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Comment by snowwrestler | Hacker News Reader

Voters are ID'd. When I go vote I have to volunteer my name and my address. That's identification.

But it's also public info, right! What if someone else just walks up and gives my info??

Then I won't be able to vote. I'll have to file a provisional ballot and a complaint that someone stole my vote. These sorts of things are tracked and it turns out it's very rare.

As a means of altering an election outcome, it just does not scale. Even to fraudulently elect a town dog catcher, you would need hundreds of people to fill out fraudulent ballots, one by one by one. Where are you going to get those people from? Why would they spend their time doing that? What's in it for them? What incentive would that have to keep it a secret?

Can you see why it is dumb to worry about this kind of vote fraud?

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> Even to fraudulently elect a town dog catcher, you would need hundreds of people to fill out fraudulent ballots, one by one by one. Where are you going to get those people from? Why would they spend their time doing that? What's in it for them? What incentive would that have to keep it a secret?

What if someone (perhaps a political campaign or party) with some kind of vested interest and a whole lot of money broke off a couple hundred dollars for a few hundred people?

Seems like there's money and possibly NDAs involved, in that scenario.

What if someone (perhaps a political party member) with some kind of ends-justify-the-means mentality thinks its for the greater good if they go around voting fraudulently? What if that person convinces a few other like-partied folks that it's for the best and they go along with it?

There's certainly many possible scenarios for people committing some form of election fraud.

> What if someone (perhaps a political campaign or party) with some kind of vested interest and a whole lot of money broke off a couple hundred dollars for a few hundred people?

If those people are OK with committing a felony for a few hundred dollars, ok, but I doubt most people would even entertain the idea.

It's a huge risk, a personal risk, and takes a large number of people who all have to be trusted.

And then any NDA they sign will be made irrelevant as soon as one of them gets immunity for testifying against the organizer in what would inevitably become a RICO case.

> Seems like there's money and possibly NDAs involved, in that scenario.

You think there's such a thing as an NDA enjoining silence about a criminal conspiracy?

How are you going to recruit hundreds of people without hitting one single person who talks about the recruitment? Going off of typical political activism conversion rates, you'd have to start with at least thousands of people to find a hundred willing to take part.

NDA would not solve this problem because people would only sign the NDA after they were recruited. (And NDAs cannot compel silence about criminal activity anyway.)

> There's certainly many possible scenarios for people committing some form of election fraud.

Sure, and there are lots of scenarios where a voter ID law doesn't stop them either, like if the criminal masterminds pay a few hundred dollars to have some fake IDs made. Did you think of that scenario?

What there is not is evidence that this happens more than rarely, or is a problem for American elections.

Meanwhile there is tons of evidence that restrictive voting laws prevent legitimate votes from being cast. In short, voter ID laws cause far more vote irregularities than they prevent.

I used to work in politics. It's hard enough getting 40 people to show up at an event with free food in beautiful weather. You'll never get enough volunteers that look normal enough or are skilled enough to look normal enough to pull this off in dozens (hundreds?) of places without getting caught even once. There are easier and more reliable ways of hacking the vote (voter suppression, which you may have heard about).

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