Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization

You also said:

"It's relatively difficult to pull off hoodwink when you've got adversarial observers standing there."

But this being 2020 and the topic politics, he who makes the first assertion wins.

Not that it matters really. Perception is reality, and the media has more control of the perception of Americans than any other entity. Welcome to a brave new world - enjoy your stay, citizen.

I swear, it's like a significant portion of the media is designed to sow dissent and outrage in society. If the links provided were questionable looking you might think twoice, but Detroit Free Press and CBSLocal at least sound like mainstream publications to me. Although considering the quality of their stories I guess that's not saying much.

I honestly think it's highly questionable whether the unique combination of variables the USA has going on is sustainable much longer in this age, I think something's gotta give.

Hence why the judge ruled to allow observers closer.

Like, the shy tory effect comes from a much less polarised election in the UK (the 1992 GE).

That being said, I actually think that it was the likely voter models that messed up this year, given that turnout was so much higher than expected.

2. Kick out poll watchers

3. Figure out how many votes your preferred candidate needs.

4. Examine the voter rolls and see who never turned in a ballot.

5. Fill in ballots for those people (and if you're in a rush, don't even bother to vote in any down-ballot races) and mix them in with the legitimate ballots.

If you control a few key urban centers in a few key states - you can definitely pull this off. Given the behavior of the left over the last 4 years, I absolutely believe they did something like the above.

The most common claim I've been seeing is that dead people are voting Democrat, not that living people's votes were stolen.

He also attempted to sabotage the USPS, and cast doubts on mail-in ballots as a whole, with the obvious intent of suppressing opposition voters, and/or having reason to question the election after the fact.

The only party with anything to gain from suppressing voters are the Republicans. Look at the map of states that didn't ratify the 24th amendment. They've repeatedly made false claims of voter fraud, and engaged in voter intimidation and voter suppression.

And just this election, the Republicans put up fraudulent, illegal mail-in ballot drop boxes.

That...doesn't follow.

If I was planning massive mail-in voter fraud/sabotage/suppression, I'd probably be overly sensitive to the possibility that my opponent would also do what they could in that direction (or, in the case of unfocussed sabotage efforts, that my voters’ ballotd would be at risk from my own efforts), which would make me more likely to encourage my voters to vote in person, so that only my opponent’s votes would be at risk.

So what you are pointing to, inasmuch as it says anything relevant, makes Trump more suspicious, not less.

What's funny about this situation is that Biden is on track to win most of these states by a larger margin than Trump did against Clinton. She did ask for a recount, but I don't remember her ever going on and on about fraud.

Most of the fraud allegations (at least the ones where the numbers would be large enough to make a significant difference) revolve around these unsolicited mail in ballots and the extended deadlines which we've never had before in this country.

And please, kicking out GOP poll watchers (and only GOP poll watchers) and blocking their ability to observe and inspect ballots might not prove fraud took place, but it does prove criminal intent in my eyes, and the eyes of millions of other Americans.

These concerns need to be addressed.

There are good reasons why the rules for people are different to those for goods and capital. However, you may note that Trump specifically is also in favour of tariffs i.e. impeding the flow of goods. Via FATCA the USA also practices an obscure form of capital controls.

I don't know if getting into a debate about the merits of borders is a great idea for this thread, but, consider at least the following things:

1. Historically people have fought and died for the rights to create borders (or a nation, as they saw it). The world in 1800 was a world of sprawling empires. Passports didn't really exist in their modern form. Borders were weak or non-existent. In the past 200 years the number of countries has gone up drastically, often because people fought against those empires for the rights to create a smaller, more localised nation that would be better attuned to their local needs and cultures.

Are you sure all those people were that wrong that they sacrificed so much, for something they shouldn't have wanted?

2. The world at the time of the Statue of Liberty was rather different to the world of today. For one, relatively few people could actually reach the US to do that sort of immigration. The arrival of cheap air travel fundamentally changes the equation for borders and immigration rules, as the flows of people involved are so much larger.

3. Culture is a real thing, a describable thing. The left exhalts it and upholds the benefits of a diversity of cultures. But in practice, cultures don't always co-exist peacefully. In Europe countries are resurrecting internal borders (e.g. Sweden did this just a few days ago) in the wake of yet more Islamist terror attacks, including the beheading of a school teacher that was trying to teach French values of tolerance and freedom of expression. Presumably you're aware of this story. As a consequence even Macron, who is as global-elite-anti-borders as they come, has had a sudden 'conversion'. The left has no coherent answer to how to sustain the values of 'enlightenment liberalism' that they hold dear in the face of large-scale immigration from cultures that doesn't share those values, nor tolerate them.

The left is losing this argument despite that borders seem retrograde, are inconvenient, and so on, because it hasn't yet found any coherent tradeoffs or solutions for the problems that prompted them in the first place. Indeed nobody has: the right doesn't even try. But the left is simply ignoring them and campaigning against the infrastructure of enforcement, which is a childish approach. A similar problem can be seen in the USA with respect to the police: campaigning against the existence of a thing that creates problems, without any answer to how to address the problems lack of that thing would create. It's this kind of anti-tradeoff thinking that eventually led me to abandon the left. It's OK to recognise that a situation is unsatisfactory, yet also recognise that you don't know of an alternative tradeoff that's clearly better.

The states have sovereignty through federalism and the US constitution. The EC and the Senate are not necessary to their sovereignty.

A union can't really be "equal" between all states unless all states contribute and benefit equally, and you can't really expect millions of people who live in a prosperous and populous state to be willing to discount their own voices so that the voices of those who may contribute less count far more than theirs. I'm not sure a perfect system exists -- it's all a series of tradeoffs, and a popular vote system would have its own -- but saying that the 700k people living in Alaska should have the exact same influence as the 40 million people living in California doesn't make things any better.

Ultimately, a country is made up of people, not political entities.

Popular vote will only remove state sovereignty if the majority of people are aligned with that, at which point yeah, it should be done away with.

However, the reality is that people generally do agree that quite a few laws are state-level, not federal, and so even with a popular vote for federal laws, states would retain the sovereignty they have now.

Your reply there seems like a drastic overreaction. If we voted on our president via popular vote, we would have had a few different presidents in recent times, but I doubt any of them would have reduced state sovereignty significantly.

States are still free to set their own taxes, run their own police as they see fit, etc etc.

Basically, I don't think the popular vote would vote to repeal the 10th amendment, so it seems silly to say it would "destroy any shred of sovereignty". Especially since in this election, the outcome would have been identical.

No, it doesn't. It doesn't even remove unequal, state-based voting power, which is greatest in the Senate, not the Electoral College.

But direct popular election of the President doesn't impact state sovereignty, which is a matter of Constitutional limits on the federal government and guarantees to the states, which the states control changes to via the amendment process.

> Why would states remain in the union if California and New York forever dictate the direction of the country?

Why would states remain in the union if their citizens had only an equal voice?

Why do California and New York remain in the union when their citizens are denied an equal voice, and the states whose citizens are given a greater voice consistently drain their resources?

But in the 21st century the u.s. federal government has a much larger influence on people's lives.

When a government is closer to a defense pact like Nato it makes sense to have voting apportioned by regional power. But as that government starts to have a larger impact on your day to day life than it makes less sense.

If we started sending nato several trillion dollars a year it makes less sense for Bulgaria to have the same say in how that money is spent as we do.

And there isn't really any political appetite to roll back the federal government to a size where that type of representation made sense. Moving social security and Medicare from the federal to the state or city level would be a political non starter.

1. The scale of population difference between the most and least populous full cantons (that have equal representation in the Ständerat) is somewhat lower than CA versus WY, and they're geographically much (!) closer which I suspect at least allows for a bit more "intercantonal" exposure.

2. Even more importantly, in my opinion: the two houses in the bicameral system have essentially identical powers. There isn't a system of important executive or judicial appointments requiring only a Senate appointment (although the analogs here are blurry), so a majority of the national population's representatives must also sign off as well as a majority of cantons. Providing the Senate unique powers protect the tyranny of less-populous states without limiting the dependence on the federal government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Assembly_(Switzerland)

Also, wouldn't rural areas have the same problem? And probably even worse due to less diversity?

Say Louisiana and the mid-west would decide that a fascist leader would be best for the country. How the hell do residents in the cities stand up against that in any way but force.

Works just as well, and is what is actually happening.

By having a Constitution that protects a basic model of government and requires a supermajority of states to consent to changes.

People having unequal representation in the national legislature or Presidential elections doesn't help that and isn't useful too it (well, the general problem. It might help specifically against unwelcome government supported by large-population states, but only by magnifying the risk of such when supported by small population states.)

Urban/rural isn't really the divide the Senate/EC works on. California’s rural population, whose voting power is deweighted by the Senate and EC just as much as that of the urban population, is bigger than that of the six smallest states combined.

How do the majority stand up against that?

Your charge could be leveled in reverse and better wielded.

>People in rural areas tend to think similarly due to a similar environment. What a rural area desires in the nation's leader does not necessarily align with city voters. You must see the danger in a few, smallgroups having the majority of the power.

>Say 10 states comprising less than 3% of the population decide that a communist leader would be best for the country. How the hell do residents outside the cities stand up against that in any way but force.

Note the 10 lowest population states really do comprise less than 3% of the US population.

Of course, you could just let each family choose its own meal, while using a majority vote (either of people or families) to decide things that affect all the families. This is federalism.

But I submit that families choosing what to eat is different from government making laws. Many things have to be decided by a central authority, and there has to be a way of apportioning representation in that central authority. Giving certain citizens 3x as much power because they live on one side of a line vs. another violates the principle of "one person, one vote".

If your position weakens any further it wont even have one seat in congress. In a democracy a position that virtually nobody cares for is dead.

> While county election officials were able to verify signatures and voter registrations upon ballot receipt, normally, absentee ballots can't be further processed or opened until Election Day. But this year, beginning 15 days before the 2020 general election, officials were allowed to open returned absentee ballots, remove those ballots from both the outer and inner secrecy sleeve envelope, and scan the ballots using a ballot scanner machine.

> It's so much more of a shitshow than you can possibly imagine, but I came away from it feeling paradoxically better about the process.

This is the first time I really dug into the process, and I agree. I voted absentee, and that process plus what I saw on TV around the counting process made me much more confident in how things work.

You're talking about someone showing up at the polls to commit voter fraud in person, when the contention here is primarily about mail-in ballots.

If someone has access to the voter rolls from the previous election, how do you detect if they've submitted mail-in ballots for people who were registered but didn't vote last time, on the theory that most of them still won't? Or who registers new people without their request and then submits ballots in their names? That entire process would be taking place outside of the polling location.

Probably the hardest one to catch is where they have access to the voter rolls and submit ballots in the names of people who were legitimately registered but didn't vote. The stealthier way to do that would be to have real-time access and then inject the ballots at the last minute in the names of people they know didn't vote, so there wouldn't be duplicates.

The scattershot method would be to predict who isn't likely to vote, e.g. because they didn't vote last time, and submit ballots in those names. Then they would have some duplicate ballots, but if the predictions about who wouldn't vote were mostly right, they could submit thousands of ballots and only have a small percentage of duplicates. There would be some duplicates, but then what do you do? You could throw out the duplicates, but one of the two was a legitimate ballot, and the majority of fraudulent ballots wouldn't be duplicated and would still get counted. It's also not obvious how to distinguish between whether a small percentage of duplicated ballots out of millions cast are a result of a single act of intentional fraud or many independent acts of incompetence.

Another alternative would be to register people who didn't request to be, e.g. people who are institutionalized and a worker at the institution is in a position to register them and then intercept their ballots and submit them.

Some privileged positions would allow someone to do this at greater scale, e.g. postal workers. A postal worker in a high density city could have many thousands of residences on their route, each with multiple eligible voters. Get a copy of the voter rolls, register every eligible voter on their route who isn't already in there, use their real social security numbers obtained from a copy of the Equifax leak or similar, then request mail-in ballots to take and submit.

Edit: I mean I am okay with leaving it as “somebody on the internet says”, but wondered if the evidence was more clear than that.

I voted absentee and honestly it felt more secure than any in person voting I've ever done. I had to apply, fill out, and then drop off my vote in a box. My wife wasn't even allowed to drop off my vote, and instead I had to do it personally. I was then able to track it online and verify it was counted without an issue. Contrast this to when I hit some buttons in person and have no idea what happens after that. The point is, you have to trust the process at some point, and in this case fraud is so unlikely across multiple states with 10s of thousands of votes.

It's easy to imagine a political party that runs on a "cheap power for the cities" policy which involves mining and burning coal a long way away from any city.