And how are you going to do this on a large scale? Especially without being caught?
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.
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.
Voter rolls are public. You can't see how someone voted, but you can see if they voted.
Nobody is engaged in a conspiracy to vote hundreds of times, but are a lot of people voting in various technically illegal ways? Sure.
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.
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.
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).
There's no funding or conspiracy involved.
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.
they end up wiping out swaths of real, actual voters