Hacker News Reader

Comment by wang_li | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

> 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'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

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...

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

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.

> 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'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...

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com