Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate | Hacker News Reader

Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

thedailybeast.com

156 pointsclumsysmurf145 comments

Anyone with half a brain knows that these purges are designed to advantage a side not protect the system. I read an article the other day that stated that some America's voting system had essentially been compromised on many levels. It made me think about why so many of our polls have, in the last few years, been so off the mark. Now I'm beginning to think it's not because the polling models suddenly don't work. It is quite possibly something more nefarious than that.

Yeah, I remember the outrage when the original Diebold hacking announcement was made in the Bush Jr era. The concerns in that were never addressed and doubtless things have simply since got worse.

If Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election, they could bring some of their engineering prowess to bear on defeating systematic voting machine fraud.

> Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election

I'm still surprised by the anger for this. For the purposes of the viewer, Google and Facebook are effectively media companies. By that measure, all media companies bias elections heavily during election cycles. This is done both with content and well as paid advertising.

But to "make amends" for something sounds as if their influence is either unprecedented or morally wrong. Perhaps the argument is that the bias from international influences was wrong. Something else entirely?

I suppose i fail to see where the real complaint here is. What behavior or lapse triggered these accusations?

> if their influence is either unprecedented

It is. That's the entire point of the "filter bubble" argument that is coming up some 8-10 years old now.

There are some (poor, outdated, ineffective) checks and balances on the use of traditional media for political advertising. The new media successfully lobbied to be even excluded from those. Additionally, a lot of people who are not in this business were surprised about the extent.

>"But to "make amends" for something sounds as if their influence is either unprecedented or morally wrong."

I think we're too early in Mueller's investigation to definitively be able to say whether their influence was morally or legally wrong, or whether actions of employees/executives of those companies were morally or legally wrong.

What does the fact that they don't do so, tell you?

>If Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election.

Since when has Google wanted to make amends for biasing the election? Aren't we quick to forget Eric Schmidt was all in on attempting to bias the election in the direction he wanted. Timshel/THE GROUNDWORK are and were nothing more than tools for the DNC to manipulate the electorate

Does Fox News bias the election? Should it be required to make amends?

Do you think it has more, or less influence then a 100K spend Facebook ad campaign by Russia?

Way less obviously there are laws to help prevent foreign actors from injecting money and influence in to our elections. Which is why there are bipartisan congressional hearings on an unprecedented attack.

I understand that this is illegal. What I don't understand is why domestic manipulation of elections isn't. Eric Schmidt and Rupert Murdoch don't have the interests of the US in mind any more then Putin does.

Just because it's quite precedented doesn't make it right.

Nevermind the US government, and its agencies manipulating elections throughout the world going on 70 years

>domestic manipulation of elections

You mean campaigning?

Rupert Murdoch isn't himself running for president, but it's pretty clear that he is trying to manipulate the election into a particular outcome.

All the same arguments for why Putin's involvement should be illegal can also be levied against him.

> engineering prowess to bear on defeating systematic voting machine fraud

Simple, don't use fancy electronic voting machines. There's really no benefit.

That isn't a systemic solution and this is a systemic problem.

It's not a "the engineering isn't sufficiently sophisticated and cutting edge" problem.

Everyone wants in on the exiting problem solving portion of the the issue, few people are willing (or have the time available) to sit in on the vote process and procedure oriented bureaucratic election bodies, even fewer still are allowed to be appointed onto the boards that aren't vetted by the major parties.

I agree. The media seems to mainly focus on voter purging and whatnot when it tends to favor the GOP, and not looking much at the other side. But it's happening with Democrats, too. The elites must know about how vulnerable these systems really are, and they're using it to their advantage.

http://www.wnyc.org/story/city-board-elections-admits-it-bro...

...do you realize that the story you linked to explicitly involved purging Democratic voters? This really isn't a "both sides do it" problem.

The 2016 polling models were pretty good, or at least, as good as they are usually[1]. The problem is, it was a very close race by electoral college standards. Trump ultimately won by 80,000 votes in three states in an election with 136m votes cast[2]. So the 'deciding' votes were just 0.06% of the vote total.

I think we can have it both ways. Voter suppression is being done and we have statistical heats in competitive races due to how poorly designed the Electoral College is. This mix is pretty tough to work with.

Probably more reason to abandon the Electoral College outright. The popular candidate lost even though she have 3m more votes. How can pollsters be expected to work properly with such an irrational system? How can they predict where .06% percent of a vote will swing spread across three competitive states?

[1] https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-state-of-the-polls-...

[2] http://www.weeklystandard.com/the-election-came-down-to-7774...

It would take a Constitutional Amendment to get rid of the Electoral College. That’s 2/3rd of both houses of Congress and 2/3rds of the State legislatures.

Better to call a third Constitutional Convention.

There is another way to get a similar effect.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

has something changed since a bunch of ladies got a constitutional amendment passed banning everyone's favorite beverage and the federal government's main source of income?

say what you will about the temperance movement, they made shit happen.

Lawrence Lessig is trying to challenge not the Electoral College directly but the winner-takes-all way of selecting electors in court, arguing that the Bush v Gore precedent of equal protection taking precedent over the states right to run elections as they see fit should apply also to the winne-takes-all selection of electors.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-time-has-come-reform-the-e...

I have no idea what the chances of success are, but it's an interesting argument.

The unfortunate irony is that 2/3 of state legislatures will never vote to abolish the electoral college in favor of the popular vote, because a vast majority of states get relatively more voting power than they would with the popular vote, since every state gets a minimum of 3 electoral votes no matter how small their population is. This comes at the expense of the few most populous states (e.g. California), which are severely disenfranchised.

I wonder if we will ever see an effort to exploit this by having the ruling party start splitting the states friendly to them into multiple smaller states in order to get more electoral votes and more senate seats on their side. It seems that creating a new state requires a 2/3 majority in both houses and the signature of the president [1], so this seems unlikely to come into play any time soon.

[1]: https://people.howstuffworks.com/new-state-in-us.htm

My own state of Vermont has signed on to this [1] particular proposition, so no, not every tiny state demands that it have a voice disproportionate with its size.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

Hawaii, too.

If the electoral college did go away, I wonder if it would end up actually increasing the animosity between the coasts and 'fly over country'. Fair or not, the current system does appear to serve as a bit of a pressure relief valve. Allowing things to escalate to the level where the urban/rural divide becomes so great that one or both sides decides it's time to break the country apart is unlikely to have a better outcome than the last time we arrived at this point, even if on a different path and for different reasons.

Pretty much. I highly suspect the shit security of the voting system is by design, not some 'accident.'

"A side". Lets call a Republican a Republican. Same for gerrymandering. If you can't win fairly, win at any cost.

De rigueur pointer to a discussion of the birthday paradox for those who don't understand why the combination of first name, last name, and birth date is an unavoidably flawed way of uniquely identifying individuals: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/bring-science-hom....

Personal anecdote: my parents used a pediatrician who identified minor patients by first + last + birth month. The office had to start using middle initial as well to disambiguate me from another patient.

Separate personal anecdote. My wife changed gynecologists after receiving a message on our answering machine with very sensitive and concerning medical data that was not for her.

She hadn't even seen the doctor in question for more than 9 months, had never had any indication of the problems in question (but had had tests done that could have identified such) and was generally thoroughly freaked out by this. Turns out the practice had another patient with the same name and was just a little sloppy about which person got called.

Natural keys are no substitute for unique fully synthetic identifiers...

Synthetic identifiers SHOULD identify zero or one entities (zero if the reference is not presently valid).

Upon lookup, /verification/ should still occur at an operator level.

Lawsuit was filed shortly after SB 442 was passed (which is what allowed the process to begin): http://www.naacp.org/latest/naacp-files-lawsuit-indiana-unla...

Sadly, it will have to work its way through the court while names continue to be purged.

Doesn't have to, the NAACP applied for an injunction that would stop the purges while the case is making its way through the court. It's basically the first step any time a law or something like this is challenged in the court.

Couldn't find any follow up articles from a (admittedly super cursory) search saying if it was granted though.

This is a crime. The power to unregister voters must be forcibly taken away from states; especially red states, since they are the only ones abusing this power.

It should require federal action, instead.

Well that's a non-starter, I'm sure people are de-registered for perfectly legitimate reasons all the time. But yes clearly this is an egregious abuse of power. Here in the UK local councillors have been jailed and punitively fined for pursuing voter registration and de-registration policies that were politically motivated. It's considered a serious crime.

> It should require federal action

Shooting from the hip is a good way to trash a democracy. What you're proposing would allow a single, centralized actor to purge voters from the rolls. De-centralised systems will always have longer, more-idiotic tails. That's the tradeoff for their robust central tendencies.

Most countries have centralised voter registration. Often tied to ID and other registration systems.

> Most countries have centralised voter registration

Most democracies haven't lasted more than a century. De-centralisation is an annoying but core feature of American democracy. It's wise to be conservative when discussing its dismissal, particularly in respect of something as fundamental as voting.

New Zealand was one of the first countries to offer universal adult suffrage in 1893. Which is a decent definition of a modern democracy. Sweden, where I live, was a bit late and got it voted on in 1919 and the first election in 1921. So just under a century now.

I'm not saying centralized voting is incompatible with democracy. (It isn't.) I'm objecting to arguments in the form of "because most countries do X, we should too" when it comes to voting. The sample of old democracies isn't large enough to draw much from alone.

Note that the Voting Rights Act was an act of federal oversight over voting. I fully agree with it. If you get a chance to read its drafting, please do. It's careful, extending only where necessary, defaulting to the status quo wherever possible.

American democracy has a myriad of problems, maybe keeping the status quo is the worst of all options.

Was America actually a democracy prior to the voting rights act of 1965? (Not trolling, this is a critical part of the issue, the extent to which black people could actually participate in said democracy)

And by extension: Is it a democracy right now? Seeing as a good portion of convicted felons are not allowed to vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felony_disenfranchisement#Curr...

"Stable, prosperous" stands in for "democracy" in most discussions, this one included. Things that look like democracy (peaceful succession, generally non-violent political competition, an electorate too vast to bribe outside policy channels, checks and balances, et cetera) simply have the best track record in achieving this aim.

> "Stable, prosperous" stands in for "democracy" in most discussions

"But 'glory' doesn't mean 'a nice knock-down argument'," Alice objected.

"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean- neither more nor less."

I can see where you're coming from, and it's the view that has led the US to support undemocratic rightwing parties over democratic leftwing ones in a lot of places. Including some parts of the US.

> generally non-violent political competition

The US is a little strange on this one, in that armed revolution against the government seems to be something that people talk about all the time but never do.

Since you’re asking a reasonable question...

the probable answer is somewhere around 85% “yes”. And about 15% “f$&@ no!”

We could retain a decentralized system and all its benefits if there were federal oversight.

Someone has to stop Kris Kobach, basically.

Software means one idiot's algorithm can quickly become every idiot's algorithm.

That said, the urge to federalize everything is troublesome. Democrats want to protect Alabamians from Alabama, but who's gonna protect us when Alabama takes over the federal government?

De-centralization at the very least makes it easier to fix mistakes piecemeal, even if it doesn't prevent everybody from making the same mistake.

One benefit of the electoral college is that it compartmentalizes voter fraud to the state in which it happens. If I'm a corrupt election official in a state that is going to give a presidential candidate a large margin of victory, I have no incentive to risk being caught manipulating vote tallies (for president). If we ever switch to using the national popular vote instead, think we'd see lots of cases of local officials trying to 'save the country' by offsetting votes from other states that vote primarily for another candidate.

You are misusing the term "voter fraud" here. It doesn't mean what you think it means. "Voter fraud" refers only to intentional voting by people who don't have the right to vote, or who are voting more than once.

There basically is no such thing as "voter fraud"; there have only been a few handfuls of cases in the past two decades, out of billions of votes cast. So it's important not to play fast and loose with the use of this term. Republicans are using professional liars to allege that voter fraud is a real thing. It's not.

I've been wondering whether the way the political war in the US will end will be by a devolution of power to the states, with things like abortion rights, immigration policy, drug policy, health care, the social safety net, and maybe even taxation and some trade policies decided at the state level instead of federally. Just a thought, but it has occurred to me.

This is an action which legitimately needs to be done. I think the larger issue we need to fix is the partisan entrenchment that lets people justify this being done to further their own agendas.

Using targeted disenfranchisement to further your own political goals is quite clearly illegal, we just need to start sending people to jail over it instead of excusing it because the ends justify the means.

This isn't really about "partisan entrenchment"; this is not a bipartisan issue. It's an issue with Republicans. There's no history of any large-scale activity like this from Democrats.

The history of Democrats doing this is so rich there's a Constitutional Ammendment addressing it. The current climate only benefits Republicans purging voters, but both sides manipulate voting to benefit themselves.

Are you referring to the 15th or 17th amendment? Both of those were put in place before political parties switched their ideologies. The Republican Party of the 1800s was the liberal party, not the conservative beast it is today.

Ok, but the claim made above didn't have anything to do with "liberal" and "conservative", it was that the Democratic party has never pursued disenfranchisement policies, which is ahistorical to the point of silliness.

Certainly, the Republican party is currently pursuing disenfranchisement to a shameful degree (and in my opinion voters should send them into the wilderness next year to show that this, and other, behavior is not acceptable), but it's not happening because they're fundamentally less moral than the Democrats. It's happening because they won power soon after a census and while facing a future of strong demographic shifts toward the other side. They have both motive and opportunity to skew the system in their favor.

The Democrats would do the same thing in the same situation. We should be discussing system-level fixes rather than blaming a single party for taking advantage of the current system. The Supreme Court has a chance to start moving this in a better direction this session, and I hope they'll take it.

24th, passed in 1960. Democrats were liberal in many areas at that time, but accepting blacks was a late move by them.

To the best of my knowledge, you are correct that Democrats do not typically purge the rolls. Their strategy is to get dead people to vote, and to bus people around to vote fraudulently in multiple districts.

Of course both parties cheat at as large a scale as they can get away with. If nothing else, if you really must conceptualize the Democrats as wholly good without a spot of blemish on them, then how can you believe there are no Democrats who consider it a moral imperative to cheat as much as they can to prevent Republicans from getting in? To think that either party is so ethical that they would never consider cheating at all is to require not only a very high bar of ethics, but a very particular bar of ethics to be met... in the world of politics, with control over the largest economy in the history of the world at stake. Are all Democrats really that purely deontologists?

There is, of course, zero evidence of any of the allegations you mention.

But there's ample evidence of voter suppression by Republicans.

You need to focus more on the evidence.

  There is, of course, zero evidence of any of the allegations you mention

Actually, there's lots. A Freedom of Information Act disclosure showed Chicago had more votes than voters in 2016 elections: 1,101,178 voters, 1,115,664 votes cast[2].

Detroit: voting machines in more than one third of precints recorded more votes than there were voters!

In California, 11 counties have more registered voters than voting age citizens.

A few other examples:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/in-los-angeles-144-voters-for-...

https://www.theepochtimes.com/chicago-had-more-votes-than-vo...

https://www.theepochtimes.com/stream-of-voter-fraud-cases-em...

https://www.theepochtimes.com/official-thousands-of-indiana-...

Judicial Watch keeps uncovering more and more examples.

Tu quoque. There's plenty of evidence, just like there's been plenty of evidence for years that Hollywood is full of predators. In fact, the same people who saw it as their job to not report anything about the Hollywood issues to you see it as their job to not report anything to you that might make it look like Democrats cheat on the voting.

Everybody knows Hollywood is full of predators. Everyone knows Democratic precincts have lots of dead voters. The only people who don't know are people who are going through a lot of effort to ensure that they don't know.

(Also, in the next couple of months it seems decent odds that "Everyone knows the Clintons are corrupt crooks" is going to be coming out in force. Everyone has known, except those who have all but deliberately sought to keep themselves in the dark.)

To say that there is "no evidence" means either A: you are in a filter bubble several feet thick or B: you are deliberately keeping this information from yourself.

Democrats gerrymander and listen to lobbyists just like republicans, but you're correct that currently this is just an issue of abuse from republicans. Democrats have everything to gain by enfranchising as much people as possible because their voter base is growing faster than the GOP and urban areas tend to have lower turnout and vote more toward Liberals. But if the tables were flipped I'm sure folks would come out saying "We Democrats need to do it for the good of the party!" If you have any doubts look at the behavior of Donna Brazile and Debbie Wasserman Schultz in the last primary election or even the push during the primary that sanders supporters were acting against the good of the party.

Gerrymandering and lobbyists are entirely irrelevant to the issue at hand.

What you are "sure of" is just really invented. There's absolutely no evidence in the recent past of Democrats pulling any crap like this. Certainly not as an intentional, national policy initiative designed to disenfranchise others.

Brazile is similarly irrelevant; the very most she is even alleged to have done is to tell someone about debate questions ahead of time, which would only be considered a serious advantage by people credulous enough to believe that Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders aren't talented and intelligent enough to handle all foreseeable questions quite well. DWS' actions are similarly entirely irrelevant to a discussion of voter suppression.

You do realize that every time a person moves from one state to another that they need to be removed from the voting rolls of the prior state, right?

Honest question, as I’m not sure where you’re headed with this.

New York purged me back in 2010 and I was forced to vote provisional despite voting there consistently for many years. The fail extends all around.

Happened to me in 2016. In Texas, provisional votes are 'reviewed' by an unelected group of inhabitants of the county, in this case a very conservative one.

Guess what? They tossed my vote despite me never having any issues voting in Texas before in a liberal county just to the south, both counties comprising a significant part of Austin.

I feel like folks who arbitrarily strip other citizens of their civil rights should be imprisoned for lengthy periods of incarceration.

And odds are high that your provisional ballot was simply tossed unless you contacted your county Board of Elections, probably with documentation to prove that you were allowed to vote and probably within just a few days after the election.

What happens with provisional ballots is very highly variable, but quite frequently ends up with them simply being tossed.

Are they tossed because of malicious intent, or because they can't change the outcome of the election?

For example, if the outcome of the election has Candidate X ahead of Y by D votes (D = X - Y) and there are less than D provisional ballots to count, is there a reason to count them?

(This being for a simple one-post election; if there are multiple posts where proportion of votes allows for a seat being won/lost by a party, the formula would have to be different.)

> Are they tossed because of malicious intent, or because they can't change the outcome of the election?

Highly variable, but I'm pretty sure it's a lot more to do with the laws of the states than with whether there are enough provisional votes to matter. In looking up some things for an earlier comment I saw one mention of persons casting a provisional ballot then having 3 days to bring proof of eligibility to the county Board of Elections and a separate mention (for another state) of the Board of Elections investigating provisional ballots and informing voters if their ballot was discarded instead.

I'd be surprised if anyplace had a law of "you don't have to count them if there aren't enough to change the outcome," but I've been surprised before.

The headline is wrong. A 99% false positive rate does not mean the software is 99% inaccurate. That's a statistical fallacy.

It's one "kind" of inaccurate, if you will. They're just trying to simplify.

They also explain exactly what they mean in the caption under the title.

I get the obvious point of the article; something is clearly fishy.

However, let’s look at the numbers.

According to https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/IN , the population of Indiana is roughly 6.6 million. Roughly 85% are white ( so about 5.6 million people) and ~15% are non-white ( roughly 1 million people).

Now, the article says “50 percent of U.S. racial minorities share the same last names, as opposed to 30 percent of white Americans”. So just using this as an issue, about 1.7 million whites and 0.5 million non-whites hit the first hurdle.

Honestly, if they really are using this against minorities, then they sure suck at it. They’ve already got MORE THAN 3 TIMES as many white folks as non-whites thru the first hurdle towards un-registering them!!

Serves them right if the article is anywhere close to being correct!

Too add a data point, here is a list of the 10 most common <FirstName, LastName> pairs in the United States.

https://blogs.ancestry.com/cm/calling-james-smith-10-most-co...

I hesitate to guess ethnicity based on names, but I see mostly Caucasian and Latin names (Smith is represented heavily).

Many immigrants and especially African-Americans that are decendants of slaves have/use anglo-ized names rather than traditional names associated with their ethnicity.

I think the goal is less to target racial groups directly, but rather to target those who are less likely to have the desire, the knowledge, or the resources to rectify the issue.

This tends to target the poorest Americans -- either those who can't afford to take time away from work to get the documents required to re-register or those who simply would give up after finding out they are not registered.

It is correct to hesitate to guess ethnicity based on names. Quite sure there are plenty of people of color named Smith and Johnson.

Also, even if these were Caucasian names, the article states that the system disproportionately targets people of color; looking at the 10 most common combinations proves nothing one or another with respect to the assertion in the article.

Yay, more good news.

[sarcasm]

The inaccuracy is a feature, not a bug.

Perhaps more specifically, it's its intended feature, not some goofy side-effect. The whole game here is voter suppression, and this is just one of its many new implementations as heralded under this administration's plan. Can't beat them with Gerrymandering? Deregister people who will vote against you.

If that fails the next step is to launch lawsuits against the voting rights act, and if even that fails then you claim fraud and refuse to recognize the validity of the election, as the Republican Party in Georgia did.

In the US, there's a lot of concern about making it easy for voters to register and stay registered, because in the past officials used this to disenfranchise blacks in the south and minority groups.

I think they are not paying enough attention to the risk of intentional voter fraud (by hostile outsiders) in the modern world. In the last election, Russian election manipulation became a big topic because they hacked e-mail servers and placed some fake news ads. Can you imagine what it would have done to the country if they had actually placed fraudulent votes in key districts? Would you have accepted Donald Trump as president if there had been serious questions about whether he'd been elected by fraudulent votes? This is not really that hard to imagine!

The system today is pretty vulnerable to manipulation by outsiders, and the discussion about voter disenfranchisement is keeping us from fixing that...

That's complete nonsense. The Supreme Court and several district courts have found states like North Carolina to be actively using purges and registration changes for the purpose of disenfranchising voters. Furthermore, if you want to protect the integrity of the vote, registration is the last logical place to start, as in person fraud is vanishingly rare. Only 2 people were charged with doing so in this past election, 2.

If we want to secure the machines, that is a totally different scenario, and unrelated to purging voter rolls.

It doesn't get charged often because there are parties that fight tooth and nail to prevent the implementation of processes that would allow the detection of ineligible voters voting.

It is shown in every election cycle that there are cases of voters voting who should not be because of their citizenship or felon status or voting in multiple districts.

When you say that only 2 have been charged, why is that relevant? What number of people would be disenfranchised if the voting system required photo ID? And I mean people who literally cannot get a photo ID at all, not someone who has to pay $10 or who has to spend a few hours once every four to six years getting their ID renewed.

You're gonna have to provide proof of that.

Proof of what? That voting fraud happens? It assuredly happens, as does more generalized election fraud. In my state of Washington there have been confirmed cases of people voting their dead family member's ballot[1]. And in the 2004 Gubernatorial election there were more illegal votes cast than the margin of victory.[2]

Or do you mean that parties fight against efforts to make the voting process more trustworthy? Feel free to search voter id lawsuit in your favorite search engine.

1: http://www.seattlepi.com/local/article/Dead-voted-in-governo... 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington_gubernatorial_elect...

All of it. Proof that it happens on such a scale as to actually be a problem, and proof that those measures you speak of are not just thinly veiled attempts to disenfranchise voters. If you're going to mess with the people's right to vote, you had better have a damn good reason.

You own second citation contains the following passage:

>ridges removed the five votes from the final count: four for Rossi and one for Ruth Bennett.[32] No evidence was brought before the court of any of the illegal votes benefitted Gregoire.[32] The final margin of victory for Gregoire over Rossi was 133 votes.[33] Rossi did not appeal to the state Supreme Court[34] and the Washington State Republican party settled the case after paying $15,000 in court costs to the Democrats.[35]

Judge Bridges' ruling was seen as a comprehensive defeat for Rossi. The judge admitted nearly every piece of evidence the Republican Party offered and then wrote a thorough, tough opinion rejecting the Republicans' claims (while criticizing the administration of the election, particularly in King County); Rossi was left with very little legal ground for a successful appeal. After receiving such a negative verdict, Rossi declined to appeal to the State Supreme Court, claiming that the political makeup of the Court would make it impossible for him to win, thereby ending all legal challenges to the election of Gregoire as the Governor of Washington

The plaintiffs, the Washington Republican party wasn't able to provide any evidence that improperly cast ballots disproportionately went to the winner of the election. Additionally the judge noted that many of the "illegal ballots" were simply improperly cast provisional ballots. That means that people casting them weren't trying to commit a crime, they just messed up.

Even in this case, there is no proof of substantial voter fraud deciding an election. Or even proof of substantial voter fraud. In fact the judge found that King County had poorly managed the process, which is not a matter of in person fraud, which again, isn't a real problem in the US.

You'll note that I said more general election fraud happens. That was the point of the 2004 election reference.

>Even in this case, there is no proof of substantial voter fraud deciding an election.

Perhaps not voter fraud, but certainly the fact that there were substantially more improperly cast ballots than the outcome of the election makes it impossible to know which candidate received more votes. The judge's ruling does not change reality.

> Perhaps not voter fraud

You said it was an example of voter fraud, I guess expecting no one to be familiar with the case or to bother reading the decision. What is your game here?

> substantially more improperly cast ballots

Then fix the ballots and the procedure for casting them. THat's no reason to purge rolls with a 99% error rate in the purging process.

> The judge's ruling does not change reality.

Neither does you nonsense argument. The ruling does however change settled case law. And wishing it away doesn't make in person voter fraud a problem, which it is not.

You are a liar, and you are spinning the truth. You are clearly a shill for the interests that want to purge rightful voters from the rolls. You are an enemy of democracy.

> It is shown in every election cycle that there are cases of voters voting who should not be because of their citizenship or felon status or voting in multiple districts.

Source? Because every [1] source [2] I find [3] says the opposite.

[1] http://library.uwp.ac.id/digilib/files/disk1/13/--publicadmi...

[2] http://open.mitchellhamline.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=...

[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html

Your own links say that it happens, but then hand wave it away as not significant.

Your [1]:

>However, in only 26 cases was there a conviction or a guilty plea by the citizen.

From your [2]:

>n the state of Washington, for example, six cases of double voting and nineteen instances of individuals voting in the name of the dead yielded twenty-five fraudulent votes

From your [3]:

>Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.

I'm not saying it's widespread, but I suspect that there have been local elections where the outcome was changed due to fraudulent votes. The question is do we care that each fraudulent vote voids the vote of a legitimate voter? And if something such as voter ID requirements were in place, would that have any value? Would requiring states to cross check their voter registration have any value?

As an aside, people seem to enjoy comparing the US to places like Canada and Germany on many different things, health care, progressive tax rates, commitment to green policies, immigration, etc. yet surprisingly no one ever says brings up voter ID, which both of those countries require.

Very few people object to the concept of voter ID. They object to its implementation in the US, which is virtually always done to disenfranchise legitimate voters.

The fight against voter ID laws is really a fight against voter laws accompanied by biased ID requirements and intentional difficulties foisted on the opposition voters.

How exactly can you have a citizen that is unable to get a government-issued ID? That is a failure of the government. They either have the documents and/or government records to prove that they are a citizen, or they're not a citizen.

A law requiring citizens to have IDs to vote is not the problem. The problem is the processes that aren't assisting citizens that struggle to get IDs.

> How exactly can you have a citizen that is unable to get a government-issued ID? That is a failure of the government.

This isn't a prima facie truth. I agree that IDs should not be a challenge to procure. But a reasonable electorate may, as Americans have, choose to prioritize other things.

You're treating it as two separate problems, but in reality they're intertwined.

In an ideal world, you create a voter ID policy in order to ensure the integrity of the vote. You figure out sensible policies to ensure that every eligible voter can vote, and enact them. Separately, you create an ID system that all citizens can use.

In reality, voter ID policies are often created with the intent of making it more difficult for certain groups to vote. They figure out policies to ensure that voters on the "right" side can vote, and voters on the "wrong" side can't. For example, they might accept a form of ID commonly held by one group, and not accept a different form of ID commonly held by the other group. Or they might restrict hours or shut down ID offices in areas populated by the "wrong" side to make it more difficult for them to obtain acceptable ID. Both of these have actually been done in various states.

Voter ID laws and making it more difficult for certain groups to obtain ID are two sides of the same coin here.

Washington uses mail-in ballots. Obviously, filling in, and mailing a ballot for a dead, comatose, or absentee relative is possible.

When we're talking about voter disenfranchisement, though, we're not talking about mail-in ballots. We're talking about people showing up at polling stations, and being unable to vote.

>When we're talking about voter disenfranchisement, though, we're not talking about mail-in ballots. We're talking about people showing up at polling stations, and being unable to vote.

A counted ballot cast by an ineligible voter disenfranchises a eligible voter. How is that less of an issue than preventing someone from casting a ballot in the first place? If the second is a concern then the first should be also.

It's not an issue.

People passing laws that disenfranchise voters aren't doing it in states with mail-in ballots.

Your examples of voter fraud are in a mail-in ballot state. Please provide equivalent, widespread, impactfull, examples in an in-person voting state. You won't because you can't.

Never mind that adding an extra vote to a voting pool does not have the same effect as denying a person the right to vote. Stealing half a penny from a million people is not viewed the same as stealing $5,000 from one person. Perhaps it should be, but its not.

I'm not in favor of preventing legal voters from voting, yet one could just as easily say that you cannot provide an example where preventing people without ID from voting would have widespread impact on the results of an election.

>Never mind that adding an extra vote to a voting pool does not have the same effect as denying a person the right to vote.

It has exactly that effect, unless you are saying that allowing a person to vote and then removing that person's ballot from the ballot box has no effect on their right to vote. Is that what you are saying? Otherwise every ineligible vote for one candidate nullifies a lawful vote for a competing candidate.

  You won't because you can't.

A Freedom of Information Act disclosure showed Chicago had more votes than voters in 2016 elections: 1,101,178 voters, 1,115,664 votes cast[2].

Detroit: voting machines in more than one third of precints recorded more votes than there were voters!

In California, 11 counties have more registered voters than voting age citizens.

A few other examples:

https://www.theepochtimes.com/in-los-angeles-144-voters-for-...

https://www.theepochtimes.com/chicago-had-more-votes-than-vo...

https://www.theepochtimes.com/stream-of-voter-fraud-cases-em...

https://www.theepochtimes.com/official-thousands-of-indiana-...

Is this a problem of people voting when they aren't supposed to, or a problem with the voting machines, or the vote counting process?

Unless the level of criminality by members the public in Chicago is truly mind-boggling (Thousands of people casting dozens of votes each), I'd speculate that the problem lies higher up the tree of elected and unelected office. Or perhaps in the counting methodology used to come up with the number of votes, and number of voters. [1]

But your citation is only corroborated by tabloids, so we will never know.

[1] https://www.snopes.com/more-votes-than-voters-in-detroit/

  Unless the level of criminality by members the public in Chicago is truly mind-boggling

It is and has been for over a century. The tradition of "walking-around money"[1], where public funds are actually used for cash bribes on the streets, is one obvious example.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Street_money

> If the second is a concern then the first should be also

You're ignoring observed magnitudes. If hundreds are dying because cars are going too fast, but two are potentially being saved because the ambulances can go faster, that doesn't make the issues equal.

> It doesn't get charged often because there are parties that fight tooth and nail to prevent the implementation of processes

You're literally fabricating that. Bluntly,you made this up unless you can provide proof to the contrary.

There have been numerous studies that have shown that in person voter fraud is basically non-existent in the US.

Think about the motivation for a moment. Committing this crime has negligible and highly uncertain payoff. The odds that your 1 or few fraudulent votes could tip an election turn on you being able to cast those vostes in precincts that have less than a 1% margin between candidates. If you could even correctly identify those places, you'd still have to go and wait in line in those places, which could take all day. You could be challenged and caught in any one of those locations, and face jail time if you're caught. Even if you accomplish your goal you've still only mustered a handful of votes which likely aren't enough. If you wanted your crime to have any chance of paying off you'd need to conspire with other voters to commit similar fraud, and then you exposure to legal peril is exponentially increased. So you'd have to have some sort of leverage to get these conspirators to actually cooperate and not flip if caught. This would likely be money, and a lot of it. With that kind of cash, why not just run attack ads and bus like minded folks to the polls, both of which are legal and more effective.

Now, if you could get a hold of a few hundred absentee ballots, from say a nursing home... then you might be able to commit a crime that has the intended outcome. Which is interesting, because this is a crime that actually happens, unlike in person voter fraud which is again, non-existent in the US.

That's not the only form of vote fraud. Non-citizens voting is illegal and happens[1]. Does it happen in massive numbers? No idea, probably not. To what extent, though, does it compare to eligible voters who don't have ID, which is a common complaint about voter ID laws, which are struck down in the courts all the time.

1: https://www.justice.gov/file/3835pdf/download

Non-citizens voting is still in person voter fraud. I'm sure it has happened, but it is vanishingly rare, you citation is about 1 person.

There is simply no incentive to commit that crime. Even less so if you're a non-citizen, because if you're caught you'll be deported. Very few people commit crimes where they have nothing to gain, a lot to lose, and a high chance of being caught. It is almost a non-issue.

There is literally no evidence that in person voter fraud poses a threat to the integrity of US elections either local or national. It is a red herring.

>I'm sure it has happened, but it is vanishingly rare, you citation is about 1 person.

Yes. I found a single link to to illustrate that it does happen, not to quantify how much it happens. Several people have replied saying that it doesn't happen at all. When I link to sources showing it does they switch to saying it doesn't happen enough to matter. Well, a group in Virginia found that 1852 ballots cast by non-citizen voters between 2011 and 2017. Does that matter? Maybe, maybe not. But it's on the same scale as people who would be inconvenienced to have to procure an ID to satisfy voter ID requirements.

Two different surveys have found that ~13% of illegal immigrants from Mexico have registered to vote. Given the impact doing so will have on having their immigration status normalized it doesn't make sense that they would register, but by their own admission they have. Rational or not, it happens.

It seems in every election cycle in King County, Washington people mail in ballots of recently deceased relatives. Again, it makes no sense because it's a deeply blue county and one extra ballot isn't going to swing the election. But they do it.

>There is literally no evidence that in person voter fraud poses a threat to the integrity of US elections either local or national. It is a red herring.

By definition even a single ineligible voter destroys the integrity of an election.

> Yes. I found a single link to to illustrate that it does happen

A single instance is an anecdote, not data. You should not make policy by anecdote.

>Two different surveys have found that ~13% of illegal immigrants from Mexico have registered to vote.

Which surveys? By whom? I've never heard that before, and I follow the issue. I'm tempted to call this an outright lie.

> It seems in every election cycle in King County, Washington people mail in ballots of recently deceased relatives.

Again, that's not in person voter fraud, which doesn't exit as a real problem. That's mail in ballot fraud, which none of the voter suppression laws and purges target. I previously said twice, mail in ballot fraud is the only way voter fraud practically ever happens in the US. You are willfully trying to obscure that fact.

> By definition even a single ineligible voter destroys the integrity of an election.

No it doesn't. The margin of error on counting votes is at a state wide level is often measured in 1000s of votes. A single fraudulent vote is noise statistically. You are lying and pandering to fear to support draconian and ridiculous voter roll purges. You are presenting weak arguments and no real evidence. You are trading in anecdote and fear.

  There is simply no incentive to commit that crime.

There is exactly the same incentive as that to suppress a vote for the other side.

That's completely untrue. If you can effectively as a legislative body identify demographics that reliably vote for your opposition and can identify their preferred voting methods you can target them with legislation or voter roll purges. The North Carolina state government was found by district courts to have done exactly that. The motivation is clear; stay in power. The path is similarly clear; purge your opponents supporters from the voting rolls, remove the voting mechanisms they use e.g. early voting, and require hard to obtain ID to vote, making exception for you own constituents e.g. Texas' allowance for concealed carry permits.

So we have both motivation, means, and evidence of states doing this. What more do you need?

You claim that there are a significant number of fraudulent votes happening. The corollary of what you're attesting to is that Kris Kobach and many other folks responsible for enforcement of the laws are utterly and completely incompetent.

I don't have time to track down where I did the math, but even being very generous with the claims of fraud (assuming that they're wildly overstating) and assuming that Kansas being full of those Fine Upstanding Conservative Religious Citizens had only half the fraud rate of the country as a whole, that means that Kobach's office was unable to find basically ANY of the tens of thousands of Kansans voting fraudulently.

This is a situation that holds true when you look at the other places where there are widespread claims of voter fraud and the people making those claims. Sure there are a few cases (e.g. Ann Coulter's fraudulent registration, a few voters who voted in multiple places including at least one non-citizen, etc.) but not very many.

As for Kobach, he actually got 4 convictions in 2016 (for elections in 2010 - 2014): http://www.kansas.com/news/local/crime/article75545277.html

Looking at a different state, seems that Washington State is a hotbed of fraud - the state has identified 72 cases of suspected vote fraud in the 2016 election. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-states/washington/articles/...

> You claim that there are a significant number of fraudulent votes happening.

If you mean "significant" in the sense of large, then no I did not. If you mean "significant" in the sense of meaningful, then I assert that even one illegal vote cast is significant as it disenfranchises a legitimate voter.

One group has found that between 2011 and 2017, 1852 ballots were cast by illegal aliens in Virginia.[1]

1: https://publicinterestlegal.org/blog/report-5500-noncitizens...

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, which you cited, is a right-wing crank group.

https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2017/06/07/right-wing-...

Your media matters link doesn't provide an academic work showing that the cited statistic is incorrect. The closest it comes to doing so is by linking a paper by the Brennan Center which says in a footnote that the PILF report uses an unreliable methodology. That's about what you can expect from a left-wing advocacy group.

Here is the footnote in full:

>See, e.g., Public Interest Legal Foundation, Alien Invasion in Virginia, 2016, https://publicinterestlegal.org/ files/Report_Alien-Invasion-in-Virginia.pdf; Public Interest Legal Foundation, Aliens & Felons, 2016, https://publicinterestlegal.org/files/Philadelphia-Litigatio.... Despite using unreliable methodology, these reports, authored by an organization that promotes the myth of widespread voter fraud, identified few noncitizens on the rolls.

How about if by "significant" I mean "has enough impact on elections to merit countermeasures that have been statistically shown to disproportionately reduce election participation [oh noes!] by brown people and people with lower incomes (regardless of race)?"

How about if by "significant" I mean "has enough impact on elections to merit countermeasures that cost at least tens of thousands of dollars per fraudulent vote, but probably hundreds of thousands of dollars per fraudulent vote?" Is there truly no more cost-effective way to spend that money on ensuring election integrity? Perhaps with little things like voter-verifiable paper trails that actually allow auditing of results?

Why, it's almost as if the oh-so-unfortunate side effect of minority and poor disenfranchisement is the purpose and "preventing vote fraud" is just the excuse. I'm sure Paul "our leverage in the elections quite candidly goes up as the voting populace goes down" Weyrich would have been heartbroken by that. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8GBAsFwPglw

I also looked through the report cited and found it remarkably light on actual facts. They make a big point of Maureen Erickson's cancellation for being a non-citizen in 2012 and her providing a Guatemalan address. They also note that she'd voted in 14 elections. Honestly, I'm surprised that they also included that the most recent of those was in 2008, 4 years before her registration was cancelled. So what happened in those intervening 4 years? Did this obviously Hispanic woman get thrown out of the country? Or perhaps she moved, married, emigrated, etc. and stopped voting in the US.

I'd classify that whole report as long on the fearmongering and short on the evidence.

Edit: I decided that was a unique enough name to look up, and lo and behold: "In fact, Todd Erickson said, his wife is an American citizen and while she does work as a missionary in Guatemala, her cancellation from Prince William County’s voter rolls in 2012 was a mistake resulting from the confusing voter registration system." and from the well-known lefty rag the Washington Times no less.

Edit: missing words

Show any evidence whatsoever that the type of voter fraud you're talking about is a problem. Until then, the talking point is worthless.

Are you saying, "prove it has happened" or "prove it is a risk"? I doubt it's happened yet, but I think the risk is getting worse every year (technology enables this, like when personal identifying information on large numbers of American voters leak from large companies...)

you are spreading FUD which is detracting from a more immediate (and actual) issue

That’s a feature, not a bug.

That's not really fair. I care about making sure people are able to vote, too. I expressed a concern about election security because I think it's an issue people should give more thought. It's not fair to suggest that means I don't care about the same things you do too.

Except these red herring concerns are the exact same fake concerns that those who are interested in suppressing voters come out with.

How exactly will you use this PII to perpetuate voter fraud?

Show up at a polling station with fake ID or PII? Then at another polling station with another piece of fake ID or PII? What's your plan for voting staff checking the records, and finding out that 'you' already cast a ballot at that station?

This kind of fraud is incredibly risky, and does not scale (And is trivial to combat). Election fraud by the process of disenfranchising voters (or rigging electronic voting machines,) on the other hand, scales incredibly well.

The former is not happening, and would be incredibly difficult to pull off, at great risk to the perpetrators. The latter is happening, and is comparatively trivial to pull off (And nobody goes to jail, when they get caught.)

Voter fraud is a red herring.

Not all states require an ID to vote. Voter ID laws are a controversial measure.

Generally, you register to vote. As long as you input plausible information and a real address you can receive mail at, you are likely to get on the rolls. Once you get on the rolls, you just show up at the polling station and tell them who you are (no ID required), they look for the name in the book, mark you as having voted, and you go vote.

Several years ago they did pass a law federally requiring an ID if you couldn't provide the last-four of an SSN or a driver's license, though, if you're a new voter. Not sure how that works if e.g., you're Amish and don't have an SSN or driver's license.

And how are you going to do this on a large scale? Especially without being caught?

How would you detect this kind of fraud? Historically, whenever states go about trying to verify their voter registration databases, they end up wiping out swaths of real, actual voters for various reasons, which usually makes it a non-starter.

I doubt it's very common in a fraud sense (though there are probably a lot of people who aren't supposed to be able to vote who end up voting), but either way, it's a difficult problem, probably impossible, to solve without impinging on the rights of the voting public. Voter ID laws disenfranchise people, sharing too much data with the feds has privacy risks, cleaning up the rolls inevitably affects legitimate voters...there's no good way to solve the problem.

> How would you detect this kind of fraud?

Voter rolls are public. You can't see how someone voted, but you can see if they voted.

Sure, but there's no reliable way to determine of someone is a real and qualified voter in the precinct they voted. That's the whole problem.

Nobody is engaged in a conspiracy to vote hundreds of times, but are a lot of people voting in various technically illegal ways? Sure.

Again, proof. Show it, or stop disrespecting us by parroting the tired and debunked talking point.

> there's no reliable way to determine of someone is a real and qualified voter in the precinct they voted

Have you registered to vote in the United States? Records are corroborated.

Remember, voter rolls are public. My New York City record lists my name, address, party affiliation and voter district information. Anyone can challenge this based on public information, e.g. social media posts, court records, employment records, et cetera, or absolutely nothing.

In New York, you literally write a letter and the Board of Elections opens an investigation. Lots of people do this every year, and the problem isn't them finding anything useful. The problem is them (a) burning tax dollars and (b) knocking off the rolls those who forgot to report minor address changes, e.g. moving within the same building.

> a lot of people voting in various technically illegal ways

Many have looked for evidence of this. Zero has been found. It's a high-cost, low pay-off gamble. Will some people be idiots? Sure--there's a small handful every election. Is this even remotely of concern? Absolutely not.

No, all you can see is that somebody claiming to be X voted at Precinct Y using Z method (in-person, absentee, provisional vote).

You have to accept a vote whether that voter appears on your roll or note (if unregistered, a provisional ballot is cast; it's generally not opened unless the sum total of provisionals can sway a race).

You can't challenge a signature for invalidity, and you can't pull that ballot even if it is later found to be invalid.

Even if a fraudulent vote was cast in the name of a real voter, and that real voter shows up later to vote (and has photo ID), his/her ballot turns into a provisional ballot, and the first-cast, bogus ballot is never retracted.

> You can't challenge a signature for invalidity

In New York any poll worker can challenge a signature for validity. Those ballots are specially marked and subject to individualised scrutiny.

This thread has got to have the highest-confidence totally-wrong assertions I’ve seen on Hacker News in a long time.

> his/her ballot turns into a provisional ballot, and the first-cast, bogus ballot is never retracted

What do you think happens to provisional ballots? They’re provisional because they’re specially handled. If a double vote occurs on a name, that’s certainly investigates (again, in New York).

No, you were asked first. How would you do it without getting caught? How would you amass that amount of funding, and that number of people, and keep it all quiet?

I'm talking about people voting in their old precinct because they didn't change their address, felons voting in states where they are ineligible, people who don't even know they aren't citizens voting, that type of thing.

There's no funding or conspiracy involved.

> I'm talking about people voting in their old precinct because they didn't change their address, felons voting in states where they are ineligible, people who don't even know they aren't citizens voting, that type of thing

These statistically-irrelevant edge cases have been addressed in other [1][2] comments. You're beating a dead, incorrigible horse in the face of documented evidence.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15587942

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15587906

  they end up wiping out swaths of real, actual voters

Examples?

To expand on this point, large-scale voter fraud in the United States means having confederates at multiple polling locations in multiple, independently-administered precincts, each with their own processes, in multiple, independently-governed states, each with their own rules. Getting caught at any of those stages means the plan is a bust. Oh, and you can't re-use a single confederate more than a handful of times.

If you're going to conduct voter fraud, the count is your target. At that stage, IDs are irrelevant. (Even then, there are multiple precincts in multiple states with lots of random, independent volunteers and elected representatives puttering about.)

Being skeptical is fine. Using skepticism of a low-probability unsubstantiated claim (voter fraud) to detract from a proven problem (voter suppression) is at best irrational.

Let's take as a starting point this list of methods:

http://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/heritage-explains...

(I realize that's from the Heritage Foundation - I'm not particularly conservative - it's just the first decent list I came across while Googling.)

Let's take these 3:

""" False registrations: Voting under fraudulent voter registrations that either use a phony name and a real or fake address or claim residence in a particular jurisdiction where the registered voter does not actually live and is not entitled to vote.

Duplicate voting: Registering in multiple locations and voting in the same election in more than one jurisdiction or state.

Fraudulent use of absentee ballots: Requesting absentee ballots and voting without the knowledge of the actual voter; or obtaining the absentee ballot from a voter and either filling it in directly and forging the voter’s signature or illegally telling the voter who to vote for. """

Ok. Pretend I am a hostile nation-state. I can find a list of registered voters online (from some hack, because in 2020 PII is everywhere). I identify a number of key districts in the upcoming US election, and the names of some individuals living in those districts. I acquire some mail-in ballots, and cast votes using those names and details (say, SSNs). I'll just ignore whether or not the person has already voted. (To summarize: my hypothetical attack uses methods (2) Duplicate voting and (3) Fraudulent use of absentee ballots above, not actually method (1) False registrations.)

Is that so hard to imagine doing? I don't think so: particularly not for a nation state.

"Voter fraud" can be when a particular person votes twice in an election -- that's possible but not worth the risk for the individual. In this scenario there's not much real risk to whoever is carrying out the attack.

It doesn't even really matter if you get "caught" (detected). (Getting "caught" (punished) is hard to imagine.) The goal is just to undermine the election. To win, all you have to do is throw the result into doubt.

Again, prove that you could do this on a scale large enough to actually affect an election without drawing any attention.

Both. There has been absolutely no evidence that it is any kind of a risk. Despite all of that information being out there, you still need actual people to go in and do the voting, and in large numbers at that. The amounts of money, and the amounts of people who all have to keep quiet is mindblowing.

It's vulnerable overall but the actual act of in person voting has very low fraud rates. Most of these things disenfranchise tons of votes while stopping few (often literally none) instances of actual fraud.

Edit: it's not that there is no fraud, it's just that there is very little and you are much more likely to change the vote by accidentally disenfranchising people than preventing fraud

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