mail in ballot was received that mail in ballot was just rejected. Lots of politicians from one party were adamant about telling people who voted by mail to show up in person as well because the mail in ballots may not arrive in time. So there were millions of people with double votes where the mail in was auto-rejected. When analyst tried to nail down exact numbers or to audit specific instance it turns out the rejections we're not logged. The best they could do was determine, in some states, the number of people who requested absentee, but voted in person.
When contacting these people many claimed they did not request or receive the mail in ballot.
In states like California where everyone was mailed a ballot, a voters who mailed a ballot but weren’t sure if it was counted were asked to vote in person using a provisional ballot.
It's interesting how many errors people make when the topic of discussion is a ~"culture war" issue - and this topic is hardware/software/process related, which is right in the wheelhouse of most HN folks.
Has anyone ever read any studies into this phenomenon, or anything closely related?
California has lots of close elections, even if it's aggregate of state level and federal elections don't tend to be close between the two major national parties.
And doing that on any kind of scale will undoubtedly end with the perpetrator in jail for voter fraud. It's easy to speculate about how, it's a lot harder to do it in a way that gets away with it without leaving a trail that eventually catches up with them.
Yes and no. I would argue that if enough people are doing this on a small scale then there's potential for significant impact.
All that is required is the belief that it is imperative your team wins. The ideology that you can be dishonest if you do it for the right reasons grants considerable latitude for these types of corrections.
In the case you present, one bad actor is somehow able to manipulate the system en mass. That is certainly likely to draw attention, as you've pointed out.
And if the fraud is big enough the election in that polling station will be repeated. The more polling stations you have, the harder it is that a single station can impact overall results.
My state is exclusively postal voting, and checks signatures. If the deviation is too great, the reject the ballot. Has happened to my wife. Inconvenient, but it's a non-trivial hurdle.
For the sake of integrity, signature checking should be mandatory for every ballot. It would/could be entirely automated anyway. There is no burden on the states to perform the check.
Nothing would make me more convinced of an election outcome than having my ballot rejected due to signature comparison and getting the opportunity to cast it again
All told those cases total less than 200 votes. No one (edit: to be clear - no reasonable folk) claims fraud doesn't happen. Just not on the scale that has been claimed at times, and not enough to tip an election with millions of votes. Could a coordinated attack swing a local race, maybe. But as seen by the links you provided, there are people watching for these kinds of fraud, and people get caught all the time, even when it's just a single extra vote, much less enough to actually make a difference.
In the 2020 election one House of Representatives race was won by 6 votes. Another by about 120.
In the 2000 Washington gubernatorial race the number of votes counted exceeded the number of registered voters and the margin of victory was less than the number of excess votes.
And even if it is just a local school board seat or dog catcher, it’s still a violation of people’s civil rights. What’s more is local elections usually have way more direct impact on people’s lives than federal elections.
The Wikipedia page, as well as the cited sources, are a fun read. The final decision by a judge in the case was that 1678 illegal votes were to be removed from the total number of votes cast. However, they were not apportioned to either candidate. The final margin of victory was 133 votes.
False. I've encountered easily thousands of people who make such claims on the internet.
You might then say "No officials make such claims" - here you're technically correct, but somewhat misinformative: the people in such situations have public relations professionals at their disposal, and also tend to have years of experience (or at least observation) of how to do PR.
When election fraud is discussed, they choose their words carefully, opting to discuss not election fraud, but massive election fraud.
If the topic was other than this one (if "the shoe was on the other foot" so to speak), I don't think these things would be hard to notice...but, human psychology is what it is, so here we are.
> But as seen by the links you provided, there are people watching for these kinds of fraud, and people get caught all the time, even when it's just a single extra vote, much less enough to actually make a difference.
This is speculation, stated in the form of a fact - this, combined with the topic, may cause readers to form a belief that it is necessarily factual.
Yes, individuals just as mistaken as those who claim fraud is rampant claim there is not fraud. People make those kinds of mistaken statements all the time. How about "most reasonable people who understand the process and have spent a little bit of time examining how it works"? I thought that was closer to the standard in discussions on HN, not "some rando on Twitter spouting off", but I guess not.
It is not speculation that there are people who look for election fraud (and then prosecute it when found). And folks do get caught/prosecuted for just about every election cycle, so "all the time". And the links demonstrate that. I may have expounded on that a bit but the language is not speculative except maybe the portion about whether or not there is enough to make a difference. That is my opinion, but heavily based on the reading on this topic I have done, checking claims from a wide variety of sources, parties, etc. I make no claims to expertise but I do believe the information I have shared is accurate to the best of my ability and folks can do with that what they will (hopefully spend their own time actually making sure they are not misled).
I think the centre of the point of contention (and we can work outward from there) can be isolated like so: have there been zero authoritative personnel that have claimed or implied that fraud sufficient to change the outcome of an election is impossible?
And while contemplating this idea, remember that we are dealing with human beings.
Nothing is impossible. But the chance of the being sufficient fraud to change say the presidential election is extremely unlikely, especially given the evidence that we have.
> But the chance of the being sufficient fraud to change say the presidential election is extremely unlikely....
Technically, the likelihood is not known. Humans are welcome to state estimates of the likelihood, and believe those estimates to be true (and rebroadcast them, seeding the "fact" into other minds), but base reality is where the truth lies. We can (and do!) pretend that our estimated reality is factual but this is a collective cultural delusion, and a harmful one at that (which sometimes people can see clearly (in the behavior of our outgroups), and other times not (in their own and ingroup behavior)). Pick any culture war topic thread on HN, and observe how people describe "reality" - the phenomenon is not really hiding as much as we aren't able to see it (similar to how we couldn't see certain things until we developed techniques, like using lenses to see into different realms of reality).
> ...especially given the evidence that we have.
Our discovery of evidence has no influence on that which preceded it, it only has influence on our beliefs of that which preceded it. Unfortunately, we often tend to not form a distinction between the two.
I don't think the number has to be zero in your hypothetical. (Yes, I'm aware I said "no one", and I'll admit that probably should have been "the vast majority ...")
I use zero as a technique to attempt to "shock" minds into a higher plane of rationality. It's hard to tell how effective this technique is, under various scenarios. It doesn't work great in settings where there are ~no rules, like internet forums. It typically works excellently when debugging tricky software bugs, which is quite analogous to the functioning of the human mind imho, so I think it has promise.
Nobody likes to get down to the details of actual fraud events, really. Neither side. Democrats because they don't believe it happens often. Republicans because when it does happen, 9 times out of 10 the perp turns out to be a Republican. This has been the amusing reality for years now.
I personally think that fraud of a significant scale in a country with thousands of different voting systems is basically impossible to hide, and a lot of people are looking for it. We take many steps to reduce that risk. And when we catch someone trying, we should slap them down hard as an example to others.
> 9 times out of 10 the perp turns out to be a Republican. This has been the amusing reality for years now.
Citation? This article shows 2 out of 2 as Democrats.
This article shows a guilty plea from a Democrat who for years rigged votes with a Judge of Elections and Democrat Ward Leader, Domenick J. DeMuro. Demuro pled guilty in 2020.
The ABA keeps a list of current litigation on election law. [1] Election law cases almost invariably come down to nobody wanting or being able to take responsibility. People are aware of issues, but the court cases take too long and the courts rule there is no remedy after the election, the plaintiffs suing have no standing, there is no remedy in law, since the legislature should oversee not the courts, etc. Yet, the legislatures do nothing but talk. Saying there isn't elections fraud all around is incorrect.
If you're going to mock someone for not googling, you better come up with the goods: real evidence of substantial fraud in a quantity that would make a difference.
Otherwise, keep the sarcastic BS to yourself. Please.
> You find a bunch of people that can't or wouldn't vote and collect their automatically mailed ballots, fill them out and have them dropped off in boxes.
>That's one way to illegally harvest votes. One that almost certainly occurred in nursing homes around the country in the last election.
thenewwazoo replied:
> Citation, please.
This isn't about substantial fraud. It is about a very specific source of fraud that upsidesinclude said was likely to have happened.
The first step to processing mail ballots is checking that the signature matches the voter's known signature (usually submitted at the time of voter registration). Are you proposing a conspiracy where crooks are somehow forging hundreds (if not thousands) of signatures? And there's no paper trail of communications or money changing hands to coordinate it all?
No signatures where I live, what's next analysis of hand writing? You only get one mail in ballot, which is returned absolutely anonymous. Once you order one, you are struck from the on-site ballot list. You can exchange your mail-in ballot, I think, for a normal paper ballot. if you return the mail-in one. So your solution would mean manually following up every single mail-in ballot and steal it. Assuming you find out who ordered one.
using the "left-over" ballots of people not voting, sure, all you have o do is to convince the other 3 to 4 people present at the polling station to go along. and since we have literally thousands of those stations you have to repeat that a lot. And as soon as the participation exceeds the other places, people will investigate. The provisional count done on-site is redone before it is official, so again deviations will be found. And if they are not, congrats, you managed to stuff maybe a dozen ballots, if you are lucky.
Signatures are, frankly, a bad way to determine if a ballot is valid or not. People's signatures change all the time and there's not exactly a science in determining whether or not two are the same. It's ultimately up to the counter to make that determination.
Otherwise, I agree with your point. The reason ballot harvesting is much less of an issue than made out is because there's a vast paper trail with each mail in ballot cast.
That is quite a statement. Especially considering signatures are the primary way ballots are certified.
I don't believe 'signatures change' is reasonable or valid. By the time someone reaches adulthood and has an ID, their mark is likely to be quite distinct. Check your grandmother's signature sometime. My point being, that dismissal is not evidence or fact based, but likely aligns with your opinion.
>ultimately up to the counter
There's absolutely no reason to do that. Digital files already exist of all signatures and the envelope is coded to each voter. The comparison can be done trivially by image processing.
> I don't believe 'signatures change' is reasonable or valid. By the time someone reaches adulthood and has an ID, their mark is likely to be quite distinct. Check your grandmother's signature sometime.
I have my own signature that I can check and I KNOW it has changed significantly over time. Why? Because I don't sign a lot of things! Hell, I hardly write anything down.
There are many, MANY, reasons a signature can change, for example, injury. But beyond that, there's just general drift in the way people write things. [1]
> The comparison can be done trivially by image processing.
No, it can't, because the signature is not exact, even in the best of cases. The software HAS to make allowances in differences and once that happens, we are in the territory of "what is this actually proving?"
Further, signature forgery is a thing. There's a reason banks and CCs no longer even check the signature. It's a relic that proves nothing.
But beyond all this conversation, the current process for states doing signature validation isn't to reach out to the person that cast the vote to verify their ballot, no, instead they mark the ballot as invalid and move on. [2]
Indeed, if the concern was voter fraud, why WOULDN'T you want to reach out to the absentee ballot caster to find out if they actually cast the ballot? Why would "throw it away" ever be the right move?
the only country I know that uses signatures is the US, Germany definitely doesn't. And I don't have to check my grandma's signature, mine is enough which is basically a different person compared to the one I had two passport ago (give or take 10 years). Plus there are proven ways without signatures and other shenanigans.
> a central registry of residents goes a long way in solving this.
Many US problems could be solved if Americans could get over our irrational fears about comprehensive databases. The boogeyman is already real. Let's be tracked in one auditable location instead of 36+ incomplete and contradictory databases where the contradictions can be used as "evidence" of fraud. The downsides are already here, let's acknowledge reality and then build systems to give us a chance at enjoying the benefits of centralized intelligence.
If the US would stop using photo IDs as a bludgeon to keep "the wrong people" from voting, everyone could get on board with requiring it. That has always been the real blocker.
I do like postal mail. I've yet to see a convincing argument that the coercion risk is substantial enough to offset the other benefits. Voting slowly at my living room table is awesome.
Give the FEC the power to issue photo ID for voting. Legislate that it is only valid for that purpose and any other use is illegal. Send out census-style teams to track down every citizen and issue them a card, free of charge.
Of course, there are all sorts of problems with this that are entirely self-inflicted. Someone will oppose a national ID, even if we already have that. Someone else will point out that the states legally get to make their own voting rules, and they're right. This isn't a problem anyone actually wants to solve. Democrats want to make it easier to vote, Republicans want to make it harder. It's like every other tribal issue, neither side will give an inch because they fear the other side will take a mile.
I have seen your posts on HN, I don't buy that you're actually confused. Overt racism at the door to the DMV is not at all how you disenfranchise a group of citizens, especially in modern times. You make sure DMVs in predominantly black neighborhoods have short hours at times most inconvenient, you make sure polling places are understaffed and overbooked, things like that. It insulates you against direct evidence but still achieves your goal.
> You make sure DMVs in predominantly black neighborhoods have short hours at times most inconvenient, you make sure polling places are understaffed and overbooked, things like that.
Wow, I didn’t know I live in a black neighborhood!
When one considers action such as this in light of the GOP being caught red-handed attempting to shape the census questions to deprive states of Congressional representation (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-que...), it becomes, at the very least, suspicious. For at least a short time (politically speaking, maybe half a generation), the GOP has lost the benefit of the doubt regarding its actions being race-neutral and some healthy skepticism is justified.
Please - we don’t need another single-purpose ID card. Why not just make a single ID card that all privileges that are recognized in all 50 states can be added to? Driver’s license classes, concealed carry, voting, security clearance, donor preferences, etc. everyone has to get a new one every 4 years, and there’s an electronic record for verification of basic info like photo and name when internet access is available.
Because a narrowly focused voter ID card is more difficult for naysayers to rebut, because they are themselves claiming we need exactly that. I support a real national ID card myself.
I oppose Voter IDs because I don’t think we need them. I’m on the fence with a National ID because I’m concerned it would have the same problems as Voter ID.
Because this is not a power granted to the federal government, it is reserved for the states.
IANAL, but I believe that something like this would require a constitutional amendment, unless it could be squeezed in under the umbrella of the ICC like most other federal overreach laws.
> Because this is not a power granted to the federal government, it is reserved for the states.
If one agrees that this is true, that's not an answer to the question of why not do it; it does affect the mechanics—either a Constitutional Amendment (to do it federally) or a fifty-state compact (do it as a coordinated state-ID system for all state purposes, which is arguably closer to what was described) would be available mechanisms.
“The Constitution doesn't currently allow the federal government to do it” is not an answer to “why not do this in a centrally coordinated way”.
The problem I have with this is that we essentially already have a national ID system. Social Security numbers are ubiquitous despite their original intention to not be used for identification because there's no existing national alternative. Everybody knows how stupid this system is yet we've painted ourselves into a corner and I don't think we'll ever walk back our reliance on it as an ID unless there's legislation mandating it and publishing it for everyone that has one assigned.
Personally I think there is some constitutional justification for a national ID system. The commerce clause gets abused a lot IMHO but identity is at the core of just about any contract. You could argue that state identification and plain old name, address, signature are sufficient, but it's not like SSNs are ubiquitous for no reason. Even as dumb as it is to use a single number for someone that never changes, the benefits of a single static identifier that is the same across a person's lifetime and established by the government outweighs the horrific insecurity of it all. Fundamentally a government is the root authority of legal identity for all the citizens of that country. The government should provide a modern secure way of establishing identity for both public and private matters.
Driver’s licenses are not your voter id in many states, and aren’t a federal license. Real ID is supposed to bring all licenses to the same standards, but it’s not everywhere yet.
Voter id laws have been shown to increase voter turn out in the United States. Most states give free IDs for voting. It is a federal law that you must show an ID to register. Stop with this misinformed nonsense that there is a crazy conspiracy to keep "brown" people from voting. Maybe once yes but not for awhile.
Just like white people are authoritative about other white people, if we ask black people for the truth they must be right. Or, you know, not.
- 13% of Blacks, 10% of Hispanics, but only 5 percent
of Whites lack photographic identification.
- 12% of adults living in a household with less than $25,000 annual
income lack photo ID, compared to just 2 percent in households with
over $150,000 annual income.
- 15 percent of 17-20 year olds lack photo ID, and 11 percent of those ages 21-24 lack photo ID.
So yeah, ID requirements are not a half bad way to skew election results in your favor.
And consider for a moment just how strong an advantage Republicans have in the house of representatives these days compared to how weak their actual number of represented voters is. All the little efforts absolutely add up to real results.
How many of those 12-15% are actually unable to get an ID as opposed to "can't be bothered/don't need it"?
An ID requirement would get some of those to get one - if they wanted to vote.
And how does the voter turnout look for those groups anyway?
The only people who might be impacted negatively by ID requirement are those unable (for whatever reason? Why can't there be an easy way to get an ID in the first place?) and actually wanting to vote.
I don't know about those groups specifically, but overall turnout is typically around 60% for presidential elections and 40% for midterm elections, for every election since at least 2000.
Photo ID is required in the United States in order to work (Form I-9), obtain housing, drive a car, buy alcohol or tobacco, enter age-restricted venues, purchase firearms, drive a car, go through airport security, and in general, to participate in society. And one of the things I’ve listed is an enumerated constitutional right. So I don’t think it’s an unreasonable requirement for voting. Someone who doesn’t participate in society to such a degree that they already don’t need ID is probably unlikely to be voting in the first place, and it’s somewhat dubious IMO to bend over backwards to specifically court such voters.
Yep only what 60% of Americans vote? I have a hard time believing any of the meth addicted homeless really care all that much about who's running for mayor.
I think almost every person interested in elections is someone with enough money to get an ID every 5 years.
But hell give out a subsidy for the poor to get an ID card for free.
Some courts seem to disagree, wasn't there a verdict in a federal (?) court calling voter ID requirements in some state to target with "surgical precision" a certain demographic?
Germany has pretty liberal mail im voting, we had a bunch electuons during Covid with obvious increases of mail in voting. And we don't need IDs. We do have automatic and central "voter registration" (as basis to get the mandatory ID among other things).
Saying that Germany doesn’t have voter IDs is technically true but a bit misleading. In the US, registering to vote is super easy and can be done online in most states. In Germany, the residency registration that’s also used for voting requires showing up in person within a month of moving.
The German system would be much more onerous if implemented in America than one tied to driver’s licenses that virtually everyone in America has already.
Don't you also have to update your driver's license when moving? Then what is more onerous about it?
> requires showing up in person within a month of moving
Not during covid by the way. I moved in 2020 and could simply send in the documents by email. Then some time later I had to briefly drop by to get a stamp for my ID, but that was like 5 minutes.
> registering to vote is super easy and can be done online in most states
That is nice, but not having to register at all is even easier.
Partially. You can fill out and send all documents online or by mail -- at least in the city I moved to. Then once everything is done you need to make an appointment to stop by and pick up your address sticker and certificate.
Having some in person part for ID things seems unavoidable, but nothing onerous.
In America, people would call that process racist voter disenfranchisement. “Black and brown people” don’t have Internet access or stamps, they would assert, and can’t take time off from working three jobs to show up to a citizenship office.
Unless you change your primary residency you don't have to do anything in Germany. And registering a secondary residency has tax implications but none regarding voting.
And why do think your German ID card won't work anymore if the address on it is wrong?
> Anyone who moves into a residence in Germany must register within two weeks of moving in. To register, you have to go to the registration authority of your municipality and present a valid ID card, passport or passport substitute document and a certificate issued by the person providing the residence.
> Persons moving abroad must deregister with the registration authority of their municipality, while those moving within Germany only have to register their new residence. It is not necessary to deregister the former residence.
> Both Germans and foreigners are required to register. Violations of the registration re-quirement are subject to fines.
I didn’t say the German ID card would stop working. But as I understand it, voting is based on your registered address, which must be current to vote, and that residency registration requires showing up in person.
The point is that voting in Germany requires showing up to a registration office with documents every time you move, which is more onerous than presenting an ID to vote in the US. Both voter registration and renewing a driver’s license or changing your address on your license can be done completely online in most states. I’ve only gone in person to deal with my driver’s license twice in my life (I’m almost 40), despite moving almost a dozen times. Once when I got my license as a teenager, and once when I changed my residency permanently from Virginia to Maryland.
I vote but I don’t vote in every single election that I can due to other obligations.
Their fraud used the voter information of real people who they expect to simply not come to the polling station. It’s hard to catch. If you notice double voting from when the person actually votes then they simply throw out both votes (legitimate and illegitimate).
This seems like a tactic that would work well in a place like the USA which has low voter turn out.
As stated above, by increasing the number of polling places the impact of any of these can be reduced enough to not matter. Using government ID cards or voting invitations sent by authorities before handing out the ballot helps as well, anything short of stealing the invitation wont work. And even if you steal the invitation the real person has to not show up. Because if they do, without invitation but with an ID, your fraudulent vote (singular, as in one vote) is immediately identified.
And I am describing just one way of how paper ballots work save, anonymous and at scale. You need some truly mind blowing organizational fuck up (look up the last election in Berlin) for it to not work. An even then it affected one single (?) voting district (as in polling places, not candidate districts if i remember correctly), was instantly identified and investigated and almost impossible to use to temper with the results (it was found out immediately).
I guess it would be fun then to drive around and issue duplicate votes for anyone who who has a sign in their yard that disagrees with me, thereby getting their vote thrown out.
The number of people who actually vote is often nowhere near the number registered, meaning you have lots of padding with which to work. This idea doesn't pan out whatsoever.
Stuffing mail ballots makes zero sense if you're actually trying to tilt elections in your favor. It requires too much effort and conspiracy to get past the procedure you describe. Your crime-ing efforts are better off throwing away your opponents' mail ballots.
They're not thrown away in the dumpster instead of fed to the counting machine. They're discarded as invalid over "signature doesn't match" and legal nit-picking. It's another case of regulatory rules being used to stop competition instead of improving market/election integrity.
This has the same problem. I can use a webpage to verify my vote has been counted. If there’s something wrong I can see there’s a problem and what to do about it. If this was widespread it would be caught.
With respect to the 2020 election, I have wondered about the chain of custody of the ballots once separated from their envelope. In some regions boxes of ballots were transported to counting locations. Could someone swap out the entire contents of a truck. The boxes were then unloaded and brought in through back doors late at night. Could the boxes get swapped out during unload. Some boxes were left sitting under tables for later retrieval and not securely locked up. Some boxes were forgotten about in back rooms. There were reports of mail-in ballots that appeared stamped by machine, but I never saw any finished investigation of the reports.
Are you saying ballots were separated then transported to be counted? I don’t know of anywhere where that happens. In Detroit there were allegations that ballots were ‘left unattended under a table’ which amounted to actually meaning ‘most of the employees left a secure facility which was videotaped the entire time and live streamed’. Trump actual gained votes in Democratic Wayne County. I read all of the allegations of fraud filed in Michigan and they were, to put it politely, drivel.
There were also a number of reports on the integrity of the election, many legitimate audits (including in Antrim county). Did you read them? Did you look for them? Or are you trying to undermine something by feigning concern and sowing doubt?
Edit: also it is useful to remember that the 2020 presidential election wasn’t close. Nothing like 2000. Neither in total votes, electoral votes, or the margin in any of the marginal electoral-vote supplying states.
I don’t claim fraud, but I do have procedural concerns.
I’m of the understanding that ballots stripped from their envelopes were transported to counting centers.
Perhaps bribing one driver would be sufficient to swap 1000s of ballots and there would be no trail.
“””
Only after ballots were validated were they delivered to the TCF Center for election workers to process and tabulate them.
Shane Trejo, a writer for the right-wing website Big League Politics, told the Gateway Pundit that he was at the TCF Center where he said he witnessed thousands of ballots being unloaded early Wednesday morning. "There were at least 50 boxes that I saw unloaded at 3:30 a.m.“””
It’s my understanding that the validating process results in the naked ballots being placed into boxes for delivery to a counting center.
The linked article debunks that the ballots were late, but that is not my concern.
I was going to write more about Georgia but then I came across this article which eliminated most of my concerns there. I don’t know why it took a whole year before this was printed though.
I did see some of the audits, which mostly removed my concerns of cheating.
However there were claims in Georgia of mail in ballots that appeared marked by computer and I knew there was going to be a court case on this, but I never saw any reporting on this case. The above article says there were never any such perfect ballots found.
I think the perfect ballot is where my fears come from. Where in the chain could you swap out ballots and put in generated ballots.
So after expressing your concerns and asking a bunch of questions with easy to find answers that address most of your concerns, you still have those concerns?
Where does it say that ballots were stripped before delivery? Do you have evidence of that? The politifact piece says the signatures were validated then they were taken for processing. Signatures are on the outside of the envelope. That isn’t delivering naked ballots. Stripping the envelope happened at the processing center based on the videos of them describing the process [0], videos of them carrying out the process which were live-streamed and still available, and the State’s published documents describing the process.
Everyone is concerned that voting is done well. Your concern seems to move between ‘specific things which didn’t happen’ and ‘hypothetical perfectionism’ which is an unmeetable standard.
I am glad you pointed this out. Few seem to understand that once the envelope is open and thrown away there is no way to verify the ballot being legitimate in many states. It's sad that people think with such a system there is no chance of voter fraud. They will smugly say that a recount confirmed everything was legitimate, etc. Very frustrating that the nuance is lost on them.
Ballots need serial numbers that trace back to a person that we can pick up a phone and confirm their vote when elections are contested. Being unable to do a spot-check audit is just plain stupid. Every person should be able to look up their ballot and see how it was counted at the end of the election.
Let's say voter fraud is indeed very low in the US, why not make obvious moves to make it even more accurate and honest?
The secret ballot is essential, as compromise of that secrecy enables vote selling and voter intimidation. One of the reasons New York had tabulating machines and kept them was to limit the ability of political machines to interfere with elections at the local level. Tammany Hall operatives and others would retaliate against voters who didn’t do what the machine wanted. (Later those machines aged and became a liability)
There’s no such thing as a perfect process, and while your idea is a worthy way of providing validation, it creates more serious issues that ultimately undermine the democratic process.
If you have any kind of audit background they answer to ensuring integrity is always a same: a well defined process where different individuals are responsible for different parts of the process and are audited to achieve best practices.
The reality is that measures designed to target individual voter fraud are solving a problem that doesn’t exist and are done to suppress turnout.
The actual risk of voting related fraud is pretty obvious - political partisans with the access and ability to intimidate or bypass civil service employees from following the process. As a nation, we should be lauding the courage of the GOP election commissioners in Georgia who risked their careers and perhaps their lives to defy a demented president. Whatever the politics, those are people with integrity.
I meant the physical devices. Towards the end of their tenure, there were some statistical irregularities that suggested the gears were failing to roll over correctly, resulting in undercounting.
> Ballots need serial numbers that trace back to a person that we can pick up a phone and confirm their vote when elections are contested.
That would mean that elections are no longer secret. There are many good reasons why elections are secret in most (all?) democracies. It makes it impossible for people to be pressured into voting a certain way or payed to vote a certain way. It also means that you can't be prosecuted for voting a certain way. Giving up all of this would open up so many new avenues for voter fraud.
Edit: This is not necessarily an argument but secret ballots are part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
No, because literally every other true democracy on Earth has found a way to keep elections safe and anonymous. You don't need to to be able to trace ballots back to voters actually I'd argue being ablr to do so is deeply undemocratic.
The formula is simple: Central, automatic voter registration, easy access to ID cards (the general one, not a voter Id. You know, the thing most use to identify citizens instead of drivers liscences), easy access to polling stations, no Gerrymandering and paper ballots. That's all you need.
Large scale (e.g. to the point that actually matters) electoral fraud is invariably done through gerrymandering. It's also mostly legal in "literally every other true democracy on Earth", so it's usually considered as a legitimate part of the game, instead of what it really is: Fraud.
> Every person should be able to look up their ballot and see how it was counted at the end of the election.
Generally the thinking is that there must never exist a mechanism by which you can prove to some other person how you voted, or voters can be coerced into voting a certain way.
My state provides a webpage for verifying the status of your ballot by serial number. There may also be a way to do so by phone. I’m not aware of a way to obtain the map of ID to voter but I don’t think it’s necessary. Plus it’s radioactive from a voter intimidation and privacy perspective.
> Let's say voter fraud is indeed very low in the US, why not make obvious moves to make it even more accurate and honest?
Because if you aren’t careful you can make it worse.
Long gone are the good old times where you just had to place some local policemen/military in every voting center "friendly advising" people who should they vote for. "For their own security", of course (reference: Greece 1961)
> Myers acknowledged in court that on almost every Election Day, Myers transported Beren to the polling station to open the polls. During the drive to the polling station, Myers would advise Beren which candidates he was supporting so that Beren knew which candidates should be receiving fraudulent votes. Inside the polling place and while the polls were open, Beren would advise actual in-person voters to support Myers’ candidates and also cast fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates on behalf of voters she knew would not or did not physically appear at the polls.
> Beren and her accomplices from the Board of Elections would then falsify the polling books and the List of Voters and Party Enrollment for the 39th Ward, 2nd Division, by recording the names, party affiliation, and order of appearances for voters who had not physically appeared at the polling station to cast his or her ballot in the election. Beren took pains to ensure that the number of ballots cast on the machines was a reflection of the number of voters signed into the polling books and the List of Voters. After the polls closed on Election Day, Beren and her associates would falsely certify the results.
and also cast fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates on behalf of voters she knew would not or did not physically appear at the polls.
Obviously, I believe this actually happened. But: how? What is Philadelphia not doing that we do in Chicago? You couldn't do this here; it's hard for me to even imagine how someone could walk into a precinct and cast multiple votes. And how would they cast their second and third vote? Do you give them a list of no-show registrations from the precinct? And then they just sign the pollbook multiple times?
I was a machine operator in the 2020 election in Philadelphia. It’s as you describe, everyone there (4-6 people) have to sign off at the end of the night on the totals. Two people are specifically one from each of the major parties, so it should be bipartisan. The numbers from the machine have to add up to the number of voters in the book. You’d need multiple accomplices to hide the mismatch, at least three people I think? Even then, you’d have to write down the names of who “voted” so it could come to light if any of those voters checked and saw that they had an unexpected vote. The machines did change so it may have been easier before.
And further if these people were apparently also telling voters who to vote for, then they must have had all the election officials there in on it. Supporting a candidate like that is absolutely not allowed for the poll workers so this was blatant and didn’t care about whether it was uncovered. Any voter could have reported that behavior at any point. It was done out in the open.
Unless you're checking IDs, yeah - a single person could drop in a dozen signatures that all look different enough to fool a poll taker. I don't see how you're so incredulous here - a person with access to ballots filled them out and literally stuffed them in a box, it's not difficult!
They can't just make people up. They need to have the name and address of the registered voter who's voting.
They can't just re-vote at the same precinct. The EJs will absolutely notice a person coming in and voting more than once. If that gets noticed a single time, the EJ calls the sheriff (in Cook County, at least).
It takes, like, best case, 10-15 minutes to vote in a precinct. There are lines!
How many votes can you cast this way? 10? 20?
I'm not saying you couldn't manage to cast a fraudulent vote by doing this. I'm saying that your odds of influencing the election by doing it, while at the same time not guaranteeing you end up in prison for trying, are so low that my mind boggles that anyone would try.
> They can't just make people up. They need to have the name and address of the registered voter who's voting.
To quote further up:
> and also cast fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates on behalf of voters she knew would not or did not physically appear at the polls.
And:
> They can't just re-vote at the same precinct. The EJs will absolutely notice a person coming in and voting more than once. If that gets noticed a single time, the EJ calls the sheriff (in Cook County, at least).
From the article:
> Beren, who was charged separately and pleaded guilty in October 2021, was the de facto Judge of Elections and effectively ran the polling places in her division by installing close associates to serve as members of the Board of Elections.
The election judge was the one doing this, didn't have to get past anyone.
> Demuro fraudulently stuffed the ballot box by literally standing in a voting booth and voting over and over, as fast as he could, while he thought the coast was clear
TFA explains the other case was nepotism enabled conspiracy:
> Beren, who was charged separately and pleaded guilty in October 2021, was the de facto Judge of Elections and effectively ran the polling places in her division by installing close associates to serve as members of the Board of Elections.
That's something else you couldn't do in a Chicagoland election. You could take a big stack of ballots to a booth and fill them out and file them, but at the end of the day when the polls closed, those ballots would have to match the number of pollbook registrations that used paper ballots. You can't just make those up; you can't vote provisionally with paper ballots, so all those ballots would require pollbook registrations for registered voters.
I don't follow your problem here - there are a ton of people who are registered who never vote, you simply log the votes under the names of people who didn't show up.
All at the end of the evening? If you do it in the middle of the day, and the actual voter shows up, there's a good chance you're spending the night in Cook County Jail.
That's the bit everyone seems to miss. Almost all these hypothetical opportunities for fraud fall apart quickly because they require an actual registered voter to exist but not vote, and the moment that voter walks through the door and is told they already voted, all hell will break loose.
I guess it depends on how literal "all hell will break loose" is defined :). It was worth a story in the news, which is significant. How many of those does it take before it becomes a national headline? Way before we get to enough votes to matter. Imagine in either location it was, say, a dozen people saying that? There'd be calls to invalidate the election results in those areas and redo.
> North Carolina State Board of Elections data shows more than 2,600 voters cast provisional ballots during early voting this year. Around 19% of ballots cast were due to voters--like Prince--who were told they already voted.
You are right, you can't make people up, but this has happened throughout history by unscrupulous actors using either very old people or dead people and "casting votes" in their name for certain candidates. I remember seeing a few examples of this firsthand on twitter in MI where a candidate was over 100 years old(and was dead) and voted!
I'm not sure how this attack even works. You can't make up dead people; you have to know who the dead people are. You can't cast votes for random dead people; they have to be dead people from the precinct you're EJ'ing. I buy that you could get 1-2 votes cast this way, but not how you could cast a material number of them. Meanwhile, getting caught just casting 1 such vote is a guaranteed prison sentence. You can't have a vast conspiracy across many dozens of precincts in order to rack up a material number of dead-person votes. It just doesn't make sense.
Not an expert here but my read is that they were looking at the electoral register, and falsifying votes from real registered voters that just didn’t show up on the day.
At least that’s what it sounds like in
> Beren and her accomplices from the Board of Elections would then falsify the polling books and the List of Voters and Party Enrollment for the 39th Ward, 2nd Division, by recording the names, party affiliation, and order of appearances for voters who had not physically appeared at the polling station to cast his or her ballot in the election. Beren took pains to ensure that the number of ballots cast on the machines was a reflection of the number of voters signed into the polling books and the List of Voters.
You should expect some number of dead people to have voted in every election, totally aboveboard. There's always going to be someone who dies in a car accident on the way back from the polling place. Add early or by-mail voting and the attendant micromorts from a bigger gap between votes being cast and being counted, and you'll see more dead people having cast votes.
Older people are much more likely to vote and much more likely to die.
I'm aware that votes cast in the name of the long-deceased has been used for fraud in the past. But some of number of votes cast by dead people should be expected! Just way below the number needed to influence elections.
Just way below the number needed to influence elections.
People say this like there are no close elections, or are only talking about Presidential elections (and ignoring Florida 2020), but pretty much every year there are razor thin votes in statewide and congressional races. Good example is Iowa 2nd district in 2020 which was decided by 6 votes:
GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks was certified the winner in November by a mere six votes out of 400,000 cast, marking one of the closest House races in modern history.
Given 400,000 votes, there is guaranteed more than 6 fraudulent, mistaken, or sabotages ballots. Maybe that affected the result, or just missed flipping the seat, who knows. But small time voting fraud can still be a big problem.
It makes sense when you write it that way, but not in reality. There is a risk/reward to doing this. Part of your premise is that you can know when an election is going to come down to 6 votes. But in fact Meeks vs. Hart was newsworthy because results like that are incredibly rare. 99 times out of 100, if you try to juke the election, you're putting yourself at pretty grave legal risk and accomplishing absolutely nothing.
Slightly more than two months before Iowans begin voting, polling shows the open-seat race in the U.S. House 2nd District as a dead heat.
In a live poll of 406 likely voters by Harper Polling, Republican state Sen. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Democrat Rita Hart each had the support of 41 percent of the respondents
So this is exactly the kind of race where a smart cheater would cheat, not trying to get Trump to win California or Biden to win West Virginia. But I assume people who are corrupt and cheat are going to be corrupt and cheat even when it is not in their own interest. And just by chance that will affect other elections happening at the same time.
No, it's easy to know what the tight races are likely to be, and very difficult to predict which races are going to come down to a margin of just dozens of votes; it's much harder to predict those races than it is to predict the winners of races, since they're very uncommon, and lopsided polling is not.
In Greece, we've seen quite a lot of cases where polling failed spectacularly to detect even large vote swings. Given that those polls are usually being done by organizations closely tied to political parties, I guess they weren't just incompetent. So there's probably quite a lot of error margin there.
> Part of your premise is that you can know when an election is going to come down to 6 votes.
Not in reality, you appended that to your local model.
It's true that there is only so much fraud you can get away with, and if the legitimate votes outnumber your ballot stuffing then your plan failed.
Presumably fraudsters do not know what the final counts are going to be (unlike how many people in this thread "know" things they have no way of knowing), so this would not necessarily alter their plans on sites that are plausibly (in their estimation) swingable.
> But in fact Meeks vs. Hart was newsworthy because results like that are incredibly rare. 99 times out of 100, if you try to juke the election, you're putting yourself at pretty grave legal risk and accomplishing absolutely nothing.
This rests on the premise of omniscience, and while this is a fairly standard convention on the internet these days, there is no scientific evidence I've seen that substantiates the phenomenon.
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Which part of the risk/reward equation I've presented do you disagree with? That the reward is higher than I think it is? Can you be specific as to how many votes you think you'd be able to swing with a scheme targeting e-day voting? Or is it that you think the risk is lower?
I'm disputing the claim that a premise of the argument is necessarily knowing the final vote count prior to launching the scheme. This knowledge is not actually necessary, although having it would certainly be beneficial.
In addition to the other response, elections where there are razor thin margins like this garner a TON of attention, making the likelyhood of getting away with fraud much less likely.
People _hate_ this but it's as fair as anything and probably okay whenever the vote tally is very tight. There are solutions to this, in rcv (or runoffs period) or proportional representation
Chicago invented sophisticated election fraud 100 years ago. It may be the case that recent Chicago administrations decided they didn't want to continue to be known as the worst place in the US for honest elections.
Oh, sorry! You're right! Never mind, we don't do any of the things I said we do. I should have read Block Club instead of relying on my own EJ experiences.
>You can't just make people up! Every vote is tied to a specific registration. We do same-day registration, but those votes are cast provisionally, with a paper log; there aren't many of them, and they can all be set aside and audited after-the-fact.
> You certainly can't just make up a final tally. The numbers from the individual voting machines and the paper ballots have to match up; we had to stay an extra 2 hours after the polls closed last time I did this (in 2020) because of an equipment screwup that kept us from doing the final certified count/reconciliation.
Honest question: what if the final count _didn't_ match, or people _were_ made up? If all of the judges were corrupt, and they gave a false count, whose job would it be to step in and fix it? The police? The current (potentially lame duck) government? Ideally the regulations would be enough of a disincentive that no one would risk it, but if the set of people who finalize the counts blatantly lie, who has the authority to overturn them? And what's stopping that authority itself from being bribed to overturn legitimate results?
File a FOIA request for voting precincts that weren't able to submit a consistent count at the end of the last election. If you're in a sane state, that'll cost you a single email. State FOIA is often very fast (in Illinois, it's 5 days). See what you think when you have actual data.
In case it's not clear, I don't actually have any reason to believe that any election I'm aware of has has it's outcome fabricated. I was mostly intrigued by the parent commenter's assertion that it was impossible for the people in charge to just lie about an election since clearly it's possibly for them to at least try. I realized I don't actually know who has the power to hold them accountable, and I was curious if there was a definitive answer for this sort of thing (and although it likely varies by location given how decentralized election regulations are in the US, it seemed like the parent commenter had some first-hand knowledge of how their local elections work and might already know the answer).
Continuing the hypothetical you suggest, what would an individual actually be able to achieve if they did somehow get the evidence they were looking for that the vote count was fabricated? Is there some sort of civil procedure for contesting the vote tally? Would it require a lawsuit against the person or group of people who lied about the totals? Is there some sort of hearing where people can make a case that whoever is supposed to certify the count (e.g. the legislature) can argue against it? Or would it just be a matter of fighting in the court of public opinion to mount enough pressure to get the lying party to cave?
First, they can't be from the same party; they're deliberately mixed in Cook County. There's a Republican EJ (usually multiple) in every polling location.
Second, the story we're talking about here is about a primary election; the whole contest took place within a single party.
Third, I'm not sure why it would matter. OK, they're all Democrats. Now what? Even if all 4 EJs wanted to corrupt the results of an election, it's not super obvious how you'd undetectably do that. The paper ballots get hauled back to the central counting facility; the registrations have to match the ballots, etc.
> Third, I'm not sure why it would matter. OK, they're all Democrats.
I don't know about you, but I used to change my party affiliation before the primary to be able to vote in the election I care the most about... (I'm not from that state though).
The report lays out exactly how this was done; it appears that among other things they were casting actual ballots on behalf of unlikely voters.
> Inside the polling place and while the polls were open, Beren would advise actual in-person voters to support Myers’ candidates and also cast fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates on behalf of voters she knew would not or did not physically appear at the polls (emphasis mine)
>"Does political affiliation affect integrity somehow?"
I'd say so, but not in a sense that the effect is only or even primarily associated with [insert political party here].
Edit: We like to envision Judges as impeccably impartial, but they have a considerable amount of leeway, ambiguity, and procedural caveats they can employ should they choose to make partisan decisions. Given that judges are often selected by, or elected with support from, a political party machine, it stands to reason that they can be swayed to help the party that is responsible for their position. Especially if there is plausible deniability of bias or wrongdoing.
I'm not sure how it works in Philadelphia, but in Chicagoland the EJs don't generally know each other; we meet for the first time the night before the election to set up the polling station. If you floated the (insane) idea of trying to rig a precinct, the likelihood of one of the other EJs reporting you is extraordinarily high. Meanwhile: the likelihood of you being able to flip even a township election by doing this is low. It just doesn't add up.
I think you have to have some pretty huge procedural gaps to make this viable, which is my point here.
Find precincts with low turn out, stick your own people in there as judges, at the end of day add as many votes as you like for the people who didn’t turn up to vote following basically the same method the former democratic senator in the story did.
Dead people on the registration list has of course not much to do with dead people actually casting a vote. Not to mention that many "dead" voters aren't dead, but the SSA fucked up.
The Heritage Foundation, which is very much in love with the idea of voter fraud, has been able to find a total of 19 cases since 1997 where somebody used a deceased person's registration to (attempt to) vote.
So maybe let's kick the facetious "supposedly" of the last sentence.
And if we wanted to do better with that - the same crowd that is oh-so-concerned with voter fraud is oddly opposed to a federal registry, federal ID, or free state ID. All things that'd help tremendously with increasing the accuracy of voter rolls.
The point was, in keeping with the context of the story and prior comments, that you didn't have to make up people to be able to ring up votes as an insider.
On the larger topic of voter registration, it shouldn't be that hard for them to keep relatively clean rolls. Even if it's not causing an issue, having clean rolls promotes the integrity of and trust in the voting system. I mean, most of the dead people voting is just people signing in the wrong spot.
I'm not sure how a federal registry would really help much. I doubt there are really people voting in multiple states. There is a federal ID - the passport. Although that is relatively expensive, but it is also valid for a much longer duration, so the card can be cheaper than a state ID. I do believe that state IDs should be free if people are under the poverty level, but I also have a hard time believing that $40ish dollars every 4 year is the real barrier (things like the documents needed to get one are a bigger pain in my opinion, like birth certificates, marriage certificates for name changes, bill with your name and address, etc; even more so for Real ID). Plus the hassle of spending hours at the DMV.
"So maybe let's kick the facetious "supposedly" of the last sentence."
I'm not being facetious. Many states have implemented new programs to clean up the voter rolls. There's very little data to show if it's any improvement. In part, that's because the problem had little baseline data to go on (few occurrences of dead people voting). The other part is that many places haven't been very strict about cleaning (like Philly having approximately 1M registered voters when there's maybe 700k eligible to vote just based on age). So not much to speak of on the actual "problem" side since it wasn't large to begin with. But also not much progress on the trust side with cleaning up.
Also, I think that 19 number is low. I thought they found something like 35 in Philly in one election (year 2016? out of the 6k dead people who voted). The rest were simple mistakes. Still not a big problem, but certainly more they 19 nationally in 25 years. Again, it's mostly a trust and integrity issue than a true functional issue.
> Beren took pains to ensure that the number of ballots cast on the machines was a reflection of the number of voters signed into the polling books and the List of Voters. After the polls closed on Election Day, Beren and her associates would falsely certify the results.
So presumably they were destroying valid votes and replacing them? Seems like a pretty awful process for maintaining control of ballots if it allows for that.
Voter rolls are public information and used by canvassers all the time. If there were a bunch of fake people registered somewhere, it would be very easy to notice.
This would be a more credible claim if "certain people in DC" had any control over the voter rolls; they don't, because voting policy is delegated to the states.
Bribe the Judge of Elections who oversees everything. Dilute the vote tallies by using the voting machines to increment the votes for specific candidates. Certify that the fake results are correct. Lie if anybody asks.
This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so easy?
Apart from everything else, if you're not trying to ensure that a candidate wins, regardless of their popularity, and are instead trying to skew the odds toward a candidate who already has a reasonable chance of winning, election fraud becomes easier and harder to detect.
As others have pointed out, these "judges" were actually minor, elected election officials, close to being volunteers. They were doing this to make small additions at a local scale. There was no need to add fake voter registrations, to modify vote counting, or to add votes not connected to legitimately registered voters: they just added ballots and records for registered voters they knew weren't going to show up. At a local enough scale, you might simply know, personally, of voters who are out of town, for example.
This doesn't require any major conspiracy at multiple levels. Depending on the organization of the election, it might be possible for a single poll worker to do it on their own. It would be very hard to defend against at higher levels. Most voter ID ideas wouldn't help (short of digital IDs and cryptographic signatures), because it's being done by the people who would be checking the IDs. Having multiple, adversarial officials keeping records of each person coming in could help, but now you've multiplied the number of people you need at each precinct. Contacting people listed as having voted could help, but they could well have been chosen specifically because they would be unlikely to notice or respond. Checking counts and registrations wouldn't help, because the counts and registrations would be valid. Voting technology mostly doesn't matter, and in fact, the method is likely easier with paper ballots.
It is limited in how much of an effect it can have, of course, but in tight races, or down-ballot races where few people actually fill out those races on their ballot, that might be all you need, or you might be interested in just statistically helping your party by making larger numbers of your party's candidates win, rather than helping one particular candidate.
A big part of the integrity of the system comes down to controls that are instituted at the precinct level, where there's less oversight but also less ability to plausibly influence the election, coupled with much stricter oversight at the central counting stations.
Downballot elections typically happen concurrently with statewide elections, so that doesn't help you: they don't get counted separately, and you're still stuck evading the same controls that protect the statewide elections.
There are tight elections, but in a reasonably run election system, any one precinct is going to have a very narrow margin --- in the best case for attackers --- to influence results. You can't predict where that narrow margin is going to actually be helpful. But it's going to be incredibly risky anywhere you try it.
>Most voter ID ideas wouldn't help (short of digital IDs and cryptographic signatures), because it's being done by the people who would be checking the IDs.
Not exactly.
Keep going on this scenario. If voters had to show ID like in Europe, when someone shows up and is denied to vote because “they already voted” it would be an immediate red flag for fraud.
With the IDless system, someone could be denied and it does not necessarily imply malice.
There is a whole system of provincial ballots - because this and other mistakes in ballots happen often enough. Voter ID wouldn’t secure anything but in Europe it brings more confidence, I’m not sure why it wouldn’t in the USA.
The ID checks "at the gate" don't help if the people on the inside running the system can just go and add some additional votes, either for people who didn't turn up (which they know about) or if there is no cryptographic proof of attendence then just by going up to the machine, who doesn't know how many voters are expected anyway, and presses the button a few more times.
The truth is that a lot of the system is fundamentally based on trust so it is crucial that people who commit fraud against voting are treated as extreme criminals who are trying to subvert the importance of a democratic vote. Not sure how many people would fiddle it if they risked getting a 30 year prison sentence.
I don’t know if there is a legitimate reason that any private or even public-private partnership (like the Democratic and Republican parties in the US) should have that info.
All the more reason why risk-limiting audits [1] should be standard procedure to sanity-check precinct results, especially for thinly-attended elections where fraud has a bigger impact on the outcome. Unfortunately, these things take time and money, and there's little immediate payoff in doing it, especially in the small elections that need it the most.
Risk limiting audits as described in your link would only catch ballot miscountings. In this case fraudulent ballots were added to the system, so the RLA result would not show anything suspicious.
> Dilute the vote tallies by using the voting machines to increment the votes for specific candidates
> Why is it so easy?
I don't know, it doesn't seem easy to me. I mean, it seems like the result of a ton of long-term planning to implement processes that allow each instance of this to be easy. But the fight against electronic voting machines was fierce, and took a long time.
Having some familiarity with the Pennsylvania election machinery specifically, there is nothing about this story that required (or would have been stopped by the absence of) electronic voting machines.
If it was the old iVotronic system, there would be no ballot to check against (the vote was held in the machine memory in redundant locations), but that's no protection against the machine being activated illegitimately and the judge of elections entering illegitimate votes. In the new system, the machines are just tabulators and physical "SAT-style" fill-the-oval vote cards are used as ballots, but again, there's nothing stopping a judge of elections from filling out a pile of invalid ballots and entering them into the machine if the other team members (majority and minority inspector, and the clerks of election) have been bribed to look the other way. In fact, the judge would have to do that, because the fraud will be obvious if the total count of record doesn't match the total count of paper ballots in the box... But structurally, this is equivalent to just activating the iVotronic machine several additional times to cast fraudulent digital-only ballots.
The nature of the fraud here is simple, old-fashioned stuffing the ballot box, and the only protection against that is physically barring access to the hardware (be it a computer or a pine box with a padlock), which is incompatible with the duties of the judge of elections.
There is no mention of electronic voting machines. Nothing described in this press release would even require electronic voting machines. They cast actual (fraudulent) votes and then falsified the records in the polling books to match.
> The voting machines at each polling station, including in the 39th Ward, 36th Division, generate records in the form of a printed receipt documenting the use of each voting machine...Demuro would add fraudulent votes on the voting machine
They didn't hack the machine. They actually voted on the machines multiple times. The same scheme would have worked with mechanical machines or paper ballots.
I know for a fact that where I vote it is impossible to vote more than once (or close to, Berlin managed to fuck up voting last year for some reason). How is it impossible? Everyone is centrally registered with their primary residence. Based on these records, invitations are sent out prior to elections. With that invitation, or passport or ID, you show up at your voting local (of which there are plenty, the school just across the street has three of those and it is far from the only place in our town). There volunteers check you invitation or ID, hand you your ballot, verify you drop in the ballot box and strike from the voting list for this election. Not on the list? No ballot. No documents? No ballot. Since there are thousands of those locales, preliminary results are available in the first two hours after voting closes. We have no waiting lines (most of the time, Berlin is the exception that proofs the rule but then we talk about Berlin...). Mail-in voting works just fine and without any constraints. ballots are archived (for a very long time, I'm too lazy to check the exact duration), so if there are any doubts everything can be rechecked.
No idea how the US just fails at the most simple thing in a democracy, voting. Or rather I have an idea, with gerrymandering and such shenanigans it seems to be by design to keep certain demographics from voting too much.
How would it be "impossible" to vote more than once when the volunteers who are enforcing that have been paid off to allow it to happen? That's exactly what happened in this case.
Sure, and with hundreds of those places, and at least 4 volunteers per place, just how many votes do you think you can stuff? Plus any statistically significant deviation will be spotted. But besides theory we never had more then the odd case affecting a handful of votes every handful of elections for almost 80 years, so history proofs that for all practical reasons it is 1) not happening 2) impossible to do at a scale that would impact results and 3) easy to spot.
You're rehashing literally the same exact argument we're having about US voting, it's not different. Some people think fraud is easy, some people say what you just did, that statistically it's very unlikely.
> No idea how the US just fails at the most simple thing in a democracy, voting.
You're generalizing too far. Much of the US works just like you described for your local voting. The US has tens of thousands of voting precincts with their own rules. For better or worse.
> The US has tens of thousands of voting precincts with their own rules
Surely that's the failure being described. There are always parts of the US where corruption is winning, and those places ultimately have enough political or other capital that they are worth corrupting, and that puts the system of the entire country at continuous risk.
Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US. It’s OK if you didn’t know that, lots of people from other countries are dumbfounded to learn that all you have to do in the US is show up and give the poll workers the name of a registered voter in order to vote.*
* Well, in some states you have to show ID. But one political party in particular fights very hard against this requirement.
I followed this discussion in the US quite close actually. Simply because we need to have government ID. It is racist to require it if access to those IDs is, in praxis, limited for the demographics that should have limited access to voting. It is not if you are required to have government ID, and it is very easy to get one. getting a provisional passport for travel, with a validity of 6 months, takes all of one hour tops over here in Germany.
Precisely. You can’t make something a prerequisite to voting if every voter doesn’t have it. And the US is very much against the concept of a national ID. So you can’t have a national ID requirement.
And as another commenter points out, it’s not that an ID requirement is racist, it’s that the motivations for it, knowing its impact, are racist.
Man, the US is such a strange place. It is also the only country I know of, top of my head, that doesn't have national ID requirements. No idea why this can be seen as bad thing.
The US is over 4.5x the population of Germany, the largest EU member. The entire EU is only about 25% more people than the US. California alone is larger than all but four of the EU member nations.
The US Federal Government is more like the EU itself rather than any member country. The states are more analogous to the countries in the EU.
So a US National ID is kind of like a EU Citizen ID.
What we have instead is an agreement between states and the federal government on ID guidelines. From that perspective it’s not so different.
It's fundamental to the country. We are a federal republic of states, and as such the real power lies with the states. The feds get the nukes, sure, but culturally we are reluctant to hand more power to the central government of a nation of 330 million people.
Yeah, I don’t completely get this one either, but the way we are raised is that national ID is somehow a slippery slope towards federal agents wandering the street demanding “papers, please.”
Interestingly enough, the intersection between those who would advocate for national voter ID requirements and those who would fundamentally oppose a national ID is very large.
> Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US.
This is not the argument people are making, so I hope you aren’t making it intentionally. No one is saying that requiring voting id is inherently racist.
The argument is that requiring voting id without a commensurate effort to make sure everyone has voter id ends up disproportionately affecting minorities. These efforts are subsequently dubbed racist by political opponents because the people implementing them know this to be true and do it anyway, because they prefer the outcome that minorities are disenfranchised.
Republicans have been found in court to play these tricks with “surgical precision”, to make sure the rules they come up with impact minorities more than whites.
Another example is closing polling places so that it takes 8 hours to vote in black precincts whereas it takes 8 minutes to vote in white precincts. Yes, the act of closing a polling place is not an overtly racist thing to do. But the way in which it’s done and the actual impact make clear it is done with the intent of disenfranchising minorities.
> The argument is that requiring voting id without a commensurate effort to make sure everyone has voter id ends up disproportionately affecting minorities.
Democrats have never negotiated in good faith over the requirement to make IDs available though whenever the debate is brought up. States like Wisconsin require voter ID and will make an ID for voting available for free, through the mail, and yet there is still opposition that always relies on handwavy arguments about how utterly baffling and difficult it is to obtain a photo ID, even in Wisconsin. Arguments which are ultimately disingenuous and yet still persist in light of accommodations by states that require voter ID.
It's a pretty standard tribal division, much like abortion and everything else. Each side refuses reasonable compromises because they perceive that it would be a slippery slope allowing the other side to ultimately prevail.
Like I said, unfortunately Republicans have been found in court to have used similar tactics intentionally to disenfranchise minority voters. When they have full control of states they show their hand by passing voter ID laws without commensurate GOTV funding. So we know they are acting in bad faith before it even starts.
If Republicans were serious about non-racist voter ID laws they could have demonstrated that in Georgia when they overhauled election laws there. They didn’t and we know why: more “surgical precision”.
In Wisconsin? With that legislature? Want to guess how easy it will be for them, over time, to make certain cuts to the program that makes it so easy for everyone to get a free ID?
In this case it looks like you could bribe the volunteers to simply give ballots without checking for ID, then bribe the overseers to validate the fraud.
So long as the people who’s votes you are stealing don’t come in, then you are safe.
There are no systems safe from fraud if you allow human judgment to be a part of the system.
elections are as fraud save as they are because you have humans in the loop. Hundreds of them, all over the place. And it is not judgement, but decentralized supervision that solves this problem for you. Not some flimsy electronic system without auditable paper trail.
Hundreds of humans who can all work for a single individual or organization. Without any additional rules, adding more people to supervise is simply security theater.
Note, I am not a general proponent of electronic voting machines either. They can easily make fraud easier by reducing the number of people to bribe to the few engineers with access to the blackbox code and the few officials who certify that the code is valid and was used on Election Day.
The "quiet part" is the US' long history of using ID requirements and other tactics to suppress and disenfranchise black and other minority voting[0,1], especially in the South, for example in North Carolina[1] and Texas[2], going all the way back to poll taxes[3].
If considered in a vacuum, completely absent the context of historical precedent, voter IDs seem like a simple common sense solution to the (practically nonexistent) problem of voter fraud. Unfortunately, we are talking about the US, and it's simply not possible to assume good faith.
So, are you saying Europe’s voter ID laws exist to solve no problem? Because from where I sit, confidence in the electoral process seems to be a larger problem preventing than imaginary racism using real racism of low expectations.
Yes, that is really a Democrat position, along with opposing signature checks on postal votes, supporting sending out unsolicited mass postal voting forms, opposing removing people who've moved states from the electoral register on the state they left, dismantling any system for identifying people recorded as having voted in more than one state, and fighting even the most basic checks on their programs for literally paying workers to fill out voters' ballots for them. The stated justification for all of these is the same: not doing so is an evil attempt to suppress the black vote and disenfranchise black voters. The ACLU and the non-Fox News media generally support them on this. American politics is wild by European standards.
How is this different than dropping in additional paper ballots into a ballot box? If it isn’t, then this has nothing to do with the machine, but rather control of the “ballot box”.
Stuffing paper ballots into a box or tapping the screen of an electronic voting machine are both very easy. This stuff has to be fixed at a higher level, like by making sure the folks running the precinct aren’t corrupt or by having a neutral observer present
Stuffing paper ballots is infinitely harder if your election system isn't entirely fucked. Multiple assessors, both from parties and individuals who just want to ensure that everything goes right, invalidation of the entire ballot box if any cheating is found post-votes, increase the amount of voting places so that scaling this up becomes impossible.
Voting has been solved centuries ago. And voting machines will never be part of the solution.
> invalidation of the entire ballot box if any cheating is found post-votes
That seems to just introduce a new vulnerability where you could intentionally get caught cheating in precincts that leaned contrary to your beliefs to invalidate everyone there who voted legitimately.
No. Any attempts at cheating caught live just invalidate that bulletin (and said cheater is brought to the police). With a well organised setup (having a record of who already voted, having a transparent ballot box that is only open for a moment when your identity has been verified, multiple assessors watching for the extremely obvious "hey there's multiple envelopes that fell in there"), cheating is already extremely hard, for almost no gain. Maybe you can stuff two votes instead of one, but at what cost, potentially invalidating hundreds for your candidate ? And since voter counts are recorded and compared to bulletin counts, even a difference of one will start an inquiry and potentially invalidate.
If you multiply the voting places, where instead of having a single place which will tally over 10k votes, have 15 places that tally 700 votes each, you have now made both cheating much harder, and less worth it in the scenario you propose.
> Multiple assessors, both from parties and individuals who just want to ensure that everything goes right
The story is literally about ballot stuffing at precincts where there weren’t observers like that watching. Which makes the electronic voting part a complete red herring
And 100% of the votes from those precincts without observers should’ve been discarded. The real problem is that we don’t fund elections properly. This sort of thing isn’t a problem in other developed democracies. It’s only one here by design.
What you’re proposing is that the official in charge of running elections can cut funding to precincts that usually vote for his opponent, and then later invalidate all ballots cast there?
I can register as an assessor for free (both for me and my city). The cases where cities have to pay for some is extremely rare. If you live in a city with even a hundred inhabitants, the chances to find at least one that is interested in their democratic process is already high.
I wasn't trying to be uncharitable. You said that we should have retroactively discarded 100% of votes from specific precincts, so I pointed out why allowing selective invalidation like that is a really bad idea.
Other than speeding up voting calculations, reducing paper usage, enabling arbitrary language use at the booth, and other things.
If electronic fraud is a concern, we should mitigate it, because encryption, identity, and date integrity are solved problems.
Furthermore, spot auditing and paper receipts/copies are a thing, or could be.
(Also, voting may be "solved" but voting systems and universal access to the ballot has not. First past the post voting is possibly the worst system to use short of flipping a coin.)
Access to polling places has also been solved, including India where officials carry voting machines through the jungle for or only a handful of voters.
And first past the goal post works, or rather can work. It is aggressive Gerrymandering, allocating senators by state and not population and the electoral college that screw it up in the US.
FPTP is a disaster. Even if you have perfectly representative elections, FPTP essentially disallows anything but 2 parties. This makes both parties more easily corruptible (less people to bribe if you're paying for specific result or legislation).
Multiple parties makes gaming elections much harder for moneyed interests.
France has FPTP, and it works for a lot more than two parties. Admittedly, France has a second round run off in case no candidate has more than 50% of votes in the first round so.
Having two rounds is by definition not first past the post. And in fact that is the difference that makes it possible in France for third and fourth parties to get non-trivial support in the first round.
For the vast majority of it's existence, the 5th republic has had proportional representation in the legislature (only changed with Sarkozy, who instituted 2-round elections - IIRC).
Presidential has been 2-round for much longer, perhaps from the beginning of the 5th republic.
Straight FPTP as implemented in many places in the US allows plurality winners (ie, winners that don't get 50% of the votes), France's system does not.
>For the vast majority of it's existence, the 5th republic has had proportional representation in the legislature (only changed with Sarkozy, who instituted 2-round elections - IIRC).
Uh, no. The Fifth has has two round legislative elections since its beginning. The entire reason for it was that the Fourth and Third showed what an overly powerful parliament caused, as well as the relative instability of having only a single round to elect députés.
Hence, the Fifth was started by a former general who thought that putting immense amounts of power in the president was a good idea. Because clearly counter powers are overrated.
Additionally, french legislative elections can have a very peculiar situation where the second round has three candidates, but that requires a specific amount of votes and to all be extremely close. I believe there's 10 of them planned this year according to polls, over 577 circonscriptions.
I stand corrected. Apparently proportional representation only happened in the 1986 elections when Mitterrand made that change for that single election [1]. Amusing reading back on what happened vs. what I heard about from others.
Regarding the 3 candidates in 2nd round - yes that's only possible because France allows 3 & 4 candidates to go into 2nd round if they have over 12.5%. This is usually not the case, so 3-rounds are very limited but as you indicate they do present a plurality win possibility.
Hilarious to read that as the US presidential elections take over a week to tally results, when french elections have 90% of the results at 10PM on the same evening (most voting places close at 7PM)
No. Voting has been secret also for centuries. Paper ballots allow secrecy of the vote _and_ verification of voters. Something that electronic ballots will never be able to do.
You can never be sure that people running the precinct, or any office, are not corrupt. The rules should be such that it doesn't matter who is in office. Violation of the rules must be met with stiff penalty or the rules are not really a deterrent.
It's not about actual vulnerabilities (although it may also be), it is about the general public's confidence in the legitimacy of the election. Voting machines do not instill confidence, and that is a bad thing for a democracy. I don't care about the microcosm of improved efficiency. That's not the thing to try to make ultra efficient at the cost of legitimacy.
And that's why we should decentralise power to the most local entity we can (somewhere between a central government and the individual affected by a choice) and have as few elected officials as possible.
The US tried this with their first constitution which lasted barely a decade. And the the macro scale issues these days are significantly larger than what they had to deal with back then.
Coase’s theory doesn’t only apply to firms but to other organizations as well.
Imagine if San Diego wanted water from the Colorado River (what nerve!). They’d have to negotiate with every little town next to the river. And if one town doesn’t want to negotiate, well, they can attract business with offers of “take as much water as you want” and “emit as much toxic waste as you want”, and we’ll fuck the people downstream.
Definitely. That's where the conversation needs to shift. Those are the kinds of questions we should be debating on a case by case or inductive basis, not these asinine and useless popularity contests.
> Although The Wealth of Nations is widely regarded as Smith's most influential work, Smith himself is believed to have considered The Theory of Moral Sentiments to be a superior work.[79]
> Rae, John (1895). Life of Adam Smith. London & New York: Macmillan. ISBN 0-7222-2658-6. Retrieved 14 May 2018 – via Internet Archive.
> This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so easy?
Easy and cheap! TFA says it was only $300 to $5k per election total... Which was then split _at least_ two ways?? I mean, sure, the average politician hasn't been accused of having integrity in a long time, but this is just ridiculous.
Easy to do? Probably, they only pay judge of elections about minimum wage. Not exactly positions of high standing. Easy to get away with? Not really, that's why he's been caught and pleading guilty.
Because nobody was watching when they meddled with voting machines. If there was someone oberving or at least a camera, this would be easy to discover.
>This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so easy?
You don't just cold call a judge. Presumably he knew enough about what his options for judges were that he could pick the ones who would be amenable to the idea and approach them.
The bribe at that point is just payment for risk (because the judge presumably doesn't have plausible deniability)
"Judge of Elections" in PA is an elected position for running the polling place for a precinct on election day. It's an extremely low-level position that only involves work on 2 days of the year.
It's not a "judge" in the sense someone who oversees a criminal or civil trial.
I'm surprised it is even elected. I was an election judge when I was 18 in Illinois as part of high school project. You just sign up and attend a 2 hour class.
It was fun. The other judge at my poll location was a guy who served in the Wehrmacht during WWII (was conscripted at age 14).
But I easily could have stuffed the box. Most people don't vote. At 7:45pm, you could just vote for people who didn't show up. Nobody but the other judge would have the chance of stopping you.
> Nobody but the other judge would have the chance of stopping you.
Those ought to contradict each other. We have multiple judges for exactly this reason. It is a sincerely tall order to get even one other judge, especially when it's required to be from the opposing party, to agree to your ballot stuffing. You're likely to end up prosecuted the moment you pose the question, before you get anywhere near stuffing a box.
There should be something stopping you; the voter rolls, and list of names that voted and not, are public. The press could absolutely contact a sample of the voter rolls and verify - "I voted", "I didn't". Any discrepancy (well, any time there's more than one or two, because people do lie or simply forget) should be a scandal.
There are people who did this for the 2020 elections. They found voters registered to empty lots all over Arizona. Steven Crowder, I think the guys name was.
Not sure on that specific claim, but every one of those type of "fraud claims" I've looked into turn out to be false and full of errors in how they used the information they had to try to prove their claims. An example from Arizona - not sure if the same one as Crowder, not going to watch YT videos on this topic - if it's important enough, write it up and publish it with references and proper proof that can be replicated.
"Treason" is one of the few crimes which is defined in the US constitution. It has a fairly narrow definition which does not include election fraud:
>Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The person you are responding to is clearly suggesting their personal belief that election crimes are so antithetical to American values that it constitutes a crime on par with treason.
Fine, but the system that they're claiming to speak in service of directly contradicts that belief in its foundational charter.
The people commiting this type of fraud make similar mental leaps about the definitions of words like "treason" and "patriotism" to justify their actions. It's not a good road to follow.
So if the US Republic is thrown over like the Weimar Republic the only question for you is:
Did they not break any laws as defined by the forefathers who wrote the constitution?
I don't really understand this bizarre worshipping of the creation of the US as if it must have been done too well to question. Eternal vigilance is identifying the bugs, talking about them in public and proposing appropriate size patches. Failure to do so is being overthrown by a risk not accounted for by the forefathers, or that they assumed we weren't too stupid to handle.
My suggestion that election fraud by a sworn judge should be dealt with as seriously as treason is in no way the same as someone's secret dialog with co-conspirators to justify undermining all trust in the republic being democratic for their own goals.
Yes, though more generally I am interested in the criteria and thought process that takes place in discussions leading to constitutional conventions to build a republic that is self maintaining despite various threats. The US is not Cannon to me, it is one template and we are poking at a flaw in it.
No, they were tried for conspiracy to commit espionage (50 U.S.C. § 32). Although espionage is a morally treasonous act, treason was not the legal crime for which they were prosecuted.
This is the best argument that there is not widespread fraud. The odds of getting caught are pretty high, the penalties stiff, and the value of a single vote practically zero. Sure, some races are that close, but most are not, so any kind of systemic effort has vastly more risk than it's worth just to get one lowly elected position flipped from an opposing party.
That seems to frequently be the surprising thing about these corruption cases. I'm reminded of the fascinating case where journalists in Chicago bought a bar to investigate corruption. They were shocked at $10 bribes getting things done for them (30+ years ago, but still a small sum).
https://interactive.wttw.com/timemachine/mirage-tavern
Many of us would assume the sums of money needed to bribe officials would be huge, but unfortunately many people don't consider corruption to be a big deal, so small payments can make an impact.
A recent episode of Darknet Diaries has a former intelligence officer explaining that the biggest threat of corruption is from within (its own employees being coerced). Often it’s people in bad moments in their life (divorce, serious illness, someone died, etc) that makes someone accept a bribe they would otherwise never have done. The argument is that the best way companies can protect against corporate espionage and other interference is treating their employees well, as it’s not often people that are structurally corrupt.
I suppose the same can be said about government employees, although the fact that it can be directly in the current government’s interest not to do that is another problem.
I read that during the cold war, a common exploit was people fearing massive penalties from their own governments over small issues. E.g., some accounting error that would get them imprisoned. So the US would walk in with a few thousand $$ equivalent and have a really well positioned source that just wanted to survive some basic screw-up.
It's a good lesson in how ratcheting up punishments can be counterproductive, even or especially even, in critical areas.
That's exactly how I did it. I grew up reading C&H, owned all the books, etc., and some of them really just stuck with me like that one.
A simple Google search exactly like above was sufficient in this case, but there's also a C&H-specific search engine which has been discussed on HN a few times before:
(US perspective here not sure about other countries)
This type of thing has made me think we should pay politicians more but then say they can't make money any other ways while in office and for some amount of years after they leave office.
No stock trading, no deals to get a private job after you leave office (unless you leave time to make sure your decisions could have no impact on the business you're joining), and no public speaking fees. You can still speak publicly but you shouldn't be getting paid for it if the whole reason for speaking is that you were a public servant. I think we have some sort of fundamental disconnect between expecting people to be a public servant while still saying they can act as a private individual financially
Ok, but you're adding a bunch of rules and some people are just out looking for ways to use their willingness to break rules as a competitive advantage.
From fiction and movies, one would think that selling the country's secrets to foreign governments would lead to wealth enough to set you up for life on a private island. Yet when the accounts of the treachery emerge at trial, it's always troves of highly classified documents for a few thousand dollars here or there, maybe a few $100k over decades of espionage.
It still just stuns me every time I read how in reality, while honest people would die before selling out their country, some people will sell out everyone so cheaply.
I think that many times the people involved are not doing it strictly for the money, but because they feel their side is the one that should clearly be in charge.
Look at how small the donations to politicians are. I used to wonder why the big companies weren’t “flooding the zone” and then realised the official numbers surely don’t catch much — there must be all sorts of “off books” assistance.
Here's some anecdata for you... I went to a relatively elite private high school on the east coast. Where I and several other people fixed elections through various methods for clubs and school offices. 2 of 5 people that were in on it now hold public elected office one at the state level and one at the federal level the other three, myself included, do not hold public office.
I believe this behavior is the norm. I grew up around DC and know the types of people that work there and what they're actually like. It's also possible I'm just jaded.
I personally regret doing it and justify it due to peer pressure. 'If so and so is doing it and their uncle is a congressman and their father is an elected judge it must just be how its done.' I'd tell myself.
I have no proof they're still doing that now. That'd be insane and reputation ruining for myself if they are indeed legitimately elected. Dynasties work in American politics especially at the local level.
I've been asked to work on at least 2 of their campaigns at different times but It's not been something I'm interested in anymore. Me and the other folks not in public office now all came from families that could barely afford to send their children to that school, I nearly got pulled out twice due to financial strain. I think we were used as the fall people if the group ever got caught because the anointed ones would never get in trouble.
Since then, I've served in the military for the US for 6 years (to pay for college) and feel I've done my part to pay back my debts to society.
I would suspect that people who behave like he does would out-compete people who behave honestly. From a Darwinian perspective, it would seem that the entire population of politicians will eventually make this same adaptation or otherwise get voted out.
It's like steroids, once everyone starts using them the honest people are no longer able to qualify.
I think this sums it up. Being a politician just fundamentally boils down to one skill - being able to convince the masses that they should vote for you. When we look at desirable characteristics like ethical values or personal integrity, they would likely just be harmful so far as success in this game is concerned.
PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- Union boss John Dougherty and Philadelphia City Councilman Bobby Henon were both found guilty of conspiracy and multiple counts of honest services wire fraud in their federal corruption trial.
In all, Dougherty was found guilty of eight of 11 charges against him. Henon was found guilty of 10 of 18 charges against him.
Prosecutors said Dougherty kept Henon, a union electrician-turned-Philadelphia City Council member, on the payroll of a $70,000 no-show job to help his union keep a tight grip on construction jobs.
>Michael Joseph "Ozzie" Myers (born May 4, 1943) is an American politician who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1976 to 1980. A member of the Democratic Party, Myers became involved in the Abscam scandal during his tenure in Congress and was later expelled from the House of Representatives after being caught taking bribes in an FBI sting operation. In 2020, he was indicted for election fraud.
If something political was in the title it would be flagged off of HN pretty quickly. This is a justice.gov article which are frequently posted to HN and election security is a common topic here, so it's pretty safe.
Yes, things have been feeling more partisan around here lately and I fell into that trap. I went back and realized it was from justice.gov and that changed things.
Can I not just comment on an internet forum without having to act like I'm defending a dissertation? Do I have to assume I'm talking to the ghost of Socrates?
>"Where is 'around here, lately'? Where you live? This website?"
Yes. This site. Make a reasonable inference.
>"'Partisan'? Some several people's opinions that don't align with yours?"
This assumes I only sense partisanship when people disagree with me, but there are plenty discussions here on HN bringing up conservatives, progressives, national politics, the recall of the San Francisco DA, etc.. There's a good amount of back-and-forth between those who disagree and I'm not attributing a partisan atmosphere to my opinions being challenged. And before you ask, no, I will not provide you with a list of HN threads with partisan discussions going on in them.
>"'[T]hings have been feeling[...] What things?"
Are you unfamiliar with this expression/phrasing? In this case it is not meant to convey specific examples, it refers to sentiment and atmosphere - a state of mind.
Everything else aside, it astonishes me how... CHEAPLY this was done.
Whether I am honest, or simply risk averse, or privileged, or scared... you'd have to add at least a couple of zeroes for me to even contemplate or understand or fathom somebody doing this. How fearless or stupid are these people? Or alternatively, how easy and safe is it to do this, for it to be worth such minor sum of money (compared to power/damage wrought)?
>>"After receiving payments ranging from between $300 to $5,000 per election "
It's interesting how everyone is talking about "how this can be so easy". Really what was done here was absolutely small fish compared to the much bigger issues with the US electoral system. I mean party operatives deciding voting districts, the legislative essentially selecting the judicative (admittedly an issue in many other democracies as well), a electoral system where a vote has vastly different influence depending on where you live, election financing which ensure that politicians of any party are beholden to wealthy lobbyists.
Really the issue that some small town election officials can fraudulently cast a couple of hundred votes is the least of your worries. Also worth pointing out, they were caught, so it wasn't actually so easy.
Not liking the institutional design of the political system of the United States is a radically different class of problem than electoral fraud by an elected official.
Just for context it seems The guy he bribed (i.e. the one who actually did the stuffing) was convicted in March 2020. So this isn’t exactly fresh news.
The influx of conservative politics doesn't seem to be limited to HN from what I've seen but representative of a larger trend happening in our society at the moment.
Personally it's not surprising at all to me, it's just the pendulum swinging back.
It's a quote from what someone else said (Alison Collins). How is that racist? Disallowing quotes is effectively letting her get away with what she said.
I don't think it's particularly new, nor is it surprising given a general small-gov/libertarian ideology of the self-starter/hacker types that have always leaned towards self-regulation since the 80s and before. That said, yeah COVID and the associated lockdowns seemed to have been something that caused a lot of people to either reconsider this, or double down, which may be what you observed.
There's a second dead comment with some objectionable language. And the comment on this thread that makes unsubstantiated claims about the implication of this case. And my concern about this posting isn't that we should or shouldn't be interested in this case of fraud, but rather that it's a local news story that is completely off-topic for HN. It's not academic, or technical, or related to entrepreneurship or any of the other topics of interest. It is suspicious that a 1 hour old account posts something that would normally get zero traction on this site suddenly shoots to the top. And the timing this close to the first public hearings on the Jan 6 committee is ever more suspicious.
The objectionable language seems to be quoting someone else. Although the person they're quoting self-censored in the original tweets so they probably should have done the same.
For the Americans in the audience: if this story of fraud gives you pause and you want to do something to help...
Most places in the country are positively starved for judges of elections (who are local administrators, one per polling location) and the rest of the elections team (who both manage the mechanics of the election and serve as an observer / check-on-power for the judge). If you want to help, it is a two-day time commitment per year, and the job and responsibilities are extremely straightforward.
You can often get yourself elected (in most states, these positions are elected but nobody runs for them so you can write yourself into the job). You can also reach out to the county elections office and volunteer; the positions are so chronically under-staffed that they're usually extremely thankful for volunteers, and when nobody is elected to the position in a given voting location, the county has to pull from volunteers to appoint people to the task.
You get a chance to meet all your neighbors, and there's no better way to ensure your vote isn't stolen or compromised than to secure it yourself.
Americans have a really tough time with the notion of materiality. America is such a big country that, as a matter of statistics, anything that can happen is happening. That doesn’t mean it happens often enough to call into question our basic systems.
In this case it’s the right that fails to grasp materiality. Yes, people vote illegally, ballot boxes get stuffed, their is collusion, etc. No, it doesn’t happen often enough to undermine the integrity of elections in the aggregate. But the left is just as susceptible to such thinking. They take, for example, a few isolated instances of innocent people being falsely convicted or forced to plead guilty as proof that such errors are pervasive and undermine the integrity of the justice system. It’s two sides of the same token.
> No, it doesn’t happen often enough to undermine the integrity of elections in the aggregate.
Ridiculous to just throw this out as if it's a concrete fact. Even changing the outcome of a Presidential election doesn't require any kind of sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign. Just enough well-placed ones where the vote will be close enough that the fraud doesn't have to be too large.
I'm not saying it has or hasn't happened, but it's certainly possible.
> Even changing the outcome of a Presidential election doesn't require any kind of sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign. Just enough well-placed ones
Were that to have happened, analysis of the voting results would show a divergence in results in those “well placed” areas. For a presidential race, there are a lot of eyes on this comparing demographic data with vote totals.
For instance, in 2020 there were some allegations that cities were faking votes for a specific political party, but analysts found the same voting trends against the incumbent president occurred in suburbs and in states controlled by the other party that were not decisive to the outcome. For the fraud to not be obvious, it would have needed to be committed in every major city and state.
> Were that to have happened, analysis of the voting results would show a divergence in results in those “well placed” areas.
Why didn't that sort of analysis find fraud in Philadelphia in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018? How are you so certain of its infallibility given it's apparent inability to find fraud like this?
The analysis never found fraud? Or there was no analysis at all? According to the DOJ, the fraud centered on Democratic primary elections [1], which don't receive anywhere near as much scrunity or participation as Presidential general elections.
Let me put this in different terms. What algorithm should they have ran to detect this? If we have such a infallible algorithm why isn't it always used? If it's not a algorithm but instead more of a handy wavy "analysis" by "experts" how do you know for an empirical certainty they didn't just actually fill a room full of monkeys, waited a week and said the results are good?
Comparing ballot totals to exit polling is a fairly accurate way to detect fraud (within a certain margin pf error). But increased mail-in/absentee voting, increasing the number of days on which voting occurs, etc. make it more difficult to outright impossible to perform quality exit polling any more.
You asked "Why didn't that sort of analysis find fraud in Philadelphia in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018?" And I answered it. Is that a sufficient answer or not?
To your new questions, yes, there are well-established ways to detect monkey business from machine-maniputation or ballot-stuffing. Basically, you make sure that the results line up between the paper ballots and the machine counts, and that the number of paper ballots you have matches the number of voters who checked in at the precinct. https://www.vote.pa.gov/About-Elections/Pages/Post-Election-... By law, elections generate a lot of data across independent sources. Rigging an election undetected is hard because you need to make sure those data sources remain consistent.
If you're skeptical of elections, I encourage you to volunteer to be a poll worker. Learn your state's procedures and carry them out more faithfully than how you think they're otherwise done today.
That doesn't really solve for all the ways you can rig an election. For example in '2000 Mules' they propose that democratically aligned charities like homeless shelters and elder care homes would gather ballots from their vulnerable populations, fill them out for their preferred candidates, and then have mules distribute those ballots to publicly accessible ballot boxes 3 to 5 at a time.
They have some interesting footage of those boxes, and a lot of the footage is apparently conspicuously missing. However nothing concrete, so take this as a thought experiment.
How do you prove they didn't do that from the raw ballot counts and voter roles in a way that I don't have to take someone else's word for it?
>For example in '2000 Mules' they propose that democratically aligned charities like homeless shelters and elder care homes would gather ballots from their vulnerable populations, fill them out for their preferred candidates, and then have mules distribute those ballots to publicly accessible ballot boxes 3 to 5 at a time.
In order for this to actually work, the nefarious operatives would need to forge people's signatures on those mail ballots. Otherwise, they'll fail the signature match at the elections returns center and the ballot will get tossed. Here's a good rundown of how that works, at least in California [1]. Do you have reason to believe that the signature check doesn't work?
Stepping back, rigging elections by stuffing mail ballots makes zero sense from a cost/benefit perspective. It requires massive amounts of effort to coordinate all those people so the plan proceeds undetected. A rational attacker would be better off taking an opposite approach: throwing away opponents' mail ballots. That requires far less effort. I'm skeptical of these mail ballot stuffing claims because it's an overly complex Rube-Goldberg-machine of a plot.
Other than throwing away opponents' mail ballots, is there a viable attack that could actually work?
In 2020 in Pennsylvania the standard was that a signature existed not that it matched the voter rolls.
The incentive not to closely scritinize signatures when mail in ballots in your county strongly favor your perfered candidate is clear.
"If the Voter’s Declaration on the return envelope is signed and the county board is satisfied that the declaration is sufficient, the mail-in or absentee ballot should be approved for canvassing unless challenged in accordance with the Pennsylvania Election Code.
The Pennsylvania Election Code does not authorize the county board of elections to set aside returned absentee or mail-in ballots based solely on signature analysis by the county board of elections."
Thanks for sharing this! That's absolutely concerning, and definitely opens up a possibility for monkey business if fraudsters can just scribble down anything in the signature field. Given the millions of mail ballots in Pennsylvania in 2020, I would expect someone noticing ballot theft at scale (i.e., "I never got my mail ballot but it says I already voted!"), but regardless this is something I would still want corrected if I were a Pennsylvanian. Is the standard still the same?
The signature match is an important part of the mail ballot process, one that even California does.
It is astonishing to me that anyone thinks signature matching is a good idea. It’s incredibly subjective, and I have no idea what my own signature from years ago looks like.
I should start off by saying 2000 Mules is a film by Dinesh D'Souza, noted scumbag. It's also a conspiracy theory. Asking "how can you prove this conspiracy theory false" isn't productive.
It looks like this was pretty small-time voter fraud in local and low-level elections, where there weren't teams of data operatives scouring returns for any inconsistency.
When people talk about "there is no voter fraud", mostly what they mean are federal elections. The US has great gobs of elections, there's no reasonable way to analyze them all, and we simply don't have the data in most of the cases.
> Why didn't that sort of analysis find fraud in Philadelphia in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018?
You can’t look at votes a local candidate for city office received in Massachusetts or Iowa because those candidates are only on the ballot in Philadelphia. The type of national vote trend analysis I’m describing only exists for national elections.
No. It was decided by votes in the swing states. There wasn’t a swing in votes in “a dozen counties”. Votes trended toward the democratic candidate across demographically similar counties in all 5 states , and also trended the same way in states that were not critical to the election (for instance, in Texas: “Biden improved on Hillary Clinton's 2016 vote share by 3.24%, giving him the largest percentage in the state by a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter carried the state in 1976. Trump's 5.58-point margin of victory was also the narrowest for a Republican since 1996.” - Wikipedia )
>Votes trended toward the democratic candidate across demographically similar counties in all 5 states ,
Categorically false.
Increased and majority number of Republican governors were elected. Republicans increased house seats. Trump out performed himself in all counties he won in 2016.
Sorry for the imprecision, I thought it was clear we were discussing the Presidential candidate voting specifically.
Yes, Republican congressmen improved their performance compared to 2018. some voters ticket split and voted for Biden for president and republicans for congress. Although I guess some would say the election hackers just forgot to update the other database columns or something.
>Even changing the outcome of a Presidential election doesn't require any kind of sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign. Just enough well-placed ones where the vote will be close enough that the fraud doesn't have to be too large.
This only looks true when viewed retroactively. It would have taken roughly 80k votes to switch the 2016 election from Trump to Clinton. However people had no idea of that beforehand. That 80k vote number accomplishes the goal only if one knows exactly where to place them. Someone would need to add hundreds of thousands if not millions of votes across numerous battleground states in order to be convinced that their changes would have the desired impact. That certainly sounds like a "sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign".
I wasn't addressing a question of whether election fraud happens or the motivation for it. I was specifically criticizing the idea that "changing the outcome of a Presidential election" is possible without a "sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign".
The EROI doesn't matter in that context because the goal is a singular binary event. It either was enough to sway the election and it qualifies for this discussion or it wasn't enough and therefore doesn't support OPs original point.
If the EROI is high enough you try it prior to knowing the outcome. Because there is a curve of investment that eats into the Return portion of the equation, they should push up the number of votes (cost) until they hit their desired (cost of capital + profit margin). That is the rational way to act at least.
If someone says to you pay $1 to have a 75% chance at $2. you definitely should take it. It's the same with millions of dollars or billions of dollars.
Yes, but if the question was "did someone give you $2?" then your ROI is irrelevant. The question wasn't whether someone would want to attempt this fraud. It is whether someone could successfully execute this fraud.
> It is whether someone could successfully execute this fraud.
Wouldn't this become a certainty given enough Investment? if so then the EROI is a real factor because it tells us that someone not only could spend $ALOT but could also expect to profit from and so is likely able to fund the project.
>> It is whether someone could successfully execute this fraud.
>Wouldn't this become a certainty given enough Investment?
No, because the larger the fraud, the easier it is to detect and detection would make is unsuccessful. This requires an expertly targeted fraud that is both large enough to change the overall result while being small enough to go undetected. I don't think that specific combination is possible without a large conspiracy behind it.
>It would have taken roughly 80k votes to switch the 2016 election from Trump to Clinton. However people had no idea of that beforehand.
What if they paused ballot counting on the night of Election Day, assessed how many votes they needed, and worked overnight to get the votes needed, reporting new totals the next day? Wouldn’t that solve the issue you raise here?
They would need to be able to mobilize tens or hundreds of thousands of votes on hours of notice. They would also need to be able to distribute those votes broadly enough not to cause suspicion when an unexpected trove of votes are added late. These votes would also need to be cast intelligently enough to match all expected down ballot elections not to draw suspicion. I don't think there is a way to do all of this without a sweeping multi-state conspiracy.
> They would need to be able to mobilize tens or hundreds of thousands of votes on hours of notice.
The ability does exist, for example in Fulton County there is video of workers pulling suitcases full of ballots out from under tables and running them possibly multiple times through machines after poll watchers had been sent home. An investigation revealed there was no widespread voter fraud, but in an alternate universe those ballots could have been shenanigan votes.
>They would also need to be able to distribute those votes broadly enough not to cause suspicion when an unexpected trove of votes are added late.
The votes that were added overnight actually weren’t broadly distributed at all. Suspicion was raised (and dismissed, since investigations suggested no evidence of widespread voter fraud).
>These votes would also need to be cast intelligently enough to match all expected down ballot elections not to draw suspicion.
If I recall, many if not most of the votes added overnight did not have downballot selections at all. Of course, this fact is not evidence of widespread voter fraud.
>I don't think there is a way to do all of this without a sweeping multi-state conspiracy.
I tend to agree. A multi-state conspiracy is more likely than districts in Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia and other swing state cities acting independently of each other - that is, if widespread voter fraud did occur, which of course there is no evidence of.
If you are going to make claims like this, you really should back them up with sources. I was only able to find info about one of the issues you mentioned.
>The ability does exist, for example in Fulton County there is video of workers pulling suitcases full of ballots out from under tables and running them possibly multiple times through machines after poll watchers had been sent home. An investigation revealed there was no widespread voter fraud, but in an alternate universe those ballots could have been shenanigan votes.
"The 90 second video of election workers at State Farm arena, purporting to show fraud was watched in its entirety (hours) by
@GaSecofState investigators. Shows normal ballot processing. Here is the fact check on it." [1]
>The votes that were added overnight actually weren’t broadly distributed at all. Suspicion was raised (and dismissed, since investigations suggested no evidence of widespread voter fraud).
Source?
>If I recall, many if not most of the votes added overnight did not have downballot selections at all. Of course, this fact is not evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Election returns centers have a lot of people in it. You'd need a pretty sizeable conspiracy to carry out an attack you describe. At the very least, such a conspiracy would produce some kind of written communications or financial transactions. You'd need pretty good coordination to pull it off, and people are neither psychic nor capable of playing verbal "telephone" at scale.
> Election returns centers have a lot of people in it.
In Philly they barred GOP poll watchers from observing the process and they (GOP) had to get a court order to force the center to allow them in...so all it takes is a few partisans at the top of the food chain.
Love how temp accounts can post partisan hackery (and post a comment noting they have an obvious agenda), so we get to hear all the old, lame conspiracy theories from twitter on hn.
Can you link to evidence of this happening? Because all I could find were stories about how Trump's lawyers argued this was the case, but were forced to admit in court there were poll watchers acting on Trump's behalf:
>Judge : “Are your observers in the counting room?”
>Trump lawyer: "There's a non-zero number of people in the room.”
The city played the covid social distancing game and forced poll watches to be so far from the action that one reported needing binoculars to even being to see what was going on. The commonwealth court ordered the city to allow the poll watches within a reasonable distance so they could, you know, observe.
LOL, this is about the time someone points out that faking the moon landing would be more expensive than just doing it. Tell me how you coordinate a pause across even a few different precincts, much less states, and then it'll be worth discussing whether you could invent 80K fraudulent votes in just the right places.
This is a hysterical question to ask, primarily because -- if you look at the statistics of election night -- it appears that exactly what you're describing happened.
You mean that as absentee ballots started to be counted (after the in-person ones, as required by Republican officials), that the polls started to swing just as everyone (including then-President Trump) had expected before the election? Is that what you mean?
For all the conspiracy theorists out there who still think there were more than seven million fraudulent votes cast in 2020, I wish I could give them the opportunity to try and vote fraudulently, with no legal consequences. You can do whatever it takes (caveat: no violence) to get those fake votes in. Document everything you did, record it all, present it when you're done and there will be no legal repercussions. We'll thank you for pointing out how easy the system is to game.
That's not an insult, it is a challenge. Put up, or shut up. Calling into question our fundamental democratic systems just to score points in identity politics is low brow, we should challenge anyone who makes those accusations to back them up with facts.
Ridiculous to just throw this out as if it's a concrete fact.
It appears to be a concrete fact this fraud did not change the outcome in any election. The scrutiny also goes way up as you move up hierarchy of election importance.
Seems a stretch, the civil rights bill was JFK’s baby initially, and if JBJ hadn’t been president it’s pretty likely that another democratic president would have signed it, possibly Humphrey or McCarthy.
The book "master of the senate" makes a pretty compelling case against this. LBJ was a masterclass politician (honestly much better than JFK or Humphrey). It makes the point that basically every liberal president since the Civil War had tried to pass some sort of civil rights bill only for it to fail
>No, it doesn’t happen often enough to undermine the integrity of elections in the aggregate.
Are you sure about that? After watching 2000 Mules, even with some skepticism about the evidence presented it certainly appears there is an effort to undermine elections in very specific places that were key to the 2020 election. Video evidence is hard to argue with. Can't say if it actually affected the outcome because I don't have all of the evidence to review it, but what was shown should be enough to get people up in arms about election fraud and finding ways to stop it.
I'm not saying there aren't holes...but there is a lot of evidence shown that can't really be disputed. I'm certainly not saying to take it 100% what they say...but it should be investigated further. Why take pictures of the ballot boxes after dropping off a bunch of ballots at 3AM? Why go to so many different ballot boxes one after another after another? Why use gloves and then throw them away right next to the ballot box...all starting right after someone was charged with voting fraud by using their fingerprints? I don't believe the numbers they calculated for sure...but individually the video evidence shown is damning.
The gloves one is easy - some people took Covid as a serious threat to themselves and wore gloves - I saw many people wearing gloves to shop and then throwing them away before getting to their car.
It's also interesting that the map of ballot drop boxes was wholly incorrect in 2000 mules.
Finally, one of the alleged mules was reached out to - and it transpired he was not, in fact, a mule, but was dropping off the ballots for himself, his wife, and adult children, which is entirely within the law.
>Finally, one of the alleged mules was reached out to - and it transpired he was not, in fact, a mule, but was dropping off the ballots for himself, his wife, and adult children, which is entirely within the law.
...and one was reached out to that said she was part of a bigger conspiracy on collecting ballots and dropping them into boxes that weren't being monitored by video. One example doesn't mean it applies to all. How about the guy that dropped off ballots at 3AM, starts to bike away and then goes back to take a picture of the ballot box? That doesn't seem suspicious to you...or the other cases they showed where people were doing this in a way that didn't appear like a "hey everyone look I voted" social media post...
I agree with your basic point, and it certainly applies to both political tribes. However,
> a few isolated instances of innocent people being falsely convicted or forced to plead guilty as proof that such errors are pervasive and undermine the integrity of the justice system
The justice system does not operate on a best effort "good enough" basis. When the "justice" system harms an innocent person, it takes on the exact role of a criminal attacking a victim and does so in all of our names. The victim would have been much better off if the system had not been given power in the first place! Thus, we should insist that the false positive rate for the justice system must remain extremely low, lest it effectively function as the injustice system.
Furthermore, we should insist that the people operating the justice system are held accountable under the same laws that they uphold for everyone else. Otherwise all those lofty ideals come across as quite hollow.
All human systems operate on a “good enough” basis. You can tweak the knobs to trade off false positives versus false negatives in whatever balance is politically viable. But there will always be false positives, and in such a huge country even a systematically low false positive rate will generate many outrage-inducing stories of injustice.
Both election results and criminal verdicts are, and should be seen as, statistical determinations with error bars. All we can control is the size of the error bars, and we can control those only by trading off other things we care about (cost of the system, speed of the system, etc.)
Just focusing on error rates leaves out the details by which false positives are created, which are very important to everyone's individual sense of justice.
For example, one of your examples was "forced to plead guilty". The word "forced" implies something else responsible for the erroneous outcome. Rather than merely saying that was a "false positive" that could be tuned, we should focus on that specific thing responsible - if it was the system's high-stakes dynamics depriving a person of their right to a trial, then those dynamics need to be reformed. If it was a bad faith prosecutor/cops pushing falsities to get a baseless conviction, then they need to be criminally prosecuted for abusing the power of the state to suit their own personal ends.
Everybody knows that bad things do occasionally happen. The outrage isn't merely due to the initial miscarriage of justice, rather it's the nonchalance of the entrenched system shrugging it off rather than reifying and prosecuting its own crimes.
Compared to America, many other democracies manage to get by with far less fraud. For example, election fraud is effectively unheard of in France; the system is so robust that even in very close elections there is never any real drama about recounts or such. For a country that considers democracy to be fundamental to its identity, the US's performance is embarrasing in comparison.
>For example, election fraud is effectively unheard of in France
Which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, and the other way around, American politics is dominated by discourse about election fraud more so than actual evidence of it (this case excluded). On the contrary elections in America are extremely rarely fraudulent[1]
You're actually buying into a politically motivated narrative that tries to characterize American democracy overall as not worth participating in.
It really doesn't. I've voted in French elections and volunteered in American polling places, and the French system visibly has much better safeguards. I am not regurgitating some invented narrative, just believing my "lying eyes".
There is nothing specific about the French system that cannot be replicated.
You need to be registered on the voter list, show up on election day with your passport or ID card, take a bunch of small papers with candidate names on them, go into a privacy booth to put whichever candidate you want in an envelope, then you walk to the center of the room where the election officers check your passport again, you have to sign your name on the list, and the head of the voting office opens access to a big transparent urn where you drop your envelop.
At the end of the day, the count of the votes is done in public.
I don't remember any history of voting fraud in any kind of election.
If you don't start out with one person, one vote then I think you should not be calling yourself a democracy to begin with. Votes from different persons should be exactly equal in weight.
When elections run close enough that the outcome is in doubt for days and hangs on a few counties, it doesn't take much to swing an election either way.
I think the scandal with the last few election rounds in the US was the notion that a foreign nation (Russia) was putting their fingers on the scale, getting away with it, and even succeeding to swing public opinion on a number of topics. And of course Trump managed to declare Putin a genius days before he invaded Kiiv.
Pensylvania, where this latest scandal happeed, was one of the states where the margin between Trump and Biden was razor thin and of course one of several states where the outcome was challenged. Considering that Trump lost that state you might see his point. But then of course there were other places that narrowly swung his way. Just not enough in the end.
With most of the election rounds since the Clinton era there have been states that were too close to call that used obviously flawed equipment and convoluted/weird auditing processes. Where the winning party appears very reluctant to address the serious issues in their state because the outcome suits them. E.g. the drama with voting machines in Florida has been dragging on for decades.
All this stuff just calls into question the outcomes of the major elections in the last decades. This stuff is disgraceful and the fact that both parties are working hard to ensure nothing changes is more disgraceful.
Carter called it almost a decade ago when he said that the US no longer has a functioning democracy. And that was way before a lot of the crazy stuff in more recent years happened.
> a few isolated instances of innocent people being falsely convicted or forced to plead guilty as proof that such errors are pervasive and undermine the integrity of the justice system.
I think you misunderstand the nature of the critique. Granted I’m just one leftist among a few tens, but the systemic prejudice of the justice system is not a few isolated cases, not limited to wrongful convictions, and mostly invisible by design. Most of it is fully legal and unassailable from a legal standpoint. They don’t need to get away with crimes if the law is in their favor.
Take Florida in 2000, population 16 million. Assume no fraud at the presidential level, but even a tiny amount of fraud in local city/county races could have tipped the Presidential count one way or the other. With 6 million votes cast, it seems likely that there were 600 fraudulent votes in the state. TLDR; even a very small amount of fraud can have world changing consequences.
> seems likely that there were 600 fraudulent votes in the state
Likely? I'd buy that there were probably 600 screwed up votes, but that's a lot of fraudulent votes to be cast without detection. The odds are very much against it.
you just said a bunch of stuff in what you probably think is a "fair and balanced" voice, but you didnt offer anything in the way of support. not to mention empirically wrong on the justice system.
If I'm understanding the indictment right, these are elections for low-level judgeships:
>On or about May 19, 2015, Domenick J. Demuro, and others known and unknown to the grand jury, added 40 fraudulent ballots during the primary election in the 39th Ward, 36th Division, on behalf of defendant MICHAEL "OZZIE" MYERS' client candidates running for Judge of the Court of Common Pleas in the First Judicial District of Pennsylvania, and on behalf of defendant MICHAEL "OZZIE" MYERS' preferred candidates for other state and local offices.
(this is just one incident on the list). I don't know what the campaign budget for a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas is, but I suspect it's not that high if they're willing to bribe someone for an extra 40 votes!
Not a statement on any claims of influence but the amount seems about right. "The couple [Zuckerberg and Chan] awarded $400 million to nonprofits for election assistance"
My partner worked as a volunteer election poll worker in 2016. It was her job to take everyone's id and check it against a database to ensure that the person was on the voting rolls. 13 people came in to vote that either voted already at another location or had voted during the period of early voting allowed by our state. This amounted to approximately 1% of the voters that were processed by her that day.
There were no consequences for trying to vote twice, these people were simply turned away. (There was a mechanism for resolving disputes too. Provisional ballots could be given to voters and these would be counted only if the race was close enough for provisional votes to make a difference in which case these votes would be adjudicated before being accepted.)
> There were no consequences for trying to vote twice, these people were simply turned away.
can everyone agree that this is insane? it should be at least a federal crime to attempt to cast a fraudulent ballot in a federal election. surely, everyone here—pro- or anti-voter ID—should agree with this?
I get it, but why spend resources "punishing" a feeble attempt which was immediately turned away? Maybe take their names down and audit the voter logs to make sure those folks haven't actually voted two times, but honestly it's just a waste of time and money to "punish" these folks.
game theory wise if attempting voter fraud goes unpunished, then the optimal thing to do in order to win is to attempt as much voter fraud as possible, as you have nothing to lose by trying.
is this not about as self-evident as it could possibly be?
It was done by the election officials in charge of certifying the count. Read the article and it explains the whole thing. They went to great lengths to keep it "within the bounds" of the existing system, to make it harder to detect.
Because it doesn't address the problem in the article.
These voters were "active voters". They voted in the past like 6 years! Sure, it wasn't them and instead an impersonator but whatever step you want to use to only ensure active voters are on the rolls, one can do as an insider.
Need a signature? Grab the one on file.
Need something mailed back? Just fill it out and drop it off in outgoing of their post office.
Need them to vote? No problem, "they've" been doing that already.
I would assume that, in a large city, those counts are routinely wrong and mismatches are ignored. If I try to count even a few dozen items twice in a row, I’d be lucky to get the same count twice. I can’t imagine poll counts are better.
As an election judge, I'm not sure how different Baltimore is from Philly, but we are not permitted to physically leave the polls if the count (voters_entered - votes_cast = 0) is off by one at the end of the day. There is not slop in the daily counts. A chief election judge could just close out the tallies and lie up the chain, but if there was an audit, they would get caught. (ps - they got caught)
The other scheme was advising voters inside the polling place (illegal) and signing in non-present voters and casting votes on their behalf (also illegal), so the counts would all look legit. They got caught for that too, it sounds like.
Myers was the representative for Pennsylvania’s 1st congressional district and was a Democrat. He served from 1975 to 1980.
Meyers was convicted of bribery in 1980 as part of the ABSCAM investigation and on Oct. 2, 1980, the House of Representatives expelled him in a 376-30 vote.
Each congressman who was approached would be given a large sum of money in exchange for "private immigration bills" to allow foreigners associated with Abdul Enterprises into the country and for building permits and licenses for casinos in Atlantic City, among other investment arrangements.
The FBI recorded each of the money exchanges and, for the first time in American history, surreptitiously videotaped government officials accepting bribes.
I cannot imagine a system more transparent than the one implemented in the country where I come from (and some others as well):
After closing the polls, the paper votes are counted manually (in from of candidates representatives and public in general) by the poll station "vocales".
"Vocales" are citizens (4 in total) randomly selected for each poll, who must operate the poll during the entire day. They must report the results of the counting directly to the central system and sign a certificate, so everything is traceable down to the polling box, and it is very difficult for a candidate to conspire against a fair count. Results are normally available from 1 to 3 hours after closing the polls.
I'm completely against e-voting as I feel that transparency in every election is way more important than efficiency, and I think that it cannot get more transparent than this.
It sounds like this is worse than what I've experienced in multiple US jurisdictions. Any of the random nominees can unilaterally discard my vote without detection. In the US, I physically insert my ballot in a sealed counting machine that the poll workers cannot tamper with without detection. Nobody who has access to my ballot knows which vote is mine, so nobody can censor me without detection.
If the 4 people counting the ballots are chosen truly at random after the voting is done, and they count the votes independently from each other, and there is some punishment (even a mild one, like a moderate fine) for disagreeing with the majority count, why would a counter discard your votes ? they have 0 gaurantess that others would discard the same number of votes so why risk being the minority report and getting punished ? bonus points if there is a reward for agreeing with the majority.
If the randomness gaurantees hold and everybody knows they hold, I have trouble imagining a better system. It has a blockchain-y feel to it, you have no reason to trust any single rando, but a bunch of random non-colluding people all acting consistently is a very strong indicator that they are actually telling the truth.
Yes if they all count everyone, then they have to collude to discard my vote.
The better system is what you described, plus a box that I insert my ballot in that counts it. The electronic machines used in SF are basically the same as an additional random poll worker, with the added benefit that the machine's count can only be manipulated by physically inserting ballots into the machine.
we could even have generated guid on the paper records that you can look up in a database to make sure your vote is being recorded correctly, without exposing any identifying information.
But how do I know that no one is correlating those GUIDs with my personal information? And more important: how do you convince a common citizen that their votes are not being tracked when there's a unique identifier right there?
The way I see it, it's a system that only works in elections when it's not needed. Otherwise, all you need to suppress people's votes is some thugs saying "we have men on the inside - if you vote for someone else, we'll know". It doesn't need to be true, just plausible enough to make people think twice before voting.
For the voter who just wants to vote and leaves it to others to do any auditing, they simply take their ballot into the booth and fill in the bubble next to the option they want to vote for. It looks just like normal optical scan voting except filling the oval with the provided pen reveals a code instead of completely blackening the oval.
For the voter who wants to check later that their vote was included correctly in the total they have to also to note the codes that are revealed when they fill the bubbles.
Voters that wish to check that the have not received a rigged ballot can ask for two ballots, and then pick one of the two at random and reveal all the codes before going into the booth and using the other to actually vote with. They can afterwards look up all the codes on that first valid to verify they are all valid. This actually just shows that the ballot they picked to verify with instead of vote with was not rigged, but someone trying to slip in rigged ballots has a 50/50 chance of being caught each time a voter asks to do such a check.
He was changing on the order of 40 votes at a single precinct for local judgeships in primary elections.. It could have swung things but only for very small races when there's exceptionally low turnout.
Wonder what that small of a change would do for the right location in a Presidential election... Maybe like the year 2000 for Florida where Bush won by just over 500 votes lol.
The plea agreement makes it sound like he was trying to get local judges elected who were using his consulting services -- so he was bribing some small fish with a few thousand dollars to get people elected to local office to get further consulting business. Gross and obviously illegal but not remotely relevant to the broader election security discussion.
It's a small drop in the bucket of corruption that plagues the US election system. It likely has little impact compared to other well known forms of fraud: gerrymandering, lobbying, ads / social media, etc.
The fact these are all known yet nothing is done to change things means that those in power have no incentive to do so, and the public doesn't care or is misinformed enough to not care about it.
> Beren would [...] cast fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates on behalf of voters she knew would not or did not physically appear at the polls. [...] If actual voter turnout was high, Beren would add fewer fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates.
Great, so now this gives extra credence to the "the election was stolen" narrative. Well, I mean it looks like in this case it had actually been stolen for years in that particular ward in Philly.
Hopefully one day we can have paper trails, IDs, registration records matching and so on. We can fly satellites beyond the solar system, but managing voting integrity of a few hundred million people is seemingly unsurmountable problem. Every single election it's an endless tirade of debates afterwards that it was stolen or not stolen and so on. This is stuff that even poorer countries with even more people seem to manage.
>Hopefully one day we can have paper trails, IDs, registration records matching and so on.
You understand this happened right..? The extra votes weren't just ballots stuffed into a ballot box. The numbers of ballots matched the turn out numbers. They specifically used registered voters who they knew wouldn't be voting in this specific election. The issue was the people who check registration, ID, etc were in on the scam.
The numbers match but the people didn't vote. Is that an impossible task to prevent his kind of fraud. It doesn't have to be technological, it could be a mix of human (procedural) and technological.
Did you think about the ramifications of the story at all? The data is totally irrelevant to whether or not this will bolster "stolen election" narratives for 99% of people who hear the story.
These things have an impact even if the data doesn't support the narrative.
Big oof moment there. Where I'm from we use a simple ledger with tear-off serial numbers, and a few steps that would make it quite difficult to commit any worthwhile amount of fraud I think. It's a ton of work for the staff, but they manage to scale up and get it done with basically no notice when required.
Turing complete voting machines should never be part of a fair election. Yes it costs more to count votes that way, but it's also orders of magnitude harder to manipulate the audit trail.
> conspiring to illegally vote in a federal election for orchestrating schemes to fraudulently stuff the ballot boxes for specific Democratic candidates in the 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018 Pennsylvania elections
I'm gonna go ahead and guess 2020 wasn't tacked on for obvious reasons.
The democratic process, other than instances where it can be independently verifiable, like a show of hands in a room, or on a blockchain, is obsolete. It is a pretense for criminals to occupy and corrupt.
You invite coercion and retaliation when ballots aren't secret. Corruption can and does happen in either case, but we don't need to enable other bad behaviors. Transparency and sunshine laws are not a panacea.
I think you misunderstood my point. The democratic process is obsolete, aside from a show of hands. I'm not suggesting that we should therefore go with a show of hands.. I am suggesting that we should understand that voting is now a pretense meant to get us all to go along with whatever corruption.
Verifying an election process is one thing. If you're saying that if we can verify an election, and it can still be corrupted by criminals, so be it. All the more reason to end the farce. Sticking our head in the sand in pretending it's viable is not reasonable, and is perilous.
One of the most effective things we can do to secure the presidential election is do away with the Electoral College.
It's much harder to come up with the millions of votes needed to game the popular vote than it is to come up with a few tens of thousands in two or three key states.
Of course the popular vote would also have the bonus of being more democratic (with no downside, since we no longer need to help slave owners feel a sense of equity).
It didn't really. The co-conspirator was already convicted years ago. It takes years for a federal case to get on the calendar even after it is fully briefed, because the productivity of the justice system is not evaluated or pursued, and because common law is an idiotic system. This is also why it's been possible for the Attorney General of Texas to be under federal indictment for 7 years without ever seeing a courtroom.
Maybe this will come across as yet another Australian telling the Yanks how to suck eggs at this democracy thing (because I'm sure you haven't had enough of us tut-tutting you about your gun laws or health system), but I believe there are several key factors that mitigate against large-scale electoral fraud in Australia.
1. We have a single federal, non-partisan (ie. beauracratic not political) electoral commission, governed by federal laws that ensure that every federal election is managed the same way, uniformly across the federation (doesn't matter what state you are in). The Australian Electoral Commission is truly the jewel in our democracy. Check out https://www.aec.gov.au/
2. We don't use voting machines. Our system (whether via polling booth or postal) is entirely paper based. We have one of the slowest counts in the western world but also one of the most accurate. A slow count isn't an indicator of fraud - it's an indicator that the system is working.
3. We have compulsory voting. As another commenter pointed out, one fraud vector is harvesting real people's votes when those people haven't actually voted. Compulsory voting largely eliminates this vector. It also has the benefit of "centralising" the political compass as most people tend to be fairly reasonable. In optional voting systems, the political distribution is skewed to the edges due to the correlation of motivation-to-vote with more-extreme-political-position. Do you want to encourage centrists and discourage extremists? Implement compulsory voting.
4. We have preferential voting i.e. candidates are ranked. It's not the candidate with the greatest primary vote that wins the parliamentary seat for that electoral area, its the candidate that is "most preferred" i.e. garners the greatest overall preferences compared to other candidates. e.g. in the recent election some government MPs lost their seats even though they had a higher primary vote, because the rest of that electorate preferred the other gal/guy. I may vote Green as my first preference but my 2nd preference is for the Labour person and then the climate-change independent candidate ahead of the incumbent.
But like so many other things in the US, the cultural history of the primacy of the individual's right to vote or not, and the primacy of the states to define their own rules for how elections are run, along with the benefit to the political duopoly of your current system, means the chances of the US implementing any of the above is probably close to zero. Then again what do I know? Literally a month before the Soviet union fell apart I insisted to my then-girlfriend who was Lithuanian, that they would never be free and to stop wishing for fairy tale endings.
Why would you want low-information voters to be forced to vote in a compulsory voting system?
Australian "democracy" is hardly a shining star in the world, given state politics is a corrupt mess with branch stacking (featuring cash in manilla envelopes exchanged in car parks, no really, this happened!) and outright corruption. Then you have both major parties being practically identical (both vehemently voted for anti-encryption and metadata retention bills).
You also made the common misconception that the US is a democracy. It wasn't, never was, and was never founded as one. The US is a republic, and elections are based on state representation and not individual voters. This prevents coastal elites in California and New York from dictating policy for poor farmers in Idaho.
I also find it hard to believe the AEC is not partisan, considering their mainstream bias (the three majors receive preferential treatment).
Preference voting is also terrible, given it severely punishes minor parties, who are rapidly rising in popularity. 1/3rd of Australians don't vote for the corrupt major parties yet they are barely represented.
As for "encouraging centrism", I'm not sure anyone should want that given Australia is a basketcase of mass surveillance, war crimes (indiscriminate slaying of civilians in Afghanistan) and violating UN Human Rights guidelines they are a signatory to (they prevented citizens from leaving the country). Such a shining star for democracy and centrism, blasting away Afghanistani civilians and covering it up. Sounds amazing!
Do you really think that most US voters are high-information voters? No. But they are high-motivation voters. Again, this hits at the fundamental difference - one voting system is about the overall stability of the society, in the other its about the primacy of the individual in (almost) all things. Let me ask - in the US, does the government have a duty to govern for/on-behalf-of non-voters?
WIth respect to party branch stacking, you're conflating the internal selection of candidates within a party, to the external election among candidates for an electoral seat. Please refer to the context of this article that we're all commenting on. I stand by my characterisation of Australian electoral system as one of the least corrupt in terms of the way the elections are run (which is what we - or at least I - are talking about).
As for your self-proclaimed "belief" that AEC is partisan ("the three majors receive preferential treatment"), please provide a citation for ANY kind of evidence that is true.
While preferential voting is not the same as proportional representation, the recent federal election here shows that people are less wedded to their blue/red inherited voting "teams" than ever before, with the greatest ever election to parliament of independent candidates and Greens, and the Greens now holding the balance of power in the Senate.
You may well look at Australia and see a "basketcase". I look at the US and see far worse than that. Is Australia perfect? Clearly not. I vote Green and I agree that most of what you've cited as issues, are indeed that. But my kids aren't more likely to die from gunshot wounds. A person won't die just because they can't afford private health insurance. As for "blasting away Afghanistani civilians" - there is a very public court case right now underway against the (highly decorated) soldier I assume you're referring to. Meanwhile, to the best of my knowledge, not a single individual at any level responsible for the "Collateral Murder" incident has been punished. I won't hold my breath.
How can you claim elections are free and fair if the parties that win every election are subject to massive corruption including cash bribes in car parks? By the way, this is NOT an isolated incident or even an isolated area.
I imagine if Biden or Trump was stacking state electors or state nominations with shills by using cash-stuffed manila envelopes you would've mentioned that in your original post -- why do you not care about this corruption in your own country?
The proliferation of cash payments in envelopes to rig selections seems to disqualify Australia from the title of "not corrupt" elections. Again, not isolated.
As for the AEC, they have a long history of targeting people in rules that effectively prevent them voting [1]. Wow, so democratic! Not to mention the privacy breaches, or the audit that said they lied to the public repeatedly about cybersecurity. Wow, AEC elections are so secure! [2] [3]
Let's look at a quote: "Insufficient attention was paid to ensuring the AEC could identify whether the system had been compromised," Mr Hehir said.
Whoops. They didn't even have the capability to know whether the election was compromised, then they lied about it.
>But my kids aren't more likely to die from gunshot wounds
Gun homicides have been declining for 40 years in the US. Increased gun sales are correlated with decreased gun homicides. It seems like you're extrapolating data from media sources rather than looking at crime statistics?
>A person won't die just because they can't afford private health insurance
This is pretty much a lie. Medicaid ($672bn yearly budget) provides coverage to those on low or no incomes. Not to mention those "bill shock" images you've no doubt been manipulated by are highly misleading. People don't pay those figures. Never. Hospitals negotiate 90% or higher discounts for those who aren't insured. Go read personal finance subreddits for yourself to confirm.
>Meanwhile, to the best of my knowledge, not a single individual at any level responsible for the "Collateral Murder" incident has been punished
Australia is covering up the war crimes perpetrated by the military. The only reason it was ever public was because of leaks. The US military (as warmongering as it is) felt the Australian military had a bloodthirsty reputation.
You are not understanding what the "stuffed envelopes" was about. Federal elections are comprised of the people voting for candidates for specific electoral "seats" (geo regions equating to a seat in parliament). Some candidates are independents, others are party candidates.
What you are referring to relates to the way parties select their own candidates for a given seat. Rules for such things are entirely party issues and nothing to do with either the federal election itself, nor with the AEC. Some parties allow for "higher-ups" to veto the selection of party branch members, or to carry greater weight. There's typically horse-trading as factions of parties jockey for position to become "the" candidate for a given seat. Yes, branch stacking (with shill party members) happens. At the end of the day, they still have to present a candidate that the electorate finds palatable. E.g. in the recent federal election, the Labor party "parachuted" a high-profile candidate into a seat against the wishes of the local branch. That candidate was soundly beaten - contra to the trend in adjoining seats and the rest of the country - precisely because of those sort of shenanigans.
You're clearly a troll and I know I'm not going to convince you of anything, however there are others reading this and they deserve respect. Hence my responses.
Yes. The AEC is not perfect. Never claimed it was. But as far as these kind of institutions go, it's pretty damn good, and you could argue prima facie that it's leagues better than what you've got in the USA.
You've got to be kidding about the gun deaths. Yes, overall homicides may be down, yet active shooter events at schools are up. In what other country not actively at war or suffering a terrorist insurgency would anyone need a school desk like this? https://www.defendourchildren.org/safe-space-security-desk
Answer: only the USA.
I'm going to stop now but if your aim is to convince people you're a reasonable, good-faith interlocutor, you have singularly failed.
> Medicaid ($672bn yearly budget) provides coverage to those on low or no incomes
Only with the ACA expansion, which 12 states have declined, does Medicaid cover non-disabled, non-pregnant, childless adults, and even with children may not cover them except at a very low income (exact eligibility rules vary by state, income-based eligibility for adults with children can be as low as 17% of the federal poverty level.)
Best option is paper ballots that are machine-readable and human-readable.
Cryptography doesn't help; what you need are processes which make fraud difficult (for instance, observers with line of site to all ballot boxes from when voting starts until they're counted; cross-checking counts of blank, spoiled, and voted ballot papers before & after voting, translucent ballot boxes that are clearly empty at the start of election day, etc.,)
I'm not sure it even matters how difficult fraud is. Conspiracy theorists will see what they want to see, especially when primed by their candidate to assume fraud in the case of a loss.
Accurate Voting seems like the most viable use case for triple entry accounting, you know that thing that got created in 2009 by that mysterious Satoshi guy and everyone hates it now and thinks it’s a Ponzi scheme- totally legitimate use case here with voting and the only real world scenario I know of where the solution hasn’t located the problem yet.
Exit polls are also an important tool. They show routine, systematic fraud in US elections, starting with the introduction of electronic voting, mostly in areas without paper trails. I'll try to keep this non-partisan, but there are plenty of independent peer-reviewed papers showing clear evidence of count tampering, and they all implicate the same party.
Hint: It's not the party that keeps proposing paper ballot mandates at the federal level.
This is definitely going to be used as proof that Trump won in a landslide in 2020 and all of the poll watchers nationwide are in the (((Democrats))) pockets.
> some straightforward cryptographic scheme
Anybody who designs cryptographic systems is LOLing right now.
The contradiction at the heart of the problem with cryptographically verifiable elections is that, if you make it possible for a voter to prove to others how they voted, you make it possible for their vote to be bought or coerced.
There are zero-knowledge cryptographic constructions that may theoretically allow you to prove things to a voter without allowing them to prove it to others. But doing this in practice with voters who aren’t cryptographers, and whose personal devices get hacked and stolen, has proved to be a difficult problem.
Your mention of personal devices getting hacked and stolen suggests you are only thinking of cryptographic voting systems that use electronic devices for the cryptographic interaction with the voter.
There are paper-based cryptographic systems for end-to-end verifiable elections. There are no personal devices to hack or steal in such systems.
From the Helios paper: “With Helios, we do not attempt to solve the coercion problem. Rather, we posit that a number of settings—student government, local clubs, online groups such as open-source software communities, and others—do not suffer from nearly the same coercion risk as high-stakes government elections. Yet these groups still need voter secrecy and trustworthy election results, properties they cannot currently achieve short of an in-person, physically observable and well orchestrated election, which is often not a possibility. We produced Helios for exactly these groups with low-coercion elections.”
Please state requirements before elements of a solution.
The secret ballot, also known as the Australian ballot, is a voting method in which a voter's identity in an election or a referendum is anonymous. This forestalls attempts to influence the voter by intimidation, blackmailing, and potential vote buying. This system is one means of achieving the goal of political privacy.
> Anybody who designs cryptographic systems is LOLing right now.
Ron Rivest and David Chaum are rather well known designers of cryptographic systems, and I don't think they would LOL at crytographic voting schemes considering that they have designed one [1].
Nixon showed us it can and does go all the way to the top. "All the President's Men" is worth a watch to see how cheap it is to buy the country. The Committee to Reelect the President brought the Democratic frontrunner to tears in public, and eliminated him from the election, with a measly $3,000,000. Power can be bought at a cheap discount, and only "democratic norms" seem to protect us from this behavior most of the time.
Er, isn't it the other way around? Voter fraud is just individuals cheating on a small scale like "helping" grandma with her mail-in ballot, but election fraud entails broad schemes and conspiracies like the DOJ article describes.
So all this time, "election fraud" is entirely plausible but we've been building a strawman around "voter fraud" and saying that it doesn't happen? What level of bad faith debating is this?
Certain politicians use the myth of widespread voter fraud to push targeted disenfranchising policies like voter ID requirements and mail-in voting restrictions. Conflating individual voter crimes that might supposedly be stopped by these laws, with election official crimes that have nothing to do with them, would be bad faith debating. So it’s important to be clear about this distinction.
That's a fair point. Though I would argue that improving controls around voters make it easier to detect election fraud. If you can tie each vote to a real person, it becomes very difficult to add an arbitrary number of anonymous votes to a candidate, like how Michael “Ozzie” Myers was doing.
If we're looking at it from a cost-benefit perspective, the ability to ensure that election fraud isn't happening (which disenfranchises all voters) is more important than the downsides of extra voter requirements (which may disenfranchise a much smaller number of voters).
We already have a public list of people who voted. In order for a corrupt election official to undetectably add a large number of votes, they may need to add people to that list (perhaps registered voters who didn’t vote). Election transparency measures and audits might make that harder; voter restrictions do not.
Huh, the DoJ article didn't make it clear that they were using existing identities for the padded votes, only that they were incrementing tallies. From the way it is written, it sounds like they don't need any existing identities at all. Do you believe it impossible to accomplish what Michael Myers did without re-using existing identities?
I’m not sure of the details, but it seems in this case small numbers of votes were added in down-ballot contests, where there were likely sufficiently many voters who would have voted in the election but not in those contests.
As a non-American what's wrong with asking for voter ID? A particular party pushing for open border and waving voter ID requirement seems like a ploy to influence the election. I am open to hear how people can justify both of these policies at at the same time.
Nobody is pushing for an "open border" and the absence of a voter ID leading to fraud is just a dumb conspiracy theory promoted by people that are ignorant of how elections actually work.
All voters need to be registered in the first place at which point they verify your identify, your ability to legally cast a ballot, and your address (falsely registering is a felony in most jurisdictions). On voting day, you show up to the correct precinct and tell the administrator your name, they typically verify that your address is correct and then you can cast a ballot. Casting a fraudulent ballot is also a felony.
So the theory is what? That all of these illegal immigrants are going to register to vote? They wouldn't be allowed to register as non-citizens and falsely attesting is a crime. They would show up on election day and cast a ballot under their own name? They're not registered, so their votes wouldn't be counted. That they're going to imitate an actual voter on election day? Instant felony which is easily caught if the real voter shows up at any point to cast their own ballot. That they're going to intercept the mail-in ballots somehow? Again, when real voters figure out their ballots are missing but votes are recorded in their name, the fakes would be immediately found out.
When the states advocating for voting IDs have a long history of race-based voter suppression, analysis shows the ID mandates have race-based impacts that would suppress votes, and there isn't an actual "attack surface" that would be solved with voting IDs, it's clear it's just a transparent attempt to suppress votes.
Not everyone has ID that meets the requirements laid out by voter ID proposals, and sometimes getting those IDs can be extremely expensive. Defenders like to say that the ID is free but when you point out the cost of getting birth certificates and proof of name change (common in marriage) they disappear quick.
And if it can't be shown that the number of people prevented from voting is fewer than the number of fraudulent votes, the policy is bad and should not be pursued.
Opponents of voter ID never seem to address the fact that Americans need a valid drivers license or state ID to do virtually anything as an adult in America. Including, but not at all limited to:
- Opening/accessing a bank account
- Driving a vehicle
- Requesting government assistance
- Renting or buying a home
- Getting married
- Buying tobacco/alcohol/cannabis
- Registering children for school
- Getting a hotel room
- Getting a cell phone
Where are these mythical minorities who want to participate in absolutely nothing else in American life except for voting?
Plenty of people haven't done any of those things in years. I don't think my grandmother had any reason to show id during her last few decades of life, and why should a possibly expired id be cause to prevent her from voting?
This is addressed elsewhere in the discussion. Access to ID is inequitable. So you need to either be willing to fund the solutions to that problem, or at least show that the supposed voter fraud problem is worse than the ID inequity problem, and neither has happened.
Election fraud is exactly what Donald Trump and his conspirators are about to be dragged over the coals for by the Jan 6 committee. He begged the GA SecState to cook the election in his favor. Basically the exact thing Myers was caught and convicted of in this story.
Trump made the accusation multiple times going back even to 2016 that millions of illegal votes were cast against him. The details of his allegation were never made clear. He convened a Congressional committee with full subpoena power to investigate and after a little over a year they disbanded having issued no findings nor held a single public hearing. There is certainly _some_ voter fraud that happens all the time, but it's not widespread, not coordinated and has never been plausibly suspected of tilting any election.
You don't need to prove voter fraud. If you show that ballots were counted that should not have, you should prevail.
For example if under law there needs to be a signature match on the envelope, but such matches were not done, or done to such a low standard that they are useless. Then technically you should be able to have those ballots thrown out. Since a signature on the envelope is a big part of verifying whether the ballot was filled out by the person it belonged to.
This was the contention that Trump was arguing about. Whether the election rules were followed. In the end, they pretty much counted everything. And no judge wanted to overturn that. So that pretty much summarized last US election.
There was a result. They recounted the ballots. And no judge wanted to step in to question it. Procedure was followed.
From an outsiders perspective, or even from the perspective of someone that uses some critical thinking. The procedure is flawed. There are multiple opportunities to cheat, by either cheating at the source, stuffing envelopes and faking signatures. Or cheating along the path. By swapping out the ballots after the leave the envelopes and before they get to the machines doing the counting.
It seems to me that both were possible. The extra long time it took to count ballots in select cities, made it more likely.
It "seems"? There are observers and safeguards at every step. There were also 65 separate lawsuits filed around the country related to the 2020 presidential election where a judge was presented with the best evidence available that mistakes had happened (there were zero cases actually alleging fraud) and every case was tossed for failing to meet basic standards.
I just don't think voting by mail can be done securely the way they did it.
Sorry still have doubts about the integrity of your election.
Somehow Biden out performed Obama with Black Americans in Detroit, who apparently came out and voted in record numbers for him. Yeah, I just don't believe it.
81 million votes. The most popular president ever. Yet the same guy couldn't get 10k views on some of his youtube videos. Yet had problems winning his own party. Somehow won the fewest counties ever, yet had the most votes ever. Delayed counting, strange ballot drop offs in the middle of the night, reversals in counts by the morning.
I just don't believe it. I'm not an American. This is just my opinion. Election looked Soviet tiered.
You know, judges existed in Communist countries too. Good luck getting anywhere with any of them by claiming the elections were fake. They obviously were. The judicial system is a rubber stamp for the system, 99% of the time. The fact that none of those appeals went anywhere should be more of a tip off than anything.
I mean you're wrong. We've been doing mail in ballots for decades. It's what the entire military uses. It's been under a microscope for the last 20 years of republican election conspiracy mongering and no one has found a flaw. Like I posted earlier, a Congressional committee spent a year looking for wrong votes (fraud or errors) and found absolutely nothing.
And you're also underestimating how many people feel utter existential dread at the prospect of another Trump term. He was if not the worst president in our history, he was assuredly the worst person to be president. We were only spared a worse outcome because he is so incredibly inept and stupid. I would vote for the slumped husk of Jimmy Carter if he ran against Trump.
Why yes, that is a strawman. I know a bunch of people who think that voter fraud is rare. Clearly it's not zero, because a few people get caught double voting every year.
It's not that there was no fraud in the 2020 election; just that there was not enough for even Republican county and state officials and Trump-appointed judges to even consider overturning the results ;)
Location data is nowhere near fine-grained enough to determine if an individual has gone to a ballot dropbox vs. the coffee shop next to it. And dropboxes are intentionally placed in convenient high-traffic areas. I would be very suspicious of these fraud claims just on how unreliable the data naturally is.
Besides, if you really wanted to rig elections with mail ballots, it's way more effective to throw away ballots than to stuff them.
The qualification was device ids that went to 10+ dropboxes, comparing the routes and stops, not the location point by itself.
For your explanation to be valid they would have to have stopped at 10 specific locations each by a dropbox. Those devices did those routes 30~ times each on avg.
Those routes include exiting off of highways, going down specific streets, then going to the next dropbox in a specific area. All at 3-5am when businesses were closed.
edit: to downvoters, please discuss the facts of the location analysis or voice what you're in disagreement about.
I haven't seen the video myself, but I'm interested in knowing more. Can you point to the timestamp where it makes these claims and how the analysis was conducted? Maybe there's something I'm missing.
You'd have to watch the full video in order for us to discuss it properly, you seem to be missing key details. However it is only available paid on demand (2000 mules dot com), not on a free streaming service.
The location analysis is explained throughout the film, but it's mainly after the intro and before going into the state security camera footage / general discussions.
The main point I was making it the location path and frequency of dropbox points is how they filtered people out. They only took people that went from one dropbox location to another dropbox location, at least 10 times. Then they analyzed how many times those devices went on those routes and how many devices met that criteria in total.
I'm skeptical of that site, without reviewing any of the details, simply because it said "Loader %" instead of e.g. "Loading 10%" when loading the content.
I don't see that this particular incident is proof of incidents elsewhere either.
However, pretending that this person is the only person to figure out how to do this is extremely naive. Especially with how long it took to catch him. I don't see why there's anything special about Philadelphia that would make this behavior restricted to that location.
Read the article, the type of fraud committed here has nothing to do with the allegations made about the 2020 election being “hacked.”
Also notice this guy was caught, the 2020 elections would have needed to involve a similar fraud being committed in every state and city (as similar voting trends were observed everywhere despite changes in types of voting or counting machines between different states).
Also when the ballots for the 2020 election were hand counted, the counts matched.
I don't see this as a partisan issue. The same motivations exist for anyone in their position to commit fraud. I doubt people of one political tribe are any more immune to them than the those of another. Perhaps it is more likely for fraud to occur from a minority party given they are less likely to succeed without it.
It becomes a partisan issue when one party conflates the two in order to write and pass laws to disenfranchise voters under the false pretense of securing elections while people parrot their (erroneous) factoids and talking points.
>The Brennan Center summarized almost 200 errors in election machines from 2002 to 2008, many of which happened repeatedly in different jurisdictions, which had no clearinghouse to learn from each other.
The analysis done from Brennan gives me opposite of hope if you read everything published by them.
The movie is another attempt to use circumstantial evidence
without actually having a proper investigation. Then all the Republicans angry that Trump didn't win will go to forums, like this one, and say "watch 2000 mules" without providing any details because when Trump lost they didn't get what they wanted and can't deal with it.
"Factchecks" are nothing more than left wing propaganda opinion articles, they offer little to nothing of value. The "circumstantial" evidence is damning and they STILL refuse to investigate it.
Circumstantial evidence is never daming by it's own definition, especially in a court of law and many claims were investigated by the Barr. They also performed recounts in multiple locations even those controlled by Republicans.
You have no proof and I consider it treason to continue to promote lies about election fraud as it attacks democracy.
Did Reuters suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story?
The Russian interference in the 2016 election did occur according the Muller report.
"When it comes to 'fact checkers', not even they are honest either and like the media are as manipulative as the actual disinformation campaigns"
How do you know they are equally manipulative? Considering the amount of time some news organizations have been around and the number or stories vs the semi recent introduction of bots
So they arrested and held in prison tons of people from Jan6 and held them in prison for over a year based on cell tracking data. I am sure you were objecting to that.
Luckily, Justice Department and FBI will likely have no incentives for investigating that given how they actively positioned themselves in the political debate. So we may never find out.
Oh there are plenty of evidences. There were even before the election. There were postal officials who were destroying ballots in one state that was well reported. We just decided to look the other way.
Why did you choose to look the other way? Pretty amazing that you'd openly admit to having proof of this and not back it up. We had a presidential candidate go to court over this and not present any evidence of this wide-scale election fraud nor would they even admit to this massive fraud in a court of law.
The federal government isn't the only organization investigating election fraud. For instance, Abbott (The Republican governor of Texas) launched his own investigation. It found evidence of voter fraud outside of Texas. Apparently, one Republican attempted to vote twice. No outcomes were affected.
Of course, all 50 states have elections offices that are also tasked with looking for internal fraud. Those offices are staffed by Republican appointees in many of the swing states Trump is complaining so bitterly about. Collectively, they came up with nothing.
Since the Democrats don't control many of the organizations that are supposedly covering up massive election fraud, who do you think is responsible?
Whoever this group is, any plausible conspiracy theory will need to include Democrats, old-school Republicans, and Republicans that are endorsed by Trump.
There is no evidence of fraud because our institutions are unwilling to investigate allegations of fraud. If you ask why they aren't willing to investigate fraud, there's an excuse for that. Then, any attempt to audit or secure the election process is shot down with another excuse. Then you start to wonder, how long has this been happening for? No wonder there is zero confidence in this system - it's all corrupt. Then they gaslight people into thinking that the mere discussion of fraud in public is causing people to lose confidence in our democracy. Amazing times we live in.
Actually, there's plenty of evidence of fraud. This article is an announcement of the prosecution of some of it.
What's lacking is evidence of widespread fraud sufficiently coordinated and systemic to sway the results of a national Presidential election, which we aren't seeing because the system is already set up to monitor for it. 2020 wasn't the US's first time to the election roe-day-oh, and there's been 200 years of infrastructure put in place to detect and punish fraud, malfeasance, and attempts to infringe, dilute, or steal people's right to vote. That's why the claims one candidate made are extraordinary (and they failed to pass a smell test, much less bring actionable claims or evidence that would withstand legal scrutiny).
Most claims we see bandied about online are so risibly ignorant of the existing process that anyone with basic knowledge of how elections work does not take them seriously. They're equivalent in credibility and grasp of the system's machinery itself to saying foreign agents can compromise your computer by infiltrating the 1-bit.
To be clear: I'm excited that people are interested in the process (welcome to the club! There are literally t-shirts!). But I'm disheartened how many people come to the conversation thinking they already know how it works when, no, they don't; like many large and old systems, it has non-obvious quirks and Chesterton's Fences, and common sense doesn't always match up with the how or why of the system. Screaming "fraud" every time one sees something one doesn't understand isn't how one learns; it's how one guarantees continuation of ignorance.
For some reason progressives are against voter ID laws. I've said that before and will say it again: Most of EU requires ID to vote. I will support Republicans that want to do this. It is sad to bring EU in the picture to convince progressives but it is a magic word that somehow brings logic and reason. We shouldn't have to say "They do it in EU, so it must be good".
People have stopped thinking for themselves. Anything to improve integrity of election is good. Want to put 4k cameras during vote counting process? I'll vote for that. More transparency and integrity, not less. I really don't give a shit which party wants to propel this.
> For some reason progressives are against voter ID laws. I've said that before and will say it again: Most of EU requires ID to vote. I will support Republicans that want to do this. It is sad to bring EU in the picture to convince progressives but it is a magic word that somehow brings logic and reason. We shouldn't have to say "They do it in EU, so it must be good".
There are several key differences between the US and the EU.
The most notable difference is that there is no national ID card like there is in Europe. This means that what qualifies as a valid ID is up to the states, and they can (and do!) play games with what is valid. For most people, the de facto ID standard is a driver's license, but if you physically can't meet the standards for one, well... maybe you can get a state-issued photo ID. Just show up to your county courthouse between the hours of 11 and 1 on any third Thursday of a month and you can get one [1]. That's easy, right?
Oh, and it'll cost you $50 (actual costs vary from state to state). And requiring voters to spend $50 to get an ID that lets them vote is totally not going to be in violation of the 24th Amendment (that bans poll taxes).
The second aspect that's rather key is the US has a sordid history of using gimmicks to prevent the wrong sort of people from voting. It's not unreasonable to suggest that voter ID laws are intended to be a more modern variant of historical tricks like literacy tests--and a few of them have been struck down because the legislators passing them have admitted that they were intended to prevent people from voting.
A final thing I'll bring up is this: to get my photo ID, I basically need to show up to the appropriate state office with something like a birth certificate and something that has my current address. Why is it that showing up to vote with this same information is somehow insufficiently secure to allow me to vote?
[1] This example is admittedly hyperbole, but there are some states where getting these sorts of cards are rather closer to this difficulty than I'm comfortable with. Especially in areas that were historically barred from voting because they're mostly the wrong sort of the people.
> Oh, and it'll cost you $50 (actual costs vary from state to state). And requiring voters to spend $50 to get an ID that lets them vote is totally not going to be in violation of the 24th Amendment (that bans poll taxes).
That's why all states with voter id laws also have to offer a free "walking" id.
> A final thing I'll bring up is this: to get my photo ID, I basically need to show up to the appropriate state office with something like a birth certificate and something that has my current address. Why is it that showing up to vote with this same information is somehow insufficiently secure to allow me to vote?
Some states let people use student ID's, like the thing the AV club prints in the basement. Birth certificate, social security card and a current bill should be enough in my opinion, but anti voter id folks would go nuts if you said you had to bring all those to vote.
I replaced one in 2019 and had to make an appointment at the Social Security Office days ahead of a time and wait 2 hours there in person. The web form existed, but I wasn't eligible.
Also? It's an unlaminated paper card (you're not allowed to laminate it), and you theoretically get a limited number of them before they'll stop replacing them. My feeling about social security cards is that you should keep them in a safe deposit box and never on your person. The idea of needing one to vote is ludicrous to me.
The only reason I needed one was to prove my employability in the face of a lapsed passport. I can’t remember the last time I used it for anything and the irs suggests you don’t even need one (ridiculously).
> For some reason progressives are against voter ID laws.
It’s a barrier preventing citizens from exercising constitutional rights. The need isn’t clearly demonstrated to justify the restriction.
Voter ID laws have different outcomes based on economic status. It’s especially difficult for poor people to exercise their rights.
> People have stopped thinking for themselves.
Or maybe someone else thought of something you haven’t. None of us can discover everything individually. Almost everything you know is someone else thinking for you.
I think that the progressive default argument on this topic is pretty transparent BS. If it's too hard for some people to get an ID, make it easier for everyone to get an ID. Don't open up elections to an obvious fraud vector.
The Republicans aren't interested in ensuring IDs are easy & free to get as part of their voter ID bills, because it defeats the purpose of why they're so enthusiastic for this to begin with. Democrats don't trust anything short of very concrete and explicit measures in that regard, for fear that the rug will be pulled later, similar to polling-place distribution/availability issues in some places.
Standard, universal, free federal IDs are an obvious solution to this that would also solve a shitload of other problems and irritations that come with living in this country, but they're opposed by both sides—more by the Republicans, for a mix of general don't-trust-the-government and religious reasons (to international readers: yes, seriously), but also by many Democrats (largely over a history of absolutely crazy-to-read-about, but very much real, police surveillance and harassment programs targeting civil rights activists).
Republicans do offer free IDs in every state where they mandate IDs for voting. It may not always be the easiest to get since you have to go to the DMV though. Do you think Democrats would be willing to have voter ID laws if the post office offered free IDs?
> Do you think Democrats would be willing to have voter ID laws if the post office offered free IDs?
Possibly. The Democrats' motivations aren't enabling voter fraud—they're driven by concern that these laws will disadvantage them at the polls for non-fraud-related reasons, and probably to some degree by not wanting to give the Republicans a "win" over something they see as political grandstanding without an actual, realized-in-the-world problem that it's addressing. If you can address enough of one or both of those, they'd probably at least not fight it very hard, if not support it.
[EDIT] I love that I have no idea which sort of person I've upset enough to get two downvotes on this. I truly have no clue. Seemed like a very neutral observation, to me, but I guess not.
> No because proximity to a Post Office isn't a reasonable criteria for suppressing a persons right to vote.
In rural areas, one often has to travel a long distance to reach a post office or DMV. In urban or suburban areas, while the distance may vary, on average it is significantly less.
So, if requiring someone to go to a government office to receive ID to vote suppresses the vote of people who live far away from that office, you'd expect that to produce more voter suppression in rural areas than in urban or suburban areas. But, since rural areas tend to skew Republican and urban areas tend to skew Democratic (with suburban areas being more mixed/swinging), this would seem to suppress Republican voters much more than Democratic ones.
Does it follow therefore that Republicans would be primarily suppressing the vote of their own voters? If that's true, why should Democrats be upset about such a self-inflicted wound on their political opponents?
Requiring Voter ID enables suppression. Specifically by making it harder for some people to vote. Consider the example of the polling station bus being targeted. Those people could have complied but because of their race were prevented.
> Consider the example of the polling station bus being targeted. Those people could have complied but because of their race were prevented.
I take it you are talking about the incident you mentioned in another comment, in Louisville, Georgia, in 2018, in which African-American senior citizens got on a bus to take them to an early voting center, and then told to get off the bus and it didn't take them there? (Did they end up voting in that election? Did the organisers find another way to get them to the polls?)
I don't fully understood what happened in that case, but from what I've read of it, it sounds like the bus was owned by the county, and someone objected to using a county-owned bus for a trip organised by a political advocacy group which was de facto running a GOTV operation for a single political party, and that led to the bus trip being cancelled at the very last minute.
That rule – (implicitly or explicitly) partisan political groups can't use county-owned resources at election time – in itself doesn't seem inherently unreasonable. Possibly it was being enforced in a biased way, but a single incident by itself can't demonstrate bias in the application of a rule. (And even if you had evidence that Jefferson County was indeed applying that rule in a biased manner, how do you determine whether that bias is racial or political?) So, I really don't think this particular incident is a clearcut example of "voter suppression".
The retirement home belongs to the county. I see no claim the van does. I don’t know the details either but I can’t find any evidence to support your claims.
That is one example of literally dozens on that page alone. Many of them more concrete, with convictions.
> The retirement home belongs to the county. I see no claim the van does.
So, yes, having read some more, it sounds like bus in question belonged to the activist group rather than the county.
Still, what I don't quite understand here is – they got on the bus, did someone from the county force them to get off the bus? Ask them nicely? Threaten them with something if they didn't? Exactly what happened is rather unclear.
> I don’t know the details either but I can’t find any evidence to support your claims
That's the thing – neither of us really knows what happened at that event. I was just speculating based on incomplete knowledge – much as you are. I'm not aware of any clear, detailed and independent account of what actually happened. But, you seem to be citing this as an example of a pattern without knowing much about what really happened–which is a rather questionable approach.
> That is one example of literally dozens on that page alone. Many of them more concrete, with convictions.
I'm reading that Wikipedia page, who has a conviction for voter suppression?
* In 2006, in Wisconsin, four Democratic campaign workers, from John Kerry's presidential campaign, were convicted of slashing tires of Republican Party vehicles to stop them from driving voters and poll workers to the polls in the 2004 election, and sentenced to 4-6 months jail
* In 2011, in Maryland, a Republican campaign manager was sentenced, albeit to no actual jail time (probation, community service, home detention, and a suspended sentence), for having placed fake calls to Democratic voters (the majority of whom were African-American) to try to trick them into not voting in the 2010 Maryland gubernatorial election. Despite this tactic, the Republican candidate still lost by 10 points.
Those are the only two mentions I can find on that page of anyone actually being convicted of voter suppression (and in neither case changing the outcome of the election). Is there something else I'm missing, or when you speak of "convictions" do you only mean those two cases?
I have continually provided you with clear true facts that you either misinterpreted or ignored. With further evidence that you drew incorrect conclusions you then doubled down on your initial unfounded position.
I am left with no choice but to conclude that you have nothing constructive to provide to this conversation.
Is your point that the conviction doesn’t literally say “voter suppression”? If so you don’t understand how the US legal system works either.
No, my point is two convictions for voter suppression are insufficient to tell us whether it is a serious problem in practice, just as two convictions for voter fraud (which you can also find) would be insufficient to tell us whether voter fraud is a serious problem in practice - yet you pointed to those two convictions as support for your view that voter suppression is a serious contemporary problem.
Furthermore, you clearly believe that one side of US politics is much more guilty of contemporary voter suppression than the other, yet the convictions you point to are 50-50 (1 Republican case, 1 Democratic) - and the Democratic case involved more defendants (4 vs 1), and a greater punishment (actual jail time vs no jail time). I think your belief may well have some degree of truth to it, but the evidence you point to in supporting it is rather poor.
I think you read something that you interpret as supporting your beliefs, and don’t stop to think about how well it actually does. And when someone else points out the poor quality of your argument, your response is to attack them rather than consider whether they actually have a valid point.
>No because proximity to a Post Office isn't a reasonable criteria for suppressing a persons right to vote.
How does Europe do it? Do you believe the way they do it suppresses a person's right to vote? If we did it the same way as Europe would you be fine with ID laws in the US?
If requiring an ID is suppressing voting rights then requiring and ID and a background check (that you may even have to pay for) to purchase a gun is a violation of rights. Do you support removing the background check cost and ID requirement? If not then I don't really care if you think requiring an ID is suppressing voting since you support suppressing other rights with ID requirements.
>Especially because
There are two hardships currently
1. You have to prove you are who you say you are.
2. You have to wait in the DMV
For #1 this is a requirement in Europe as far as I know. I haven't seen anybody saying that suppresses votes. You may be the first?
For #2 that is easy to solve by allowing ID services at additional places like the post office. I would be open to more than just the post office and DMVs, I just used the post office because they already have passport services so it is easy to add other IDs.
> How does Europe do it? Do you believe the way they do it suppresses a person's right to vote?
Not sure, I assume lots of ways? Europe is a whole continent full of countries that have a long history of disagreement. I wouldn't be surprised to learn some of them do suppress votes.
> If we did it the same way as Europe would you be fine with ID laws in the US?
"Europe" is not itself a compelling reason for me to do anything so, no.
2A WARNING. My words relate to my interpretation of the Second Amendment and do not indicate support.
> If requiring an ID is suppressing voting rights then requiring and ID and a background check (that you may even have to pay for) to purchase a gun is a violation of rights.
I think the Second Amendment says I can call Boeing and buy an F/A-18 Super Hornet, with missiles. So yes, I think asking for a background check or a name or literally anything other than "paper or plastic?" is a violation of my Second Amendment rights.
> Do you support removing the background check cost and ID requirement?
I think it is unconstitutional to impose a background check on the purchase of any weapon of war.
> If not then I don't really care if you think requiring an ID is suppressing voting since you support suppressing other rights with ID requirements.
Please don't put words in my mouth. Let's keep this civil.
> There are two hardships currently
You forgot "you have to actually get to the place to get the ID". This may not be the DMV but it may be deliberately chosen to reduce your personal likelihood to try. You may be harassed on the way. The reasons for this may be racial, religious, or political. There is a long, established history of this behavior in the United States specifically. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite... for inspiration.
You are still overlooking the part where the voter ID doesn't actually do anything useful. Making it easier to get doesn't change the fact that it provides no meaningful benefit while also infringing constitutional rights.
>Not sure, I assume lots of ways? Europe is a whole continent full of countries that have a long history of disagreement. I wouldn't be surprised to learn some of them do suppress votes.
>"Europe" is not itself a compelling reason for me to do anything so, no.
I didn't mean to imply you would support something just because Europe does it. Many people who oppose voter ID laws are fine with Europe's laws. I don't actually know how European countries do it, but since nobody really thinks it violates rights I would be fine doing it however they do it.
If some of them may violate rights then presumably some don't? If that is the case then it seems like it is possible to implement voter ID laws without suppressing rights? What would it take for you to support voter ID laws that don't suppress rights?
>I think the Second Amendment it says I can call Boeing and buy a F/A 18 Super Hornet, with missiles. So yes, I think asking for a background check or a name or literally anything other than "paper or plastic?" is a violation of my Second Amendment rights
>I think it is unconstitutional to impose a background check on the purchase of any weapon of war.
Are you being sarcastic or do you genuinely believe this? It seems pretty sarcastic to me.
>This does not mean I agree with the Second Amendment as written but lets stay on track here.
>Please don't put words in my mouth. Let's keep this civil
Seeing how you sound like you are opposed to the second amendment you are likely not a libertarian / anarchist and as such are probably being sarcastic in your support for no ID requirements on weapons. I will continue with that assumption.
If somebody is not some arbitrary distance to a DMV or post office it would be a violation of their rights. If that is a violation then so is ID requirements for guns.
>You forgot "you have to actually get to the place to get the ID". This may not be the DMV but it may be deliberately chosen to reduce your personal likelihood to try. The reasons for this may be racial or political. There is a long, established history of this behavior in the US.
I did forget that one. I am in favor of widespread locations for getting an ID to eliminate this issue. Do you also believe that not allowing mail in voting is a violation for the same reason? If you do believe that then do you think it was a violation of rights to not implement mail in voting until the late 70s for California and later for other states?
>You are still overlooking the part where the voter ID doesn't actually do anything useful. Making it easier to get doesn't change the fact that it provides no meaningful benefit while also infringing constitutional rights
Regardless if it does anything tangible it increases confidence in our elections. Also, voter turnout increases when voter ID laws are implemented. (It may or may not be related though.) It also will lower the amount of accusations of stolen elections.
We also don't know how much voter fraud (that would be stopped by IDs) there really is so it is hard to say it wouldn't have an impact. It may have no impact but also could. Just because you don't catch crimes doesn't mean it doesn't happen. There are very few investigations into voter fraud.
I would also say that anytime a person illegally votes it cancels out a legitimate vote. This is in essence voter suppression. This is just as bad as stooping a legitimate person from voting.
> I don't actually know how European countries do it, but since nobody really thinks it violates rights I would be fine doing it however they do it.
I don't think Europe is relevant to this conversation. We have a functioning democracy. People can look around and form their opinions then vote on it. Personally I don't know or care how voting is done in Europe.
> If some of them may violate rights then presumably some don't?
Logically this does not follow.
> If that is the case then it seems like it is possible to implement voter ID laws without suppressing rights?
It might be theoretically possible but I don't believe it is practical or necessary to try. Even if it is possible I think the risk outweighs any benefit.
> What would it take for you to support voter ID laws that don't suppress rights?
Evidence of widespread voter fraud materially impacting the outcome of an election. Also exhausting other options that don't run up against the 14A.
> Are you being sarcastic or do you genuinely believe this? It seems pretty sarcastic to me.
I am 100% serious that I believe that is what the 2A says. As I very, very explicitly said, that does not imply I support the 2A. Drawing any conclusion about my gun control beliefs based on that statement would be misinformed.
> Seeing how you sound like you are opposed to the second amendment you are likely not a libertarian / anarchist and as such are probably being sarcastic in your support for no ID requirements on weapons. I will continue with that assumption.
Labels aren't going to be helpful here. I am not being sarcastic.
> ... are probably being sarcastic in your support for no ID requirements on weapons.
I expressed no such support and in fact explicitly disclaimed it. Please do not put words in my mouth, especially these types of words.
> If somebody is not some arbitrary distance to a DMV or post office it would be a violation of their rights. If that is a violation then so is ID requirements for guns.
I think both the 2A and 24A say you can't make this hard for people. In the case of the 24A I don't think it goes far enough. I'm deliberately avoiding providing my thoughts on the 2A because it's irrelevant here.
> I am in favor of widespread locations for getting an ID to eliminate this issue.
There is literally no issue to resolve here. There is no voter fraud problem. It is made up.
> Do you also believe that not allowing mail in voting is a violation for the same reason? If you do believe that then do you think it was a violation of rights to not implement mail in voting until the late 70s for California and later for other states?
I do believe that opposition to mail-in voting is another form of attempted voter suppression. I would not say that lack of access to mail in voting itself means your vote was suppressed. But this feels like nitpicking.
> Regardless if it does anything tangible it increases confidence in our elections.
Maybe, but it also rewards people who lied about the need for them in the first place. I'm not convinced this is a benefit to society.
If you lack confidence in our elections I invite you to learn how they actually work. It's an impressive system of checks and balances that ensures both anonymous results and verified participation. It's a fascinating application of decentralized systems and trustless cooperation. The system as it stands for actually voting is very much trustworthy. There may be chances for improvements but I don't think Voter ID is one of them.
> Also, voter turnout increases when voter ID laws are implemented. (It may or may not be related though.)
I'd like to see those numbers to make sure this isn't because turnout is measured in terms of registered voters instead of eligible voters. Even if it is true I don't believe Voter ID laws are a necessary or desirable method of improving turnout. Something like making election day a national holiday would do more for that and has fewer constitutional hangups.
> It also will lower the amount of accusations of stolen elections.
I don't believe this is a real problem and it is instead a cynical attempt to suppress voting. I believe this because of the long historical record of exactly that happening. So I believe Voter ID laws would actually increase accusations that our elections are stolen. In fact I believe Voter ID laws are themselves an attempt to steal elections.
> We also don't know how much voter fraud (that would be stopped by IDs) there really is so it is hard to say it wouldn't have an impact. It may have no impact but also could. Just because you don't catch crimes doesn't mean it doesn't happen.
I prefer not to have my rights infringed until we have a compelling reason. "Maybe" isn't compelling. Especially given the historical context.
> There are very few investigations into voter fraud.
This is obviously false. Post 2020 election there were endless lawsuits and claims of voter fraud with nothing to show for it.
> I would also say that anytime a person illegally votes it cancels out a legitimate vote. This is in essence voter suppression. This is just as bad as stooping a legitimate person from voting.
Sure but which one is actually happening? Consider there's no evidence of any widespread voter fraud or of any significant effects on election outcomes. Meanwhile there is long and established history of voter suppression.
Can you name a single state with voter id laws on the books that does not offer a free form of ID suitable to vote? Reminder: a _drivers license_ and state-issued ID are _not_ one and the same.
The easy-to-get is also important. Plenty of people who absolutely are citizens, born in this country, lack things like birth certificates or social security cards, and getting one can be a huge pain, sometimes requiring significant travel and expense. Often these are older people, or the homeless.
Well the fraud vector isn't obvious. Voter IDs wouldn't solve any of the fraud that has been uncovered as far as I can tell. So it seems to be a solution in search of a problem.
Now if you want to talk about National IDs that's a whole other can of worms.
The same people that push for voter ID also make it difficult for everyone to get an ID. Those people also have a stranglehold on their state legislatures, and executive agencies that assign IDs.
They also push for other laughably biased voting rules, like only allowing mail-in ballots from demographics that vote for them (65+). [1]
It's not about fairness for them, it's about winning. It's why I can't give the time of day to their fig leaf about voter fraud.
does this notion solely come from people who live in states with ridiculous taxes on everything?
here in SD it just cost me somewhere around $22 to get my driver's license renewed. when I lived in WA I went to the DMV with a friend who had to get her license renewed one day and I said screw it I might as well get a WA license while I'm here. my jaw fell to the floor when, at the end of the process, they said it would cost me $80.
$22 is not hard for anyone to save, especially with all the generous welfare programs we have. if you're impoverished, you can easily get EBT to buy food, WIC to buy baby formula, and, here at least, Section 8 housing and other programs to get a place to live. no amount of "think of the poor people whom I've never met but assume exist somewhere despite me never interacting with them directly" will ever convince me that someone who really wants to vote can't save $22 to acquire a legal ID.
hell, if it's that big of a deal, then start some charity program to pay for people to get legal ID!
> $22 is not hard for anyone to save, especially with all the generous welfare programs we have. if you're impoverished, you can easily get EBT to buy food, WIC to buy baby formula, and, here at least, Section 8 housing and other programs to get a place to live. no amount of "think of the poor people whom I've never met but assume exist somewhere despite me never interacting with them directly" will ever convince me that someone who really wants to vote can't save $22 to acquire a legal ID.
You don't even need to save 22 bucks. Every state in the union has _at least_ a free "needs based" ID option and for the Voter ID states they all provide a free IDs (for the purposes of voting, not necessarily drivers licenses).
Now consider the intentional difficulty of actually getting to offices that can issue those documents, during working hours, and so on and so forth. Many people in many low-wage jobs can't just leave for the afternoon to catch the correct bus to catch the connecting bus to go get identification to vote.
The money is part of it, but the time is another, and the (intentional) roadblocks put into place to hinder citizens are never being argued for in good faith.
> does this notion solely come from people who live in states with ridiculous taxes on everything?
You're missing the point. Why should you need an ID to vote? It doesn't make sense.
> $22 is not hard for anyone to save, especially with all the generous welfare programs we have.
Please. It is a barrier that exists. Not everyone has $22.00. They still deserve access to their human rights. Welfare doesn't fix this.
> hell, if it's that big of a deal, then start some charity program to pay for people to get legal ID!
Charities are subject to laws and attack. This is a common voter suppression tactic. It should not require a charity to exercise fundamental human rights.
Voting is a fundamental right. It should be as easy as possible to vote. You do not need ID cards to prevent voter fraud. That is as simple as cross referencing registration with votes and then investigating differences.
Voting systems need to be anonymous and accessible. Accessible both in terms of literally voting and understanding how the system works so it is trusted. We already invented systems for this, they work. Voter fraud is a made up problem and voter IDs wouldn't stop it even if it existed.
Voter ID is a red herring. It's a convenient way to suppress votes.
> In the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election phone jamming scandal, Republican officials attempted to reduce the number of Democratic voters by paying professional telemarketers in Idaho to make repeated hang-up calls to the telephone numbers used by the Democratic Party's ride-to-the-polls phone lines on election day. By tying up the lines, voters seeking rides from the Democratic Party would have more difficulty reaching the party to ask for transportation to and from their polling places.
To your "start a charity" argument above, good luck if the phone lines are jammed.
> Michigan Republican state legislator John Pappageorge was quoted as saying, "If we do not suppress the Detroit vote, we're going to have a tough time in this election."
Well there's a smoking gun.
> In 2006, four employees of candidate John Kerry's campaign were convicted of slashing the tires of 25 vans rented by the Wisconsin state Republican Party which were to be used for driving Republican voters and monitors to the polls on Election Day 2004. They received jail terms of four to six months.
Again, good luck to a charity countering literal vandalism.
> Democratic voters receiving calls incorrectly informing them voting will lead to arrest.
> Widespread calls fraudulently claiming to be "[Democratic Senate candidate Jim] Webb Volunteers," falsely telling voters their voting location had changed.
> Fliers paid for by the Republican Party, stating "SKIP THIS ELECTION" that allegedly attempted to suppress African-American turnout.
> On October 30, 2008, a federal appeals court ordered the reinstatement of 5,500 voters wrongly purged from the voter rolls by the state, in response to an ACLU of Michigan lawsuit which questioned the legality of a Michigan state law requiring local clerks to nullify the registrations of newly registered voters whenever their voter identification cards are returned by the post office as undeliverable.
Ever have trouble getting mail to a new address? Can you imagine it happening? Hope the USPS is well funded in your area.
> In Louisville, Georgia, in October 2018, Black senior citizens were told to get off a bus that was to have taken them to a polling place for early voting. The bus trip was supposed to have been part of the "South Rising" bus tour sponsored by the advocacy group Black Voters Matter. A clerk of the local Jefferson County Commission allegedly called the intended voters' senior center to claim that the bus tour constituted "political activity," which is barred at events sponsored by the county.
> Why should you need an ID to vote? It doesn't make sense.
so that only citizens can vote in elections?
> Please. It is a barrier that exists. Not everyone has $22.00.
yes they do. I know one person who does not have a driver's license or state ID, because she doesn't have a birth certificate (lost it). she was almost unable to take her newborn children home because of her lack of birth certificate. she had ample time to save money to acquire these things leading up to her twin sons' birth, but she squandered it weekly on weed. I have worked minimum-wage jobs while living in shitty housing with zero welfare and saving $22 was not difficult. while living in Section 8 housing, receiving WIC and EBT benefits, as well as other forms of welfare, like this ID-less person I know, it would be a cinch. she simply cared more about spending all of her money on weed every paycheck. if she had any desire to vote at all (she doesn't), I would not have any pity for her.
hell, at least around here, if you don't want to work yet still somehow feel like you're contributing to society and therefore want to vote for some reason, it is very easy to panhandle $22 in a single day, as long as you don't spend it on meth or whatever. you're not going to be able to use vague emotional claims that some vague swath of poor downtrodden people (all undoubtedly "minorities" in one way or another, because everywhere in the US is just oh so racist that every time a white person sees someone with a different skin color voting at the booth next to them, their nose visibly wrinkles in disgust, before returning home to recount their experience to their Klansmen buddies, or whatever hallucination you choose to inhabit) who live paycheck to paycheck or are homeless or whatever yet feel that participating in an election is somehow more important than getting a couple dozen bucks together in order to obtain a state ID necessary to participate in society. if you actually cared, again, you would be interested in finding solutions to this problem, instead of throwing your hands up, saying "the mere concept of voter ID in the US is discriminatory and racist and evil and bad and morally wrong, and there's just nothing we can do to change that so the only possible solution is to throw the vote-integrity baby out with the voter-ID bathwater!" if you genuinely cared about this topic then you would be more willing to find compromise in any way, but you're not, so there's not really much further discussion that could be had. and anyway,
In Ohio, it's much easier to vote with a drivers license than with a state ID card. People that are disabled or can't afford a car have state ID cards.
Also, poll taxes are unconstitutional in the US. $10 is more than $0.
It takes very little to imagine how this causes inequality. Maybe you can’t get the state ID either! Voter ID and State ID aren’t necessarily the same thing. Maybe you need both! Maybe you can get your State ID at a local office but the Voter ID only from the county courthouse two towns away. Maybe you don’t have a car and a day off. Maybe they are only available on certain days and times. Maybe those times change at the last minute.
There's a big can of worms here. The thumbnail sketch is "Americans have some (as viewed from outside the US) odd and severe hangups about being tracked by the government that is, ostensibly, theirs."
Reasons range from the practical / legal ones listed by the ACLU (https://www.aclu.org/other/5-problems-national-id-cards) to a small-but-vocal subset of voters who actually believe (because so much of the US is descended from Christian zealots fleeing persecution in their home countries for heterodoxy) that a card issued by your government that is required to participate in society is a literal "mark of the beast" as per the biblical Book of Revelations and therefore something to be resisted as part of a struggle against anti-Christendom.
> It’s a barrier preventing citizens from exercising constitutional rights.
No, election fraud enabled by lack of voter ID is a barrier that prevents eligible voters from fully exercising their constitutional right to the franchise by diluting the power of their legitimate votes with fraudulent ones.
Voter ID doesn't prevent election fraud. And it is an imperfect solution to voter fraud, which doesn't meaningfully exist because we already have better mechanisms to prevent it.
> Voter ID laws have different outcomes based on economic status. It’s especially difficult for poor people to exercise their rights.
Increasingly, Republicans are the party of the poor and Democrats the party of the rich. In the 2020 election, "the wealthiest parts of the country overwhelmingly voted for Biden and the poorest overwhelmingly for Trump". [0] In 2016, "the Republican Party won almost twice the share of votes in the nation’s most destitute counties — home to the poorest 10 percent of Americans — than it won in the richest". [1]
If voter ID requirements are all about suppressing the vote of the poor, does this mean that Democrats will start supporting them and Republicans start opposing them, now that the vote of the poor skews increasingly more Republican than Democratic? Or, could it be, that very many poor Americans have no trouble getting ID, and even support voter ID requirements?
Increasingly, even many poor minority voters vote Republican. Trump made significant gains in the 2020 election in Hispanic majority counties of southern Texas – which are also among the poorest areas in the state. [2]
I cited a NY Times article on how poor Americans are increasingly voting Republican. Given the overall political lean of the NY Times, I expect they'd be very happy to promote your theory if there was any evidence for it. Yet they didn't mention it, because there doesn't appear to be any.
Maybe this NY Times article isn't biased and is simply reporting on the data. I don't find "NY Times liberals" to be a compelling refutation of the assertion that the Republican party might be good at voter suppression.
I'm not even claiming they are better at it but it is certainly possible and would explain the data.
> Maybe this NY Times article isn't biased and is simply reporting on the data. I don't find "NY Times liberals" to be a compelling refutation of the assertion that the Republican party might be good at voter suppression.
I don’t think you understand my point about bias. Let me put it this way - the fact that the conservative majority of SCOTUS failed to endorse Trump’s claims about the 2020 elections - in spite of the fact that their own bias would lead them to be sympathetic to them - is good evidence that his claims suffer from a serious lack of supporting evidence. Or, similarly - while Fox News hosts such as Tucker Carlson have expressed some sympathy for the members of the QAnon movement as individuals, nobody at Fox News has publicly endorsed their outlandish factual claims - and if there was remotely any evidence for them, surely Fox News would have done so, which is good evidence there isn’t.
This is what I am talking about here - everyone is biased, but when a person whose bias would naturally lead them to support some position fails to do so, that is in itself a form of indirect evidence against the position.
And I’m sure some voter suppression happens. But, let me put it this way - no doubt some fraud occurred in the 2020 election (just like every other), but it seems unlikely it occurred on a sufficient scale to change the outcome, and there is no good evidence that it did. Similarly, no doubt voter suppression sometimes happens, but it seems unlikely it happens on a sufficient scale to change national demographic trends in voting, and there is no good evidence that it does.
> Similarly, no doubt voter suppression sometimes happens, but it seems unlikely it happens on a sufficient scale to change national demographic trends in voting, and there is no good evidence that it does.
This is where we disagree. There is longstanding evidence for exactly this. It stretches back literally centuries.
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud. There is clear, established evidence of ongoing, large scale, material voter suppression.
It looks like you are not an American so consider that this is a thing in living memory here:
There is certainly a history in the US of voting suppression targeted at racial minorities, especially African-Americans. (And although I am indeed not an American, my own country also has a history of racial discrimination in voting, also within living memory–the US is less unique in that regard that you seem to think it is.)
However, if working class non-Hispanic whites appear to have been switching, over the last several elections, from Democrats to Republicans – it isn't clear how voter suppression explains that particular change. Your theory suggests that working class non-Hispanic whites haven't changed their collective political allegiance at all, it is simply that Republicans have managed to selectively suppress their vote, but only of those among them who vote Democrat. I don't think that's very plausible – it isn't consistent with the observed changes in turnout figures. And a history of electoral discrimination against racial minorities isn't very relevant to that theory either, since to explain this it would require, not voter suppression against a racial minority, but rather large-scale politically-selective voter suppression against the historical ethnic/racial majority, which is a rather different thing.
And, it isn't just non-Hispanic whites. The biggest swing towards Trump between 2016 and 2020 was in Laredo, Texas–27.7 percentage points. [0] And Laredo is over 95% Hispanic, indeed the most Hispanic city in the United States outside of Puerto Rico. It is also not a rich city by any measure – 30% of its population are below the poverty line. So, it looks like a significant chunk of Hispanic people in Laredo (and elsewhere in southern Texas) – many of whom would be of lower socioeconomic status – decided to switch their vote to Republican, or turnout for the first time for the GOP, in 2020. And the idea that, instead, Republicans just worked out how to suppress Democrats from voting, is inconsistent with the fact that turnout actually increased in Webb County from 2016 to 2020. [1]
I mean just logically the shifting voting habits of a given demographic don’t demonstrate the absence of voter suppression. Those shifting preferences could be for any number of reasons, including suppression itself. We don’t know.
What we do know is that there is no evidence of meaningful voter fraud in the US.
We also know there is an established history of voter suppression and to a lesser extent election fraud.
With this knowledge I see no reason to enact Voter ID.
> Those shifting preferences could be for any number of reasons, including suppression itself. We don’t know.
So, Trump improved his position between 2016 and 2020 in Laredo, Texas, by over 27 percentage points. Two possible explanations:
Explanation (1): He achieved that outcome through the ordinary legitimate means that any politician uses to improve their vote share – adjusting his message to better appeal to that audience, investment in grassroots campaigning, adopting policies which attract those voters, etc
Explanation (2): He achieved that outcome through some form of voter suppression
Some questions:
Question (a): What is the relative probability of Explanation (1) and Explanation (2)?
Question (b): What can we infer from media coverage of this topic as to how most journalists covering it would answer question (a)?
Question (c): Does the answer to question (b) tell us anything about the answer to question (a)?
> With this knowledge I see no reason to enact Voter ID.
I don't support voter ID – but I'm sceptical of claims made by both its proponents and its opponents that the issue would have any significant impact on election outcomes. I think we'd likely get the same election outcomes whether it was enacted or not, and I'm not aware of any hard evidence against that. I think, to a great extent, it is a symbolic issue, a political shibboleth.
Worldwide, there are several models for running elections. The US uses what is called the "executive model", in which the operation of elections is overseen by elected officials (and civil servants who directly report to those elected officials). It also uses a particularly decentralised version of the executive model, in which state and even local officials play a major role in national elections.
Most other English-speaking countries instead use what is called the "independent model", in which elected officials have no direct involvement in running elections, instead they are run by one or more independent government agencies. Australia and Canada are the most directly comparable Anglophone countries to the US, since they both have federal systems (unlike the unitary system used in Ireland and New Zealand, and the devolutionary system of the UK). In both Australia and the Canada, federal elections are fully run by an independent federal agency, while there are separate independent state/provincial agencies used to run state/provincial elections.
I think the widespread lack of faith in the US voting system, found on both sides, is in large part due to its use of the inferior executive model, and switching to the independent model used in most of the rest of the English-speaking world could do a lot to improve public confidence. (There is also a lot to be said for the "judicial model" used in much of Latin America, where elections are run by the judicial branch instead of the executive branch – but I imagine the US would be more open to copying an Anglophone approach to this issue than a Latin American one.)
I realise that having the FEC take over the running of federal elections, like the AEC does in Australia or Elections Canada does in Canada, is probably a non-starter due to constitutional issues. However, if a US state was to adopt a state constitutional amendment establishing a politically independent state agency with sole power over all elections in the state, taking that power away from state and local elected officials–I can't see SCOTUS could possibly object to that.
Your entire premise is flawed. There are more than two explanations for changes in votes by demographic. Your biggest mistake is assuming that race itself is a predictor of political affiliation.
In a world with established voter suppression efforts and a lack of evidence for voter fraud I see no reason to enact Voter ID. There’s no clear benefit and obvious downsides.
> Your entire premise is flawed. There are more than two explanations for changes in votes by demographic.
But which is the larger contributor? We of course will probably never be able to answer that with certainty, but which is more likely to be the larger factor?
> Your biggest mistake is assuming that race itself is a predictor of political affiliation.
But obviously there do exist correlations between race/ethnicity and political affiliation, both in the US and most other countries too. Almost never are they absolute (a group might split politically 60-40 or even 90-10 but almost never 100-0), and the correlations often change over time-the majority of group X might vote for one party now, but some decades ago they voted for the other instead, and maybe in a few more decades they might even swing back. Are you actually disputing this rather obvious fact?
I think a lot of progressives would be in favor of voter ID laws if you could ensure it was reasonable for every eligible voter to get their ID. That isn't usually what happens though. Here in Wisconsin when the republican party tried it, their solution to the problem was to make people show up to the DMV and fill out forms for their free ID, then they proceeded to close a bunch of DMVs, conveniently in areas likely to be unfavorable to them.
Progressives do not want to support a system that can be used to suppress voters any more than the current system already does.
Isn't it possible that closing DMVs had absolutely nothing to do with voting? Alaska, for example, has been restricting services provided by DMVs to cut back on spending.
Democrats have claimed an inability for some to get IDs as a wedge every time voter ID is proposed. Often the claim is that minorities aren't able to get an ID. What a condescending statement. Everybody that wants an ID has an ID. ID is required for many aspects of life in the US. I do not believe that an inability to get an ID is as widespread as is talked about. Skin color certainly is not a factor on ability to get an ID.
There are 22 states that require photo ID to vote. There are an additional 15 states that require ID but accept non-photo IDs. There are only 15 states that do not require any verification that a person is who they say they are when voting.
Not requiring any ID to vote is a minority position. The Democrat party seems to be exceptionally vocal about not requiring ID to vote. That only leads me to ask why? What do they gain from not requiring ID to vote?
I would be asking these questions regardless of the party that was vocal about the issue. I do not have allegiance to either party. I see government in general as an enemy of the individual. I do support voter ID as it prevents a specific type of shenanigans.
There absolutely are people in the United States today who do not have government issued ID, do not want it, and still are and should be entitled to vote.
> Skin color certainly is not a factor on ability to get an ID.
"GAO compared turnout in two states—Kansas and Tennessee—that changed ID requirements from the 2008 to 2012 general elections with turnout in fourselected states—Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, and Maine—that did not. GAO used a quasi-experimental approach, a type of policy evaluation that compares how an outcome changes over time in a treatment groupthat adopted a new policy, to a comparison group that did not make the same change. GAO selected states for evaluation that did not have other factors in their election environments that also may have affected turnout, such as significant changes to other election laws. GAO analyzed three sources of turnout data for the 2008 and 2012 general elections: (1) data on eligible voters, using official voter records compiled by the United States Elections Project at George Mason University, (2) data on registered voters, using state voter databases that were cleaned by a vendor through data-matching procedures to remove voters who had died or moved, and (3) data on registered voters, as reported to the Current Population Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. [...]
GAO also estimated changes in turnout among subpopulations of registrants in Kansas and Tennessee according to their age, length of voter registration, and race or ethnicity. In both Kansas and Tennessee, compared with the four comparison states, GAO found that turnout was reduced by larger amounts:
among registrants, as of 2008, between the ages of 18 and 23 than among registrants between the ages of 44 and 53;
among registrants who had been registered less than 1 year than among registrants who had been registered 20 years or more; and
*among African-American registrants than among White, Asian-American, and Hispanic registrants. GAO did not find consistent reductions in turnout among Asian-American or Hispanic registrants compared to White registrants, thus suggesting that the laws did not have larger effects among these subgroups."
Currently, there are many (>> 10,000 per national election) documented cases of voter disenfranchisement, and almost no (single digit, per national election) documented cases of fraudulent voting.
The voter ID laws make voter disenfranchisement easier and fraudulent voting harder, so they greatly increase the total number of incorrectly cast / denied ballots per election. Therefore, they do a small, bounded, amount of good, and a large, unbounded, amount of harm.
Correct. Most progressives would have no issue with voter ID, as long as the states make it very easy and zero cost to get said ID. Try being poor and needing an ID, and not having all of the documentation needed. It's very challenging to do so.
Perhaps worth noting: the fraud perpetrated in this story was completely independent of mail-in ballots.
In Pennsylvania, mail-in ballots don't even pass through the level of the bureaucracy that was bribed to compromise the in-person vote totals.
"Do mail-in ballots make fraud easier" is a multi-dimensional question. At some level of resolution, everything that makes exercising the right to vote easier makes fraud easier. US history is too rife with examples of attempts to deny the right to vote under surface-level-sound justifications to take any such question at face value.
Nah, typical Texas behavior, along with overregulation of voter drives and arresting anyone who tries too hard to do it. To deny voter IDs you typically shut down DMVs in areas you don't want getting too many of them.
> Why? Do you disagree that fraud is easier with mail-in ballots?
It certainly enables some kinds of it (like forcing your family members to vote a certain way) but also makes some kinds harder (putting the voting site in someone's house and intimidating anyone who drives up). It's very popular in most places it's been tried, and probably a good tradeoff anywhere with rural populations.
> The only reason to be against voter ID is to make fraud easier.
You have little imagination. Just because someone claims some new law protects the integrity of the vote doesn't mean that is the actual intent. Frequently it is just a pretext for differentially shaving off a percent or two of the "wrong" types of voters.
For decades conservatives have been alleging widespread voter fraud by democrats. I can't count the number of times I've heard about dead people being on the voter rolls. Yes, when my dad died of stroke, getting his name removed from the voter registry was item #496 on my list of things to do.
After the 2016 election Trump alleged 3M+ illegal votes. He formed a committee to investigate it, headed by Kris Kobach, who has a history of making such claims despite not showing anything. Despite having the full power and resources of the federal government at his disposal, the committee turned up nothing.
Election fraud is a real concern, and none of the recent laws address that. Voter fraud is on the order of 1:100,000 to 1:1,000,000.
EU countries are split on mail-in ballots. UK, Germany, Spain, Poland, Iceland, and Switzerland where ~90% vote by mail. It's not because of fraud concerns, it's because all EU countries have a national holiday or weekend day for elections. The U.S. does it on a Tuesday which acts as voter suppression. Colorado, similar to Switzerland, mails ballots to every registered voter, and reports very low concerns of election fraud and even lower cases of voter fraud.
> The only reason to be against voter ID is to make fraud easier
It’s to make sure minorities that have historically been discriminated against with regards to voting actually get to vote, which is their right.
Assuming you’re giving your position in good faith, I’d really enjoy to hear some extrapolation on your side of thought.
Have you ever actually looked at the test they used to give black people to vote? It’s been a while since I’ve read much about the topic, but I think it was going on even into the 1950’s?
As the top of my class, the test was easy to me - but some very slight mindfuckery, as is the point. I guarantee you the lower 50% of my class would not have been able to pass it. & this is a 2010’s level of education against essentially uneducated blacks from close to a century ago.
If you think things like that are acceptable & okay. I cannot believe you & your ideologies would lead to a prosperous society capable of sustaining humanity & advancing technology.
European countries and Canada could finish counting ballots in a day. All paper records. US had to take days, and any questioning into the process is labeled, of course, racism and right wing. It must be because the US is so advanced and progressive. It's a shame, I guess, that the damn European countries or our neighbor can't follow our lead.
Know why that was? In a lot of cases it's because in a lot of states they weren't even able to start procesing mail ballots until polls closed on election day.
Processing a mail ballot involves physically opening the envelope, removing the ballot, ensuring that everything matches against the records. This could not be done in a single night. There's no conspiracy, just obvious consequences of those rules when you evaluate the information critically.
Plenty of progressives have been against electronic voting machines from the beginning. What we're calling right-wing people out on is only caring about it when their candidate loses, and calling the previous election where they won "the most secure in history".
I don't understand the us v them mentality. I have lots of right wing friends and family and many of them have been against electronic voting from the beginning. For example, in my home state of oregon, many right wingers are against vote by mail and have been since oregon became the first state to go fully vote by mail. These issues are not so binary as you're making them out to be, and I think everyone would do well to put aside partisan differences to come together on issues where they can agree.
Us v them has been drilled into the populace for decades to divide based on tribal allegiances. The best thing you can do to break down tribal walls is to talk to "the other side" and find solutions that are acceptable for everybody.
I'll agree, our elections are shit. They're designed that way so that interested and connected individuals can manipulate them. The most successful ways of doing so are the time honored traditions of gerrymandering and voter suppression. My problem with a lot of popular right-wing complaints are that they are rarely directed at those things, they're directed at things like vote by mail which helps alleviate the latter while, as far as I can tell, not being significantly worse than voting in person for security. Voter ID sounds like a decent idea, but the solution to getting everyone their ID is to make people skip work to go to the DMV and close DMVs in areas with too many "unfavorable" voters.
But I agree, we should put aside partisan bullshit and come up with some meaningful improvements, but that will never happen as long as we have politicians who insist on trying to rig everything their way. We should be pushing for an end to gerrymandering, a way to count votes that makes it reasonable for every eligible voter to vote, assures to a reasonable degree that only eligible voters can vote, and that the count is accurate. Let me know when there's a conservative idea that actually does those things and I'll be behind it.
> vote by mail which helps alleviate the latter while, as far as I can tell, not being significantly worse than voting in person for security.
How anyone could state this with any particular confidence is beyond me. The truth is, when someone votes by mail, you have no idea who filled in the ballot. How could anyone possibly collect metrics? No one can possibly say what's going on, unless you trust the populace at large, which not everyone does. Many countries have systems for dealing with this. In many countries, they ink your finger to indicate you voted. Why not just do that at physical polling stations.
Honestly, mail-in ballots are very difficult for me. They get mailed to you, and by the time I finally have a chance to sit down, I often have to go searching for where it went / whether my toddler put it somewhere. On the other hand, when I voted in person, I would just go to the polling booth in the morning and be done. Super easy. I don't understand the desire for pure vote by mail.
One year, I didn't even receive my ballot, and it was difficult to get a replacement. Whereas, when I lived in CA, it didn't matter. You show up to the polling station (which is conspicuously noted), and just vote.
> How anyone could state this with any particular confidence is beyond me. The truth is, when someone votes by mail, you have no idea who filled in the ballot.
How do you know who filled in the ballot at the polling place? All I would need is to show up and know someone else's name and address and I could vote for them. Vote by mail isn't any worse than that and is possibly better because there's a stronger confidence that whoever filled it out actually lives at that address. As I recall from my own mail-in ballot, it is also signed by myself and a witness.
> Honestly, mail-in ballots are very difficult for me. They get mailed to you, and by the time I finally have a chance to sit down, I often have to go searching for where it went / whether my toddler put it somewhere. On the other hand, when I voted in person, I would just go to the polling booth in the morning and be done.
The poling place is open on exactly one day, and you have to wait in line for your turn. Have to go to work that day? Well, tough shit. For some people this is simple, but for quite a lot of people in overcrowded polling places and inflexible working conditions it is not. The option of a mail in ballot provides a convenience for people less privileged with the ability to make it to a polling place during a sub-24 hour window.
Notice I said option. If filling out a ballot is difficult for you, you can still do it by showing up in person.
> One year, I didn't even receive my ballot, and it was difficult to get a replacement.
> How do you know who filled in the ballot at the polling place? All I would need is to show up and know someone else's name and address and I could vote for them
Presumably by some kind of voter identification? Like the way most countries do it.
> The poling place is open on exactly one day, and you have to wait in line for your turn. Have to go to work that day? Well, tough shit. For some people this is simple, but for quite a lot of people in overcrowded polling places and inflexible working conditions it is not. The option of a mail in ballot provides a convenience for people less privileged with the ability to make it to a polling place during a sub-24 hour window.
I guess I don't get it. The polling places open at a ridiculously early hour and end at 8. You could have multi-day polling too, that's fine. I don't understand why this is so hard in this country.
> Notice I said option. If filling out a ballot is difficult for you, you can still do it by showing up in person.
No I can't because I live in Oregon, which despite being a high tax state, is unable to conduct even the most basic election.
> Perfect is the enemy of good.
It's not when we have an easy answer to this problem -- have a physical place to vote. I've voted absentee in California, and one year, my ballot got lost there. Do you know what I did? I went to a polling location. In Oregon, because it was COVID, there was no place to get a ballot. EIther you use the byzantine system set up by the state which was too complicated, or tough shit. That's not acceptable. Why aren't these 'voter suppression' tactics used in liberal states not up to questioning? Why is only the motivations of one party suspect? I don't think it is easier to vote in Oregon than any other state, despite what everyone here wants you to believe.
> Presumably by some kind of voter identification? Like the way most countries do it.
Ok, sure, just find a way to implement that which doesn't allow it to be abused disenfranchise voters, which is what typically happens here in the states.
> You could have multi-day polling too, that's fine. I don't understand why this is so hard in this country.
Yep, you could. No politician suggests this for some reason.
> No I can't because I live in Oregon, which despite being a high tax state, is unable to conduct even the most basic election.
Sounds like your problem is less with the concept of mail-in ballots and more with the fact that your state can't handle running a polling location.
> It's not when we have an easy answer to this problem -- have a physical place to vote.
For all the reasons I already outlined, it is not actually an easy answer.
> Why aren't these 'voter suppression' tactics used in liberal states not up to questioning?
They are. If no one is talking about it then they should make a bigger stink about it.
> Your friends may be for election integrity, but the people they're voting for most certainly are not.
I mean they have a name for these people: RINOs. I think I read an article that showed that most conservatives distrust their own politicians more than liberals distrust theirs. The feeling I get is that they have a clear idea of a politician they want, but no one who believes that runs, and they feel there is a mass conspiracy to prevent people like them from running -- namely funding. That sort of thing doesn't bode well for a country's stability.
That isn’t true. People are labeled right wing when they’re regurgitating Tucker Carlson and “just asking the questions” in bad faith. There’s asking questions with the intent of answering them in good faith, and there’s asking questions to generate fud in bad faith. The Republican playbook and talking points right now are to generate fud. That’s why every Republican tries to stuff “fraud”, “radical”, “far left” etc every time they speak and are asking the questions. It’s not in good faith. If it were, they’d be asking the same questions when their team wins.
Truth is, if you continue to allege fraud, some people will stop voting. And you can push laws that restrict voting to a specific time and manner. That also reduces turnout. And it just so happens that turnout is negatively correlated with republican election victories. That is the playbook and we are watching it happen, because “just asking questions” isn’t generally being done in good faith.
> if you continue to allege fraud, some people will stop voting
Could you explain the thought with this? If the people saying "there is fraud" are Republicans, and the people believing "this is fraud" are Republicans, and subsequently they are less likely to vote, wouldn't that lead to them losing more elections, and by a larger margin?
> regurgitating Tucker Carlson and “just asking the questions” in bad faith
In my experience, non-conservatives tend to believe conservatives are 'regurgitating' Tucker Carlson. Most of Carlson's audience are actually democrats. Polls show that most conservatives distrust fox news. And the whole 'bad faith' thing is a way to dismiss people. You shouldn't every think that what people are telling you is in bad faith. If you think that what someone is telling you is so preposterous as to not possibly be in good faith, perhaps you need to recalibrate as to what is normal.
> And it just so happens that turnout is negatively correlated with republican election victories.
This is increasingly not true. The democrats have kind of maxed out on their voter turnout. It turns out that they mainly have voter turnout efforts for people who will vote democrat. They've ignored the non-democrats (not their fault of course), and these are the bulk of the people who don't vote. Several South Texas districts for example have seen higher turnout amongst formerly non-voting Hispanics, and most of these are new GOP voters.
So, the Democrats are the racist right-wingers, and Mitch McConnell is the progressive in this story?
Note that, on their own, paper ballots don't actually address the attack described in the article, though the bill provides funding for mechanisms that would.
No. I'm advocating a civil discourse in which people evaluate the pros and cons of different approaches without resorting to racial attacks. I'm advocating that people should be encouraged to ask questions, like why does it take so long for the US to count ballots without getting into partisan bullshit.
There's nothing in the SAFE act that can be considered partisan, unless you assume that one of the parties is against allowing people to vote. The Republicans in the senate blocked it for two reasons:
- It is impossible to print legible ballots on recycled paper. (The recycled paper requirement in the bill could have been removed in reconciliation, even if this argument is nonsense.)
- Establishing federal standards for election machines and paper ballots would discourage states from establishing redundant standards. (Note that the opponents of the bill didn't make the stronger claim that it would prevent states from establishing stronger standards.)
The bill would provide funding for standardizing best practices around paper ballot counting. That would speed up the count and reduce election fraud.
The bill doesn't touch voter disenfranchisement, except that it includes a small amount of research funding to allow people with disabilities to vote on paper ballots without trusting a computer or divulging their vote to another person (this is currently an open problem).
It was repeatedly proposed by Democrats + fillibustered by Senate Republicans.
I don't see how any honest conversation about voting counting issues in the US can't point out that there are low-tech solutions to the exact issues you're complaining about, that the bill has been written, and that exactly one party has been blocking / fillibustering it for 3+ years (without publicly providing any legitimate complaints about the contents of the bill).
America has degenerated into sectarian politics, and in such a system you can’t have a civil discourse about anything without “resorting to racial attacks.” I went to go see the candidates in Iowa for the 2020 Dem primary I was amazed by their talent (Elizabeth Warren particularly) for injecting race into literally every issue.
Wedge politics. As old as time. Find an emotional issue to carve out a group of people. Then craft a statement that appeals to that group. It makes your campaign feel more personal to them. When you get elected, fail to implement anything you promised, and blame it on the other party.
Stuffing ballot boxes to win a judgeship in Chicago is a rookie move. Everyone knows that the legal way to get more votes is to change your name so it sounds like an Irish woman.
> three ballot cues have attained legendary status in Cook County: gender, Irish ethnicity, and first ballot position. Female candidates are believed to hold a significant advantage over male candidates, a belief borne out by election results over much of the past twenty years. The advantage of an Irish-sounding name in Cook County has long been accepted as gospel truth, so much so that several past judicial candidates with non-Irish names have legally changed their names to suggest Irish ancestry. [1]
It's so common that they passed a law to make it so that you really have to plan ahead:
> if a candidate has changed his or her name during the 3 years before the deadline for filing nominating petitions ... the ballot must include a reference to his or her former name or names and the date or dates of the name changes [2]
Not a joke:
> There are only two kinds of people, the saying goes, the Irish and those who wish they were. Shannon P. O’Malley, who is running to be a judge in suburban Chicago, seems to fit into the second category. For, despite the name, O’Malley doesn't appear to be all that Irish. O’Malley is a 55-year-old Chicago guy formerly named Phillip Spiwak who insists he is not trying to pull the wool over voters’ eyes. [3]
Why couldn't it have been North Carolina which had the only case in recent times of a congressional election being rerun because of ballot harvesting by a GOP operative?
You can't just make people up! Every vote is tied to a specific registration. We do same-day registration, but those votes are cast provisionally, with a paper log; there aren't many of them, and they can all be set aside and audited after-the-fact.
You certainly can't just make up a final tally. The numbers from the individual voting machines and the paper ballots have to match up; we had to stay an extra 2 hours after the polls closed last time I did this (in 2020) because of an equipment screwup that kept us from doing the final certified count/reconciliation.