Comment by guildwriter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by guildwriter | Hacker News Reader

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Twisted things being done in our elections goes back to Tammany Hall. If you know where to look in American history it's not hard to find credible instances of important elections having substantial amounts of fraud. Why do people believe that when the chips are down and vast amounts of money and power are at stake that people are simply going to play fair? Especially when the players are some of the most ruthless, narcissistic, and sociopathic people in America?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1948_United_States_Senate_elec...

>The validity of the runoff election was challenged before the US Supreme Court due to allegations of election fraud, and in later years, testimony by parties involved indicated that widespread fraud occurred and that friendly political machines[3] produced the fraudulent votes needed for Johnson to have a numerical majority, in effect stealing the election.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1960_United_States_presidentia...

> Some, including Republican legislators and journalists, believed that Kennedy benefited from vote fraud from Mayor Richard Daley's powerful Chicago political machine. [12] Mayor Daley’s machine was known for "delivering whopping Democratic tallies by fair means and foul."[13] Republicans tried and failed to overturn the results at the time—as well as in ten other states.[13] Some journalists also later claimed that mobster Sam Giancana and his Chicago crime syndicate "played a role" in Kennedy's victory. [13] Nixon's campaign staff urged him to pursue recounts and challenge the validity of Kennedy's victory, however, Nixon gave a speech three days after the election stating that he would not contest the election.[14]

This "Chicago political machine" was later shown to have committed voter fraud in 1982. 26 people were convicted[1], and here's the grand jury report[2]. They had been getting away with it, until they didn't.

Fortunately, as media reassure us, today voting fraud simply cannot happen: you'd need a whole conspiracy of dozens of people, a real, as one could call it, machine.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Illinois_elections#Allega... [2] - https://sites.duke.edu/pjms364s_01_s2016_jaydelancy/files/20...

Okay, here’s a non-media non-partisan source. What I’m linking to was written in 2007. This seems prescient:

In the aftermath of a close election, losing candidates are often quick to blame voter fraud for the results. Legislators cite voter fraud as justification for various new restrictions on the exercise of the franchise. And pundits trot out the same few anecdotes time and again as proof that a wave of fraud is imminent.

https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/trut...

Fortunately, as media reassure us, today voting fraud simply cannot happen: you'd need a whole conspiracy of dozens of people, a real, as one could call it, machine.

This I find impossible to believe.

How hard is it to intercept mail-in ballots, sign them, then mail them in? Who knows that you did so? I personally find it very implausible that in both elections that Trump was in he produced results about 3% better than polls indicated he would. And both times alleged that the other side was cheating. So much so that pollsters are engaged with asking how they are so wrong when Trump is on the ballot.

You know the old saw that cheaters always accuse others of cheating? What does that suggest about Trump?

> How hard is it to intercept mail-in ballots, sign them, then mail them in? Who knows that you did so?

Well first of all, the person who was supposed to get the mail-in ballot in the first place. In Michigan, you can check to see whether they've received your mail-in ballot.

Don't you think that if 100k Republicans in Michigan didn't receive their ballot at all, but checked and found that they had been registered as having voted, we'd be hearing about that?

> I personally find it very implausible that in both elections that Trump was in he produced results about 3% better than polls indicated he would.

I find this highly suspicious too. In 2016 it might have been the "Shy Tory" effect, but the Trump voters in 2020 didn't seem at all shy to me.

If 50% of the country hates the president (rightly or wrongly) and much of the media argues that he's a bad person, and everyone who supports him are racists, then I could easily see people lying to pollsters.

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.

1. Halt counting (or at least 'reporting') in critical swing states simultaneously. We all saw this happen.

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.

> Given what my extremely biased sources have told me about the behavior of the left over the last 4 years

FTFY

> Kick out poll watchers

Were any poll watchers kicked out? Trump's claim that there weren't poll watchers in Pennsylvania all turned out to be false; their lawyer admitted in court that they actually had 19 observers in the room [1].

EDIT Meanwhile, the graphs in TFA shows that there are "bumps" in the curve, showing that Democratic-leaning counties had lower turnout in the 2016 election. This is consistent with the widespread reports of Republicans trying to suppress the vote in Democratic-leaning areas, of which [2] and [3] are more recent examples.

[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/trump-sues-to-halt...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/01/north-caroli...

[3] https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/01/texas-drive-thru-vot...

> Don't you think that if 100k Republicans in Michigan didn't receive their ballot at all, but checked and found that they had been registered as having voted, we'd be hearing about that?

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

I can’t figure out if you’re seriously accusing one side or the other of cheating, but fwiw, I have confidence in our elections.

All this hand-wringing about fraud when attempts at disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of votes happens in plain sight. Just one example of many:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/04/gop-pennsylvania-bl...

(If it weren’t for massive “cure” efforts by both parties, a shocking number of ballots would be discarded due to errors like DMVs failing to forward registrations to BOEs. In 2016, the NC Democratic Party through cure outreach got provisional ballot acceptance here from 30% to 50% if I remember correctly.)

People would complain they never got their ballots, and mail in ballots are tracked. So a few people complaining they never got their ballots, but their ballots show up as voted, would be a big deal, and we would know it was happening.

That's not the type of problem that usually happens with postal voting. Intercepting votes like that on a large scale would be indeed hard.

But what people do get caught doing quite regularly and not just in the USA are things like:

1. Going door to door and giving people blank ballots, pressuring people to fill them in, right in front of them. As a 'helpful service'.

2. Dominant members of the families taking the ballots from family members and filling them all in themselves. This gets reported a lot in various ethnic minority areas in the UK, for example, where the father is traditionally dominant.

3. Ballots being destroyed or not delivered in swing areas where certain sub-regions are known to be strongly pro one candidate or another.

It's good to hear that some places let you check if your ballot was received, but almost by definition, for that to work you need a lot of people to do that kind of check and then publicly broadcast their findings. In an environment where social media is suppressing discussion of the possibility of voter fraud and the media is polarised, it's not so clear how people would do that reliably, even if enough checked in the first place. And a lot of places you can't easily check - I know I can't in my elections!

As for Trump accusing others of cheating, conservatives in multiple countries have been talking about the problems of postal vote fraud for a long time. This is not new, they care because when it is uncovered it always seems to be tipping the vote for the left. Trump in particular shouldn't be under suspicion here because he has been strongly encouraging his supporters to vote in person, where fraud is much harder to pull off: it's his opponents that strongly encouraged postal voting despite knowing that postal voting is less confidence-inspiring than the ballot box.

> he has been strongly encouraging his supporters to vote in person

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.

> The only party with anything to gain from suppressing voters are the Republicans.

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

So which one is it?

> Trump in particular shouldn't be under suspicion here because he has been strongly encouraging his supporters to vote in person, where fraud is much harder to pull off:

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.

Isn't that a "if she floats she's a witch" type argument?

> I personally find it very implausible that in both elections that Trump was in he produced results about 3% better than polls indicated he would.

We'll have to see once the final counting is done, but +/- 3% is within margin of error for most polls.

Polls also seem to have a hard time finding new voters to poll. It's very exciting to see the records numbers of people who voted, many for the first time.

Intercepting mail in ballots would be quite difficult and obvious. A far simpler solution would be to simply fill out the request forms that were conveniently mailed out to every voter on the rolls in my state. This led to thousands of households receiving applications for residents that no longer lived at that address

How do you commit fraud on the national level?

You don't need to. In the US you can lose the nation by 3 million votes as long as you win 3-4 swing states in the presidential or senate vote -- be it your brother making 538 votes disappear or your staffers creating 203 ballots with your name on it...

3-4 swing states is still a national level. You're also talking about 20k-100k type numbers. This isn't someone winning by 100 votes.

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.

Not fraud but she did write an entire book blaming Russia, and a whole host of other things.

The big difference is that it's been clearly shown that Russia did interfere [1]. The arguable point is did Trump's campaign know and direct the interference?

And if we're really talking about shaping elections, disinformation and voter suppression is the way to get it done. Once votes are cast, it's too hard to move enough in order to have any meaningful change. There are too many checks, rechecks, and processes in place to commit fraud at the scale needed for a large election.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

Russia has been meddling in our elections since the Cold War began[1]. China, Israel, and every other power "interferes" in our elections, too, just like we do to them.

What was disingenuous of the US media was to make a huge deal out of 2016 shenanigans by Russia without any context, making it appear to the average voter that it was both significant and unique, neither of which is true.

The intel community and major media spent 3 years and tens of millions of dollars looking for something illegal or even unethical that the Trump campaign did related to Russia, and nothing was found.

The idea that there are "too many checks, rechecks, processes ... to commit fraud at the scale needed for a large election" is absurd in the US where the whole national election can be determined at the end by a single large county in one swing state, as happened in 2000. Now realize that 45 states were required to haphazardly design and implement, in 3 months, a mail-in voting system on a scale with which they had no experience, we'd expect a lot of errors that aren't even malicious.

Add in a flurry of state governments quickly passing various laws to swing things to their favor as happened in all the swing states, and you have a recipe for disaster as we're seeing.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt...

Might have something to do with all the provable connections to Russia the Trump campaign had. People are sitting in jail for lying about contacts with Russia.

You really can't pretend these are similar situations.

And it's also a huge difference between undermining the entire process vs claiming that Russia conducted psyops on American voters in favor of Trump.

Trump is saying you cannot trust the vote counting. That's a big deal.

It’s really really difficult to do either of those things, especially in vote by mail. In Washington, for instance, I can see who is registered, who voted in a given election, and match that to the vote totals.

There's only a handful of states that actually matter in an election. Do we have these numbers for Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania?

turnout is always < 1.00 in the US because voting is not mandatory and registration is not (universally on a national level) automatic—which would need to happen before mandatory voting.

so it is theoretically trivial, once you know how many votes you needed to have won that you did not, to add a number of fake votes N to the number of real votes P such that N+P < T, the total of registered voters.

however, this is actually not that easy to do en masse scale because of how discretely elections are conducted. people in the US generally vote by precinct (determined at the local level by the county board of elections) which is about the size of a census tract, which is a relatively small area. it is basically impossible to know ahead of time which specific precincts you need to flip in order to change the result in a credible way. injecting the ballots into the process would require a level of sophistication that interacting with the county election officials or volunteer election administrators would lead you to believe is not possible.

the actual way to do election fraud would be to just report vote totals that have no basis in fact. which, sure, i guess is also possible. but then, while Democrats control the urban centers so may have more registered eligible voters who do not vote to be able to fake vote totals within their cities, Republicans control the vast majority of counties in the country. so at scale, effective use of this strategy would just result in everyone reporting 100% turnout every year...which clearly doesn’t happen.

the fact that any arms race here would rapidly devolve into a situation neither side can accurately predict means that election fraud at scale not only does not occur, but also that is is actually not preferable. it is way easier to play in other margins (make it harder for people to register, kick people off voter rolls, etc).

source: worked on campaigns in another life.

I'm pretty sure you do, yes.

I live in Washington state. There is someone registered to vote on my street who has voted, consistently, since 2012 - The year the resident by that name moved out. We have raised the issue to the Secretary of State’s office, and they have sent out a mailer for the resident to confirm their address.

That just means a different person is voting at worst. It’s not an extra vote.

You don't think that the person who's living at the address also has their name on the voter roll?

People are being willfully obtuse when they say the kind of fraud being alleged isn't possible. A certain political party spent that last six months forcing rule changes on swing states vis a vis mail in voting that you can't compare this year's election to any that came before.

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.

> And please, kicking out GOP poll watchers (and only GOP poll watchers) and blocking their ability to observe

Could you please provide a source for this?

I believe there was one where GOP poll watchers were barred from entry - because there were already GOP poll watchers in the room and the room was at capacity.

That is what is being alleged in multiple swing state lawsuits by the GOP.

https://youtu.be/DAh_stm5Bdc

> "I have not yet had the benefit of reviewing the underlying proceedings..."

Ah, vloggers. Same desperate need to fill airtime as the 24-hour news channels, with even less resources for actual journalism.

> these unsolicited mail in ballots and the extended deadlines which we've never had before in this country.

Many states added new procedures like these to this election, but I don't believe any state added procedures that weren't already used in one or more other states.

Also, if it was organised in advance, then what exactly is the problem? This year hasn't exactly been like any before in living memory either...

Can we not go down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole? Until any of these allegations have been verified, I don't see the point in speculation.

> kicking out GOP poll watchers (and only GOP poll watchers)

Zero evidence anywhere this happened. Much evidence to the contrary.

Which of course didn’t happen hear - Biden is on track to win by a clear electoral and popular margin. Florida in 2000 was decided by hundreds of votes though.

That Wikipedia article is a bit weird because it says fraud allegations and 26 people indicted but no mention of convictions.

However, the special grand jury report claims 58 people were convicted and it is very clear that an organised fraud had taken place.

https://sites.duke.edu/pjms364s_01_s2016_jaydelancy/files/20...

Update Wikipedia!

Of note:

- Despite the scope of this fraud, it didn't alter the election outcome.

- The bi-partisan checks and balances failed because the Republican party had insufficient strength in the areas of Chicago where the fraud occurred.

- They got caught.

- This was 40 years ago. It was novel for the FBI to use computers at the time to detect irregularities.

In the states that Trump is currently contesting, the GOP controls either the legislature or the legislature and the Governorship. The GOP isn't going to let any precincts go unwatched in these states.

Fraud isn't impossible, it's just impossible at a scale to change an election outcome and get away with it, especially the presidential election.

One thing I find interesting is that one of the measures the GOP regularly calls for, voter IDs, wouldn't have prevented the fraud that occurred in Chicago in 1982. Meanwhile, the sorts of measures that would've prevented that fraud (bi-partisan administration of the voting process) don't suppress the vote.

> Despite the scope of this fraud, it didn't alter the election outcome.

Every time an AMERICAN says this, a bald eagle looses its wings.

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