[HN Gopher] Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to ...
___________________________________________________________________
Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud
charges
Author : dmeocary
Score : 474 points
Date : 2022-06-08 17:02 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.justice.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.justice.gov)
| koolba wrote:
| I knew this had to be about either Philly or Chicago without even
| clicking the link. And of course I was right.
| thinkcontext wrote:
| 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?
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McCrae_Dowless
| Kon-Peki wrote:
| 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]
|
| [1]
| https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&...
|
| [2]
| https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/billstatus.asp?DocNum=4173&...
|
| [3] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/illinois-judge-
| candidat...
| thepasswordis wrote:
| In case you were curious for more info about him:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Myers_(Pennsylvania_po...
|
| >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.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| dmix wrote:
| 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.
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| 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.
| InCityDreams wrote:
| Where is 'around here, lately'? Where you live? This
| website?
|
| 'Partisan'? Some several people's opinions that don't
| align with yours?
|
| '[T]hings have been feeling[...] What things?
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| 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.
| jessfyi wrote:
| Election fraud != voter fraud. The former happens more than the
| other and primarily by the Republican party, which is why I'm not
| surprised none of those articles will (or did) last on hn's
| frontpage when they occurred in the last two major elections. The
| latter refers to the alleged attempts of voters to swing an
| election result and even conservative think tanks & orgs [0][1]
| note it's not really and issue (and again perpetuated by one
| party more than the other).
|
| My favorite thing is how even in a population of people that
| should be adept at recognizing magnitudes, people consistently
| overestimate how _voter fraud_ can potentially impact elections
| when the numbers from studies consistently say otherwise[2]
|
| [0]https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud-print/search
|
| [1]https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/12/09/trumps-
| vo...
|
| [2]https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/B..
| .
|
| EDIT and here's a more interesting case in which statistical
| analysis played a key role in pointing to the fraud:
| https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/republican-operativ...
| nonethewiser wrote:
| rhodorhoades wrote:
| >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.
| [deleted]
| lgleason wrote:
| LeftHandPlane wrote:
| rickbutton wrote:
| You just linked an insane conspiracy theory website.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| 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.
| the_snooze wrote:
| 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.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| 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.
| the_snooze wrote:
| 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.
| hunterb123 wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Why did it take so damn long to catch this?
| mistrial9 wrote:
| everyone involved is on salary
| jeffbee wrote:
| 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.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Fair enough. I just personally feel like committed fraud five
| elections before getting caught is too many.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Amusing that the ward leader for the GOP in the _very same ward_
| was just kicked out of his own party last month over suspicions
| he was committing election fraud:
| https://www.newskudo.com/pennsylvania/philadelphia/governmen...
|
| Quite a rotten two square miles of Philadelphia there.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Yeah people don't elect politicians, votes do.
| todd8 wrote:
| 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.)
| adamrezich wrote:
| > 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?
| [deleted]
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| 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 "
| dmeocary wrote:
| Sounds like there was widespread fraud in many different
| elections.
|
| Concerning that he plead guilty for 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017 and
| 2018 elections and worked directly with the Judge of Elections.
| nanna wrote:
| Not at all seeing how this implies widespread voter fraud? It
| seems highly localised and particular.
| [deleted]
| daenz wrote:
| 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.
| npc12345 wrote:
| [deleted]
| cafard wrote:
| Wow. I hadn't thought of him since Abscam
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abscam).
| yegle wrote:
| American Hustle is based on this operation FWIW.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| npc12345 wrote:
| ipnon wrote:
| 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.
| tootie wrote:
| Roger Stone was a member of CREEP and has been working for
| Trump and many candidates in between. No lesson has been
| learned.
| possiblydrunk wrote:
| stuckinhell wrote:
| Election fraud is real. Whoa
| bruceb wrote:
| This person is actually a repeat offender with a history of
| abusing his office. https://www.inquirer.com/news/ozzie-myers-
| convicted-abscam-p...
| pphysch wrote:
| The important question: is he an outlier, or the norm?
| willcipriano wrote:
| 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.
| somenameforme wrote:
| 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.
| pphysch wrote:
| Yep, it is corruption after all; it spreads by converting
| or eliminating the non-corrupt.
|
| But if Washington were to publicly tackle it, USA would be
| a less attractive HQ for MNCs.
| AustinDev wrote:
| 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.
| sgarman wrote:
| So out them?
| diordiderot wrote:
| The punishment for betraying public trust should be severe.
| spacemanmatt wrote:
| Sounds like a vote against qualified immunity. I'm in.
| quercusa wrote:
| An outlier for Philadelphia? Probably not.
|
| For example
|
| _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._
|
| https://6abc.com/jury-deliberations-bobby-henon-johnny-
| dough...
| j_walter wrote:
| Probably not the norm...but there are plenty of examples of
| people willing to cheat the system...
|
| https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2022/06/0.
| ..
| codegeek wrote:
| This link not only has a paywall but also has terrible dark
| pattern with popup etc and hijacking the back button. Just FYI.
| bruceb wrote:
| Ah, I trimmed the url a bit, there was no paywall on original
| link. Will try to find again.
| stock_toaster wrote:
| Wikipedia page[1] has good info too.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Myers_(Pennsylvani
| a_po...
| superb-owl wrote:
| bewaretheirs wrote:
| 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.,)
| bbarnett wrote:
| And, while I think you hint at this, every single voter must
| be able to understand the entire process.
|
| The manual process as described? Everyone gets it, can watch
| it in action. Code, encryption, are understood by few,
| auditable by fewer.
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
| mypalmike wrote:
| 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.
| jcpham2 wrote:
| 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.
| jandrese wrote:
| 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.
| superb-owl wrote:
| I'm not talking about inventing a new method for encryption.
| I'm talking about something along the lines of:
|
| * Every registered voter gets an encryption key
|
| * When you vote, your vote is encrypted with the key
|
| * A list of everyone who voted, along with their encrypted
| vote, is semi-publicly available (like current voter
| registration lists [1])
|
| * Anyone can check who they're registered as having voted for
| (but the encryption keeps it private)
|
| * Anyone who wants to verify the election results can request
| the voter registration list, and ask some randomly sampled
| subset to verify their vote
|
| [1] https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-
| campaigns/access...
| RcouF1uZ4gsC wrote:
| This has the downside that a person can prove how they
| voted.
|
| This opens it to risk of bribery and coercion.
|
| Right now, you can prove that you voted, but not actually
| how you voted.
| anderskaseorg wrote:
| 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.
| heftig wrote:
| I think existing systems like Helios have already solved
| this problem?
| anderskaseorg wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_paper
| s/a...
| adolph wrote:
| 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._
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_ballot
| cyberlurker wrote:
| Passing it would be seen as an admission by one side that this
| kinda stuff happens often enough to warrant it.
| vt85 wrote:
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| nabla9 wrote:
| > 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.
| darawk wrote:
| > 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| _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?
| happyopossum wrote:
| 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!
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > I don't even know how you'd generate fake votes in the first
| place
|
| > You can't just make people up!
|
| > You certainly can't just make up a final tally
|
| > the paper ballots have to match up
|
| It seems you live in an area with auditable physical copies of
| the poll receipts. Good. That should be the standard.
|
| But 5 states still don't do that:
| https://www.axios.com/2018/02/16/five-states-without-paper-t...
|
| And I seem to recall things were pretty disheartening
| nationwide in the early-2000s too:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2004_us_voting_machine_pr...
| ncmncm wrote:
| California was one of those places until Kamala Harris fixed
| it.
|
| No doubt the machines were sold off to one of those. Should
| have scrapped them.
| stretchwithme wrote:
| How did she fix it?
| dangoor wrote:
| Georgia replaced their machines with ones that have paper
| trails.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| Good. I never understood a rationale for not having a paper
| trail.
| serf wrote:
| it's a tasty option when done perfectly, in a perfect
| world, in a vacuum and the voters are perfectly spherical
| cows.
|
| Counting ballots by hand sucks. Moving paper ledgers
| physically sucks.
|
| Unfortunately it has yet to be demonstrated that it can
| be done well, let alone perfectly.
| [deleted]
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Philly is on that list though according to that article.
| shkkmo wrote:
| From an earlier press release:
| https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-ele...
|
| > 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| happyopossum wrote:
| 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.
| dreamcompiler wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://blockclubchicago.org/2018/10/24/chicago-and-rigged-e...
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| subsubzero wrote:
| 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!
| wahern wrote:
| "Firsthand" and "Twitter" seem more than a little
| incongruent. But in any event, these claims were likely
| false. See
| https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2020/11/05/did-a-
| dead-11... and https://www.bbc.com/news/election-
| us-2020-54874120
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| kevinmchugh wrote:
| 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.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _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:
|
| https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/democrat-rita-hart-ends-
| elec...
|
| _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.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| > 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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?
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| _Part of your premise is that you can know when an
| election is going to come down to 6 votes._
|
| Assuming that's true, you just need to know when it is
| going to be close, and that only requires polling, not
| prescience.
|
| https://www.thegazette.com/article/polling-shows-
| iowa-2nd-di...
|
| _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.
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| You don't have to make people up. There there plenty of dead
| people on rhe registry. Although they are supposedly doing
| better about that lately.
| dionian wrote:
| The voter rolls are filled with non-existent voters and that's
| what's used to generate fake votes. That's why certain people
| in DC resist cleaning them up - it'll hurt them at election
| time
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| nostromo wrote:
| There's two steps to the process:
|
| 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.
|
| The NY Times wrote about the possibility for mail-in voter
| fraud back in 2012:
| https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
| jbritton wrote:
| 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.
| the_snooze wrote:
| 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.
| xadhominemx wrote:
| No, because it's easy to check if your vote has been
| registered. If someone threw away a ton of ballots, people
| would notice.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| bonzini wrote:
| > how they find the hundreds of people to monitor the
| dozens of polling places
|
| Do they pay them?
| hef19898 wrote:
| I think they are volunteers, not sure if they are paid a
| nominal amount so.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > almost certainly occurred
|
| Citation, please.
| mmcgaha wrote:
| Let me google that for you:
|
| https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2022/02/24/macomb-county-
| nursin...
|
| https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2020/11/12/texas-nursing-
| home-w...
|
| https://www.apr.org/2007-07-13/two-charged-with-voter-
| fraud-...
|
| https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/4th-resident-of-
| villages-f...
|
| https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/wisconsin-sheriff-
| wants...
|
| https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/vote-fraud-election-
| sen...
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| 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.
| mistermann wrote:
| > No one claims fraud doesn't happen.
|
| 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.
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| 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).
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| telotortium wrote:
| _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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| adamrezich wrote:
| 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.
| kortilla wrote:
| Is it possible that the solutions in other countries are
| not optimal?
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| 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.
| girvo wrote:
| You're right, the reverse, ie "every Australian (etc)"
| wanting to make a better life for themselves in the US
| does never happen.
|
| You can't start your topic broad "every American" and
| then use the much less broad amount of immigrants to
| "prove" your point.
|
| Because "every American" means I can't bring up the non-
| zero amount of Americans that _do_ emigrate elsewhere.
|
| Your entire argument is in bad faith.
| KptMarchewa wrote:
| There's no optimal in policy. We're all humans.
|
| Hoverer, US is weirdly stuck in local maximums in a lot
| of places.
| girvo wrote:
| 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!
| mistermann wrote:
| 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?
| xadhominemx wrote:
| 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).
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| the_snooze wrote:
| 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?
| cogman10 wrote:
| 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| tomp wrote:
| Most other democratic countries (1) require photo IDs for
| voting, and (2) don't support postal voting at scale.
|
| Either (1) or (2) not being true makes elections way less
| secure.
| dismantlethesun wrote:
| 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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).
| giantg2 wrote:
| With registered voter turnout typically around 50% or less,
| you wouldn't need to exceed 100%.
| klipklop wrote:
| 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?
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| yencabulator wrote:
| > 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.
| chki wrote:
| > 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.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| You have to weigh the good with the bad.
|
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| This isn't a thread about mail-in voting.
| Vladimof wrote:
| > In Chicagoland, every polling place has a team of 4-5 judges,
| and they all have to sign off on the final election result
|
| but what if they are all from the same party?
| Retric wrote:
| These where primaries, so it's not clear why the other party
| would care.
| Vladimof wrote:
| Technically, they still could be all from one party
| checking the result for the other party.... even in
| primaries.
| tomrod wrote:
| Does political affiliation affect integrity somehow?
| BitwiseFool wrote:
| >"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.
| RHSeeger wrote:
| If you need all the members to sign off,
|
| And a member of party X is more likely to be willing to
| cheat to benefit party X,
|
| Then having all the members that need to sign off be from
| party X does indeed increase the ability to cheat for party
| X.
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| It certainly creates conflicts of interest with the goal of
| an election, or rather a mixed group decreases the
| motivations for collusion
| tptacek wrote:
| 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.
| curiousllama wrote:
| > After receiving payments ranging from between $300 to $5,000
| per election from Myers, Demuro would add fraudulent votes on the
| voting machine
|
| The most staggering thing for me is how _tiny_ the payments are
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| brk wrote:
| 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.
| extheat wrote:
| It's a lot safer to keep the payments small. Less suspicion,
| less at stake, both parties still win at end of the day.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| That's because you most likely work in tech and not local
| government where the salaries are much lower
| eschulz wrote:
| 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.
| e_i_pi_2 wrote:
| (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
| eschulz wrote:
| 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.
| toss1 wrote:
| Indeed!
|
| 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.
| stingraycharles wrote:
| 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.
| lallysingh wrote:
| 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.
| a_e_k wrote:
| Calvin and Hobbes called this thirty years ago.
|
| https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/04/08
| notinfuriated wrote:
| Wild. I don't think $10 would get me to the front of the line
| reliably at good restaurants.
| lspears wrote:
| It works to skip the karaoke line!
| anm89 wrote:
| Keep in mind, this was a year ago, before the average plumber
| charged $500 / hour
| [deleted]
| ncmncm wrote:
| If you are planning to commit election fraud, the first step is
| always to accuse the other party of what you are about to do.
| OptionX wrote:
| Wonder how much coverage this is going to get.
|
| Especially wonder how much it would get if it was a republican.
| hitovst wrote:
| 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.
| JaceLightning wrote:
| "Our elections are safe and secure"
|
| No, Facebook is safe and secure. Our elections are neither of
| those things.
| hintymad wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| It sounds like you're advocating for something like the SAFE
| Act:
|
| https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/2722
|
| 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.
| hintymad wrote:
| 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.
| rayiner wrote:
| 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.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| You brought race into the discussion, not me.
|
| 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).
| rickbutton wrote:
| hint: they aren't being honest
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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".
| jaywalk wrote:
| It's not just about electronic voting machines, at all.
| hintymad wrote:
| It's not about us vs them. People are labeled "right wing"
| when they ask questions, regardless of their political
| affiliation. I think that's wrong.
| SmellTheGlove wrote:
| 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.
| shortstuffsushi wrote:
| > 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?
| travisathougies wrote:
| > 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.
| travisathougies wrote:
| 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| travisathougies wrote:
| > 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Perfect is the enemy of good.
| travisathougies wrote:
| > 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.
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| > 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.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| Right wing politicians in congress keep blocking attempts
| to establish auditable elections based on paper ballots,
| and are routinely caught sabotaging election systems at the
| state level.
|
| Your friends may be for election integrity, but the people
| they're voting for most certainly are not.
| travisathougies wrote:
| > 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.
| philjohn wrote:
| 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.
| adolph wrote:
| _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._
|
| Source:
| https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/michael_myers/40809...
|
| More on ABSCAM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abscam
|
| _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._
| rayiner wrote:
| 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.
| rhodorhoades wrote:
| dralley wrote:
| >Multiple pieces of analysis
|
| Cough them up, then.
| mindslight wrote:
| 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.
| rayiner wrote:
| 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.)
| mindslight wrote:
| 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.
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > a few isolated instances of innocent people being falsely
| convicted
|
| And otherwise abused by the legal system. It's not a few
| isolated instances; plenty of research shows that it is
| widespread and systematic.
| jaywalk wrote:
| > 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.
| slg wrote:
| >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".
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| unsure the exact math here, but certainty isn't the
| required bar for an investment, just positive EROI .
| slg wrote:
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| 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.
| slg wrote:
| 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.
| maerF0x0 wrote:
| > 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.
| slg wrote:
| >> 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.
| hammock wrote:
| >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?
| the_snooze wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| > 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.
| vharuck wrote:
| 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."
|
| https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/11/trump-
| law...
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| https://www.phillymag.com/news/2020/11/05/election-
| watchers-...
|
| 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.
| jessfyi wrote:
| Except the entire process was being recorded and that
| never happened. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-
| factcheck-philadelphia-po...
|
| 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.
| hammock wrote:
| >such a conspiracy would produce some kind of written
| communications or financial transactions.
|
| How would we ever know if those exist?
| weakfish wrote:
| How do you know anything exists?
| slg wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| all2 wrote:
| 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.
| pvg wrote:
| _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.
| anonymouse008 wrote:
| I wonder if Watergate's operations continued uninterrupted
| by 'you pesky kids (reporters)' what kind of innovations
| would be expected in that market?
| pvg wrote:
| I don't understand what this means, sorry.
| mod wrote:
| I don't think concrete facts are generally arrived upon by
| appearances. I consider your first sentence self-
| contradicting.
| javagram wrote:
| > 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.
| willcipriano wrote:
| > 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?
| camgunz wrote:
| 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.
| the_snooze wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-
| judge-ele...
| willcipriano wrote:
| 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?
| HideousKojima wrote:
| 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.
| the_snooze wrote:
| 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.
| willcipriano wrote:
| 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?
| the_snooze wrote:
| >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?
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YJyQbckMDw
| [deleted]
| jacobriis wrote:
| 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."
|
| Source: https://www.dos.pa.gov/VotingElections/OtherServi
| cesEvents/D...
| the_snooze wrote:
| 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.
| creato wrote:
| 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.
| camgunz wrote:
| It is mostly a stand-in for voter suppression. It's not
| useful otherwise.
| camgunz wrote:
| 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.
| j_walter wrote:
| >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.
| philjohn wrote:
| Have you read the discussion D'Souza has with someone at the
| WaPo?
|
| There are holes in 2000 mules you could drive a big rig
| through.
| all2 wrote:
| Holes in the methodology are small enough, though, to
| convict January 6 rioters/protestors/whatever-they're-
| called-now.
| j_walter wrote:
| philjohn wrote:
| 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.
| j_walter wrote:
| >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...
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| 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.
| orblivion wrote:
| Why would you commit fraud if you didn't think you could tip
| the results? Unless you're also saying that everybody who does
| this is stupid.
| the_cat_kittles wrote:
| 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.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| 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.
| jacquesm wrote:
| 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.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| >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.
|
| [1]https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-
| american-c...
| democratiepart wrote:
| 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.
| ronald_raygun wrote:
| > No, it doesn't happen often enough to undermine the integrity
| of elections in the aggregate.
|
| Nah election fraud matters pretty materially. If it werent for
| this rigged election, we would have never gotten the 1964 civil
| rights bill
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal
| Proven wrote:
| egberts1 wrote:
| Of course, Wikipedia has over 200 citations of elections-gone-
| wrong.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_the_Unite...
| [deleted]
| daenz wrote:
| They make it sound so simple:
|
| 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?
| gumby wrote:
| > This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so
| easy?
|
| Apparently this demonstrates the power of the invisible hand of
| the marketplace.
| jokethrowaway wrote:
| Very true.
|
| 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.
| guerrilla wrote:
| Indeed, confederations of liquid democracies. The only
| people to make a decision should be the ones effected by
| it.
| daenz wrote:
| Now try to define "affected" and that's where the war
| will be fought.
| guerrilla wrote:
| 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.
| gumby wrote:
| 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.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I was going to say, with the increase in mobility today
| it could be a nightmare having a patchwork of laws at the
| municipal level.
| xpe wrote:
| A joke, I'll bet, but that is not what Adam Smith meant.
| gumby wrote:
| Most of the contemporary zealous acolytes of Adam Smith
| would be shocked and angered by what he actually wrote,
| were they to try reading it.
| the_snooze wrote:
| 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.
|
| [1] https://www.vote.pa.gov/About-Elections/Pages/Post-
| Election-...
| hammock wrote:
| Could it be widespread?
| tamaharbor wrote:
| No, this never happens. You must be a racist, or
| insurrectionist, or just deplorable. /s
| routerl wrote:
| > 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.
|
| We lost, by the way.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| jaywalk wrote:
| 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.
| bpicolo wrote:
| > 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
|
| Sure there is
| LadyCailin wrote:
| 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".
| cyberge99 wrote:
| Tabulator could have printed a receipt from scantron
| sheet feed.
| tunesmith wrote:
| 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| dismantlethesun wrote:
| 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| dismantlethesun wrote:
| 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.
| xienze wrote:
| > With that invitation, or passport or ID
|
| 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| hamburglar wrote:
| 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| hamburglar wrote:
| 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.
| ModernMech wrote:
| > 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.
| xienze wrote:
| > 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.
| tunesmith wrote:
| 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?
| tunesmith wrote:
| > But the way in which it's done and the actual impact
| make clear it is done with the intent of disenfranchising
| minorities.
|
| Which is racist.
| jaywalk wrote:
| 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| seoaeu wrote:
| 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
| ohgodplsno wrote:
| 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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| 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.)
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| r00fus wrote:
| 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.
| hef19898 wrote:
| 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.
| seoaeu wrote:
| Having two rounds is _by definition_ not first past the
| post. And in fact that is the difference that makes it
| possible for third and fourth parties to get non-trivial
| support in the first round.
| abeyer wrote:
| > 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.
| seoaeu wrote:
| > 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
| sidlls wrote:
| 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.
| seoaeu wrote:
| 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?
| wholinator2 wrote:
| I thought that they were simultaneously suggesting that
| funding be increased in a concrete and not easily reverse
| way. But I do see your point
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway0a5e wrote:
| >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)
| yakak wrote:
| The risk clearly doesn't fit the crime. A risk of being hung
| for treason is harder to recruit for.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| The list of people actually convicted of treason in the US
| is very short, and a subsequent execution hasn't happened
| since the mid 1800s.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_convicted_of_t
| r...
| cultartawayyyi wrote:
| "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.
| unethical_ban wrote:
| 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.
| cultartawayyyi wrote:
| 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.
| yakak wrote:
| 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.
| mmaurizi wrote:
| "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.
| rhino369 wrote:
| 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.
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| 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.
| all2 wrote:
| 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.
| LocalPCGuy wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.azmirror.com/2021/09/10/voter-canvass-
| features-b...
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| And get rejected from publications that didn't bother to
| do the research themselves but "know" that Voter Fraud is
| a myth? No thanks.
| robocat wrote:
| The voter list should contain canaries and honeypots.
| Known dead people or fake people, and if they vote then
| fraud has been detected.
| codedokode wrote:
| > Why is it so easy?
|
| 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.
| upsidesinclude wrote:
| Your ideology allows you to lie and cheat because you _know_
| that outcome is what 's _best_
| dqpb wrote:
| At least they were caught.
| bigwavedave wrote:
| > 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.
| ellopoppit wrote:
| >This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so
| easy?
|
| Why does a conspiracy involving only 3 people seem so
| impossible to you?
| iepathos wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| cge wrote:
| 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.
| tptacek wrote:
| EJs pretty much everywhere are volunteers.
|
| 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.
|
| It doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a crime.
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| And for so little money! $300 to $5000.
| izzydata wrote:
| I wonder if his actions managed to change the outcome of any
| election.
| sparrish wrote:
| He clearly thought so or he wouldn't have taken the risk/spent
| the money.
| oliv__ wrote:
| Would he get bribed if they didn't?
| mikeyouse wrote:
| 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.
| dsaavy wrote:
| 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.
| jl6 wrote:
| Makes you wonder what the point was if it was so lacking in
| impact.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| 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.
| cycomanic wrote:
| 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.
| troad wrote:
| 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.
| bumblebritches5 wrote:
| jl2718 wrote:
| So basically, every election within the statute of limitations.
| How far back does this really go?
| brailsafe wrote:
| 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.
| mercy_dude wrote:
| systemvoltage wrote:
| 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.
| vkou wrote:
| > For some reason progressives are against voter ID laws.
|
| For some reason, conservatives are against making voter ID
| easy to get for people they dislike.
|
| If everyone had easy access to getting eligible ID,
| progressives would stop opposing insane voter ID laws.
| jcranmer wrote:
| > 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.
| willcipriano wrote:
| > 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.
| bruceb wrote:
| How would ID laws stopped this?
| systemvoltage wrote:
| I'm just ranting on general election integrity. Probably
| should have commented at the top level, too late.
| jtdev wrote:
| mulmen wrote:
| > 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.
| Georgelemental wrote:
| > 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.
| mulmen wrote:
| 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.
| tyen_ wrote:
| > It's a barrier for poor people to exercise their rights.
|
| This is delusional. ID is required for so many daily
| activities and the price of an ID (if they charge for it)
| is less than $10.
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
| jcranmer wrote:
| In Alabama, it's $36.25 (cite:
| https://www.alea.gov/dps/driver-license/license-and-id-
| cards).
| systemvoltage wrote:
| So instead of opposing the entire idea of voter IDs, why
| do we not pass a Federal law that makes getting an ID
| free of charge?
|
| Seems like that's the root cause or the main contention.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| systemvoltage wrote:
| No, I meant, passing a law that says "$0 for all state
| IDs". Not talking about National ID.
| mulmen wrote:
| 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.
|
| When all those maybes line up you get inequality. This is
| well established behavior across the United States. If
| you want to learn more I suggest starting with this:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voting_Rights_Act_of_1965
|
| My thoughts on this have evolved over the years. I
| encourage you to dig deeper into this. Voter ID might not
| do or mean what you think it does.
| skissane wrote:
| > 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]
|
| [0] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-2020-election-
| reveal...
|
| [1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/27/business
| /econ...
|
| [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/28/repu
| blica...
| mulmen wrote:
| Or maybe the Republicans are better at voter suppression
| and that's why you don't see the poor Democratic voters?
| skissane wrote:
| 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.
| mulmen wrote:
| 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.
| skissane wrote:
| > 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 those claims suffer from a serious lack of
| evidence to support them. 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 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.
| jjslocum3 wrote:
| 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.
| mulmen wrote:
| 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 ID_ s that's a
| whole other can of worms.
| eropple wrote:
| If the folks pushing voter IDs were doing so for
| egalitarian reasons, they would be doing this.
|
| They're not.
|
| What's that tell you?
| vkou wrote:
| > make it easier for everyone to get an ID.
|
| 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.
|
| [1]
| https://www.sos.texas.gov/elections/voter/reqabbm.shtml
| adamrezich wrote:
| 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!
| mulmen wrote:
| > 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.
|
| Really hard not to use the "R" word here.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Un
| ite....
| adamrezich wrote:
| > 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,
|
| > blah blah partisan blah blah blah
|
| here's where I'm done engaging--have a good day.
| mulmen wrote:
| > so that only citizens can vote in elections?
|
| This isn't a problem voter ID solves. It is even
| addressed in the wiki!
|
| > hell, at least around here, if you don't want to work
| yet still somehow want to vote for some reason
|
| Why should voting be predicated on employment?
|
| > it is very easy to panhandle $22 in a single day,
|
| Wait whaaaat? Why should I have to _panhandle_ to
| exercise my rights?
|
| > as long as you don't spend it on meth or whatever.
|
| Ah yes "poor people are drug addicts". Nice. Why would
| people with problems want to vote on ways to solve them?
|
| > and here's where I'm done engaging, have a good day.
|
| I mean these are just things that actually happened. I'm
| not sure how pointing at reality is partisan.
| [deleted]
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| > $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).
| corrral wrote:
| 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).
| _-david-_ wrote:
| 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?
| corrral wrote:
| > 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.
| mulmen wrote:
| > Do you think Democrats would be willing to have voter
| ID laws if the post office offered free IDs?
|
| No because proximity to a Post Office isn't a reasonable
| criteria for suppressing a persons right to vote.
|
| Especially because:
|
| > It may not always be the easiest to get
| _-david-_ wrote:
| >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.
| mulmen wrote:
| > 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_sup
| pression_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.
| _-david-_ wrote:
| >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.
| lp0_on_fire wrote:
| 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.
| corrral wrote:
| 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.
| jaywalk wrote:
| The only reason to be against voter ID is to make fraud
| easier. The claimed "reasons" why it's a bad thing are all
| BS. Every single one of them.
|
| A good number of (most?) EU countries ban mail-in ballots as
| well, precisely because of fraud concerns.
| s5300 wrote:
| > 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.
| cmurf wrote:
| The idea that all voter ID laws are (a) the same (b)
| inherently good (c) non-discriminatory, is really ignorant.
|
| https://www.texastribune.org/2016/07/20/appeals-court-
| rules-...
|
| 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.
| astrange wrote:
| It's because the people who want voter ID also want to make
| it harder to get an ID and won't accept student IDs but
| will accept eg your gun club ID.
|
| Banning mail in ballots doesn't sound like much of a good
| policy.
| jaywalk wrote:
| > It's because the people who want voter ID also want to
| make it harder to get an ID
|
| BS.
|
| > and won't accept student IDs.
|
| Nor should they.
|
| > Banning mail in ballots doesn't sound like much of a
| good policy.
|
| Why? Do you disagree that fraud is easier with mail-in
| ballots?
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| pyronik19 wrote:
| vkou wrote:
| By which you surely mean that we watched in real time a
| failed attempt on January 6th to steal the election?
| eropple wrote:
| _> We watched in real time the 2020 election be stolen_
|
| No, you didn't. You have been had. HTH.
| AaronM wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
| tasty_freeze wrote:
| > 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.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_impersonation_(United_S
| t...
| AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote:
| 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.
| tastyfreeze wrote:
| 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.
| jnosCo wrote:
| > 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."
|
| https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-14-634
|
| I'd like to see a more recent study, but analysis shows
| voter ID law impacting
| mulmen wrote:
| Voter fraud is a made up problem. It simply doesn't
| meaningfully exist. We already have guardrails on it.
| They work.
|
| Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppre
| ssion_in_the_Unite... for inspiration on how Voter ID
| laws could be used to suppress votes in a targeted
| manner.
|
| 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.
| Finnucane wrote:
| Fortunately, it does take more than imagination to actually
| demonstrate, it requires facts and evidence.
| pyronik19 wrote:
| [deleted]
| philjohn wrote:
| I have, it has holes big enough to drive a big rig through,
| and has been widely panned by people who know about cell
| phone location tracking.
| themitigating wrote:
| https://www.reuters.com/article/factcheck-usa-mules/fact-
| che...
|
| 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.
| duxup wrote:
| How many occurred?
| mercy_dude wrote:
| 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.
| jtdev wrote:
| president wrote:
| 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.
| pyronik19 wrote:
| Precisely, the fraud is so prevalent and grotesque
| gaslighting is the only mechanism to deal with it.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| 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.
| hedora wrote:
| 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.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| I mean, except for literally all the cases where they do
| investigate and prosecute, such as this very thread that we
| are posting in.
|
| Good thing we have an administration right now that is
| actually doing something the previous administration didn't
| do.
| flyingcircus3 wrote:
| So then what, if not investigations or evidence, has lead
| you to believe that this fraud happened?
| mercy_dude wrote:
| 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.
| flyingcircus3 wrote:
| So much evidence, which was so well reported, that you
| can't be bothered to provide any falsifiable details
| whatsoever.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| 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.
|
| Still, shame on you.
| mercy_dude wrote:
| > not back it up
|
| All you need to do is google. Here is one
| https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/usps-postal-service-
| employe...
| tamaharbor wrote:
| curtis3389 wrote:
| They say /voter/ fraud never happens; this is /election/ fraud.
| programmarchy wrote:
| 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.
| dralley wrote:
| Voter fraud and election fraud are two entirely different
| things.
| daenz wrote:
| 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?
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://apnews.com/article/north-america-donald-trump-us-
| new...
| wumpus wrote:
| > and saying that it doesn't happen?
|
| 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.
| anderskaseorg wrote:
| 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.
| daenz wrote:
| 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).
| anderskaseorg wrote:
| 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.
| daenz wrote:
| 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?
| anderskaseorg wrote:
| 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.
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| 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.
| heretogetout wrote:
| 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.
| notadev wrote:
| 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?
| heretogetout wrote:
| 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?
| anderskaseorg wrote:
| 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.
|
| https://www.democracydocket.com/news/wisconsins-dmv-
| holds-th...
| mikeyouse wrote:
| 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.
| johndfsgdgdfg wrote:
| tamaharbor wrote:
| javagram wrote:
| You thought wrong.
| https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/11/29/true-tale-...
| [deleted]
| Animats wrote:
| This was done by adding votes. The voter counts of poll watchers
| should not have matched those of the election officials. Why
| wasn't that noticed?
| causi wrote:
| Fudging your personal count to make it match means less work
| for you. It could be as simple as that.
| Animats wrote:
| Usually, both parties have poll watchers present. Although
| some local party groups don't bother.
| yonaguska wrote:
| Except that didn't happen in 2020 where poll watchers even
| suspected of not fitting the desired demographic were
| excluded.
|
| And that looks to be a continuing trend judging by stories
| like this.
|
| https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/01/gop-contest-
| electio...
| camgunz wrote:
| It actually seems like there were no poll workers, or they were
| also corrupt:
|
| > Inside the polling place and while the polls were open, Beren
| would advise actual in-person voters to support Myers'
| candidates
|
| Definitely cannot do this.
| jandrese wrote:
| He paid off the guys overseeing the count.
| JamesSwift wrote:
| 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.
| klyrs wrote:
| The US has a perpetually low rate of voter turnout. Seems
| like that would give a pretty big margin to play around in.
| sct202 wrote:
| And it sounds like he was mostly targeting primary
| elections which can be half the turnout of a general
| election.
| yonaguska wrote:
| And updating voter rolls to capture only active voters is a
| contentious issue.
| lesuorac wrote:
| 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.
| codedokode wrote:
| Probably because nobody was watching.
| rayiner wrote:
| 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.
| adbachman wrote:
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| If you have to do it, you can get a little counter doo-dad
| where you press a button and it adds 1.
|
| https://www.forestry-
| suppliers.com/product_pages/products.ph...
|
| The flight attendant definitely counted like 3 times on a
| recent flight I was on though.
| padjo wrote:
| 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.
| eljimmy wrote:
| Interestingly I can't find any news about his sentencing. Did
| it ever occur?
| yegle wrote:
| https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-
| ele... linked from the article.
| eljimmy wrote:
| That's the conviction. He was supposed to be sentenced June
| 30th, 2020.
| tootie wrote:
| jstream67 wrote:
| Election fraud should be concerning to everyone, not just
| conservatives.
|
| I'm also not sure what you are stating is racist conspiracy
| nonsense - I only see one comment from OP at the moment.
| tootie wrote:
| 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.
| DharmaPolice wrote:
| 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.
| happyopossum wrote:
| > racism
|
| Odd that you'd throw that in there - care to explain how the
| linked comment is racist?
| kfrzcode wrote:
| There's nothing there; tootie is just slandering
| lofatdairy wrote:
| 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.
| [deleted]
| bavell wrote:
| 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.
| peyton wrote:
| > payments ranging from between $300 to $5,000 per election
|
| Surprisingly affordable relative to today's campaign budgets.
| koolba wrote:
| Everything is cheaper when you get it at just the right point
| of the supply chain.
| barbacoa wrote:
| Mark Zuckerberg spend $400MM to get influence over state
| election offices in key swing states.
|
| Makes you wonder.
| hackernewds wrote:
| Proof for this claim?
| spaceships wrote:
| 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"
|
| https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/943242106/how-private-
| money-f...
| barbacoa wrote:
| It has also been criticized for its strings-attached
| funding with clear partisan aims of influence.
|
| https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/06/
| 07/...
| [deleted]
| Imnimo wrote:
| 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!
| dghughes wrote:
| Years ago it was just a case of beer.
| gadders wrote:
| javagram wrote:
| 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.
| tyen_ wrote:
| AndyMcConachie wrote:
| This guy's name is Michael Myers. Not to be confused with Mike
| Myers of Austin Power's fame.
| Maursault wrote:
| Michael Myers was the murderously insane Halloween character.
|
| Also, the indicted former politician is 79 years young.
| helloguillecl wrote:
| 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.
| gtirloni wrote:
| You can have electronic voting machines print a paper record
| which can be counted in case of issues.
| wjmao88 wrote:
| 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.
| probably_wrong wrote:
| 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.
| maxerickson wrote:
| It's very difficult to provide an easy to use vote receipt
| that can't also be used for tampering (threats or bribes
| for the wrong/right votes).
|
| (Maybe I am reading too much meaning into "recorded
| correctly")
| mgraczyk wrote:
| I have this in San Francisco, although I've done the
| "lookup" part only by email.
| mgraczyk wrote:
| 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.
| unclebucknasty wrote:
| 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).
| rdtsc wrote:
| > 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.
| roleplayer wrote:
| > Great, so now this gives extra credence to the "the election
| was stolen" narrative.
|
| Did you look at the data at all? I am curious if you,
| individually, even looked at it at all even once
| mod wrote:
| 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.
| hitovst wrote:
| As long as liars can claim that everything they oppose is
| bigoted, and adults listen to them, your hopes won't be
| recognized.
| CircleSpokes wrote:
| >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.
| xthrowawayxx wrote:
| Crazy how this can happen in the safest and most secure elections
| in US history. I wonder what they were like before!
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