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.
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.
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...
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...
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.
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.
Could you please provide a source for this?
Ah, vloggers. Same desperate need to fill airtime as the 24-hour news channels, with even less resources for actual journalism.
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.
> kicking out GOP poll watchers (and only GOP poll watchers)
Zero evidence anywhere this happened. Much evidence to the contrary.