The statement near the end of the abstract - "Finally, strict ID requirements have no effect on fraud, actual or perceived." - seems surprising to me, and I'd like to see how they arrived at that conclusion.
At worst it's a deliberate attempt to disenfranchise minority voters, for example the NC voting law, where the legislature requested info on racial differences in how people vote before creating their bill.
https://news.yahoo.com/north-carolina-court-rejects-republic...
Of course this suggests that efforts to GOTV helped mitigate the voter ID requirements, which is part of why GOTV efforts and other support for people voting is being targeted now in many states.
A way around such shenanigans could be some legislation where the government is required to give everyone an id card for free - and to put the onus on govt for achieving that.
From my perspective, it's genuinely weird that requiring voter id would be disenfranchising... but I know that is how things are in the States. So either stop voter ID laws, or defang them by making IDs trivially available.
Trying to get a "RealID" for a family member was a nightmare because apparently her ORIGINAL birth certificate from 70 years ago was not acceptable to the asshole behind the desk at the DMV. So we had to get a certified copy from the county this person was born in that bore some seal or stamp the clerk wanted.
Guess who had lost decades worth of birth records, thus requiring us to pay for a special search process that took weeks?
An expensive, time-consuming nightmare start to finish.
There are people out there who have no idea where they were born because their parents didn't tell them, people whose parents held their birth certificates hostage for whatever reason, etc. Lots of people who rent and share an apartment might not have a single utility bill in their name. "Just give us a bank bill" someone says. Welllll in getting all frothy about terrorism we now demand banks verify the identity of their customers using...a government issued ID. The whole thing gets cyclical very quickly.
https://archive.thinkprogress.org/after-alabama-enforces-vot...
https://www.kansascity.com/news/local/article322208/Missouri...
While I would allow the possibility of it being a real issue, that’s not really what I meant. I’m most surprised that TFA claims that strict voter ID requirements have no impact on perceived fraud.
If I had to take a guess, I'd say that voter fraud was already very low to begin with, and the rare occurrences that do happen wouldn't be helped with ID laws.
But how does it not have an effect on perceived fraud, when all of the people perceiving fraud are arguing for strict ID requirements? I think I know the answer (these people perceive fraud in response to their "team's" loss, regardless). But it would be interesting to read what the authors say.
Most western European countries also have significant voter security measures, although comparisons are often hard to make because they piggy-back voter registration on the mandatory residence registration process. In Germany for example you get a voting card in the mail, but you have to shlep to your local citizens office with proof of residency (lease, etc.) within 30 days of moving. In Georgia you can register to vote entirely on line, but they check your ID at voting time.
Whether or not election security is an actual problem, one side saying “just trust the process” is not going to be credible. That’s true in America, and that’s true in Taiwan. Hence the elaborate process in Taiwan.
> Although a majority of both Republicans and Democrats express some degree of confidence in the nation's voting system, Democrats are far less confident than Republicans. The current poll shows that 59% of Democrats say they are least somewhat confident that their votes will be cast and counted (including just 13% who are very confident), compared with nearly 9 in 10 Republicans (87%, including 44% who are very confident).
Right before the 2020 election, 30-40% of people in both parties though the election wouldn’t be conducted fairly: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/more-republicans-distru...
After the 2016 election, 2/3 of Democrats believed Russia had “tampered with vote tallies” to help Trump win: https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
In the U.S., it is true that the push for voter ID laws as a supposed fraud prevention measure has been the formulation of one modern political party, as are claims of widespread fraud in general. These claims have been refuted ad nauseum by election experts for years, yet they are still used by that party as justification for voter ID and a raft of other measures that consistently have uneven impacts on specific groups.
What's most recently changed is that, while these false claims were used to preemptively disenfranchise select voters pre-election, they are now being used by the loser in efforts to delegitimize the actual election results.
The effect of this has been for that same political party to now introduce yet more measures in the state legislatures they control. And, in some cases, they have wrested control away from state secretaries, allocating it to themselves.
All of this is on the back of false claims.
A refutation of OP's statement would involve you actually demonstrating statistics of fraud across the country, not references to foreign countries and their protocols that might differ.
The success of any voter registration protocol should be evaluated through the lens of Type 1 and Type 2 errors in a statistical model. There are almost zero Type 1 errors in the current US protocol. The Republican agitation is trying to increase Type 2 errors, on the faux premise that Type 1 errors are high - which is completely baseless.
It is fashionable in "intellectual " forums to pretend that conservative actions have a legitimate basis, but they are mostly about undermining democracy.
If that hypothesis is true, then people will never stop believing in voter fraud until said demographics no longer have any significant representation in politics.
Poll citizens and ask how much voter fraud they think happened in the last election, in their state, before a voter ID law is passed. Wait for a voter ID requirement to be passed, and another election to happen. Ask again. Compare. Repeat a few different places if you want to be thorough.
That's one method, anyway.
("Polled citizens' perception of a thing about the world is wildly wrong, and changes in that perception don't follow changes in reality the way you'd hope they would" is a so-common-it's-boring result in political science)
It's possible to exploit this: you can claim somebody else's name, and apparently get away with casting their vote. If that person also votes, then that's easily detected. If the jurisdiction doesn't have a way to separate provisionally-authentic ballots from ID-verified ballots, then the election only needs to be re-done if the number of fraudulent votes is large enough to impact the outcome of the election. Elsewhere, both provisional ballots would be spoiled.
I've voted in a number of elections where my ID didn't match my address. In those situations, they didn't take my word for it, I had to provide an alternative means of proof I am the person I claim to be and that I live where I'm registered.
Also, what states have the individual find themselves on the voter roll? I've always had to provide the proof of my ID/address to a person at the polling station and they would find my ballot.
> Also, what states have the individual find themselves on the voter roll?
I've added a parenthetical to clarify that. That would indeed be absurd.
In my state you show up and give a poll worker your name, and they look it up in a binder with the list of registered voters for the polling station and cross it off. The binder's open on a card table, so if you have good eyes and can read upside down you could get a name. I'm pretty sure there was a Murphy Brown episode where the title character actually committed vote fraud in this way (to vote before she was old enough).
States do provide voter databases of registered voters (at least to the major parties for electioneering), so if you had access to one you could find a name to use. My state definitely does, because I once got election mail with my voting history for the last 5 or 6 federal elections.
Each state is tasked with voter registration/validation. Why provide an ID at all when every single voter and vote is going to be verified against the established voter rolls anyways? Every state has a register/recorder office that validates eligibility to vote at the state and federal level that is far more thorough than asking volunteer poll workers to becoming poll police.
I don't know where you live, but it sounds like people are trying to stifle your voice with what amounts to BS.
This seems awfully not-secure.
All it takes is a motivated group of people to pull off election fraud. Someone wouldn't be doing this solo. You don't think mobsters, corrupt politicians, or even foreign intelligence couldn't manage to sway close elections using this method?
To sway any election its needs to be done a couple thousand times at least. How exactly would that work? How many people could you recruit to do it and nobody says anything? How much would be paid per ballot cast?
I posted this elsewhere in the replies but it seems like an open secret. It seems like once the corruption reaches a critical mass, "the system" is no longer interested in thoroughly following up with fraud allegations. It stands to reason that once the politicians who are willing to commit fraud get elected, they appoint people to key positions that are in-debt to the political machine. Prosecutors have to decide whether or not to pursue an investigation. Judges can dismiss a fraud lawsuit for lack of merit or standing. I'm sure there are plenty of other ways to dismiss efforts to actually cut down on corruption, but I just wanted to name a few.
No, because it's batshit stupid to involve large numbers of people in a conspiracy because the probability of a leak rapidly approaches 100% and your ability to track down the leak rapidly vanishes. Much safer to get a single operator inside the election administration -- "finding" and "losing" ballots, printing bad ballots that "accidentally" leave a candidate off, etc.
Once the political machine has control over "the system", they can shield the grunts from consequences.
It won't until it does.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_close_election_results...
This is made more likely by voter rolls being public. In NC, you can even see if a given person voted in a given election. Not their vote, but whether they voted or not. Which is information you could use to identify identities up for impersonating.
At scale you would need to pay people. Now you risk getting caught trying to pay the wrong person. And for what?
I would bet your money is better spent running propaganda web farms or dark money advertising.
You can't, which is exactly why it's not a serious concern.
Yea, that's not exactly a complete list. One example is undercounting. Another is changing people's party affiliation, so they cannot vote in primaries.
You tried to simplify the far more extensive and comprehensive list of types of voter fraud into a list of categories. In doing so you removed all actionable information from the threat types. What you did is similar to saying that all computer hacks are remote or local. They are, but so what? That isn't actionable, because it removes all the actual descriptive information.
Aren't the primary elections the business of the parties conducting them and not really part of the democratic process at all, but rather a way for parties to find their favorite candidate to put up for the real election? In that case, it doesn't matter for voting rights if a party excludes someone from their own election, does it?
That's the ideal but not the real-world truth, where the parties are entangled with the legal process. If a person leaves one of the major parties, it is almost impossible for them to be recognized legally as a candidate for a presidential election. That's one of the reasons why you get Communists and Centrists in the same political party. The can't possibly ascribe to the same party platform, yet they are members of the same party.
The first example I'd call "ballot stuffing"--it's really a catchall term for shenanigans around turning the actual returned ballots into an official count. This even would cover things like poor ballot design (e.g., butterfly ballots in Florida's elections) that aren't strictly speaking fraud.
The latter example is a fourth category of electoral shenanigans that I'd loosely term voter intimidation; essentially any mechanism by which people are dissuaded from casting a ballot in the first place, which I omitted because most of this category is unfortunately legal.
> In doing so you removed all actionable information from the threat types. What you did is similar to saying that all computer hacks are remote or local. They are, but so what? That isn't actionable, because it removes all the actual descriptive information.
No it's not. While it's true that the ballot stuffing category does contain a rather disparate list of potential frauds, they're all almost entirely solvable by auditing and oversight of the physical process of counting ballots. And more stringent checks on who can cast ballots (which strict id laws purport to be) don't affect it one whit. A more specific look at how to fix an election might dive into the details more, but grouping them in one category doesn't really affect the analysis here.
You can call it ballot stuffing, but you are inventing your own definition when you do that.
"Ballot stuffing or ballot box stuffing is a form of electoral fraud in which a greater number of ballots are cast than the number of people who legitimately voted. The term refers generally to the act of casting illegal votes or submitting more than one ballot per voter when only one ballot per voter is permitted." [1]
> The latter example is a fourth category of electoral shenanigans that I'd loosely term voter intimidation; essentially any mechanism by which people are dissuaded from casting a ballot in the first place, which I omitted because most of this category is unfortunately legal.
That is absolutely not voter intimidation. I had my registration changed by someone who did this, so I am well aware of what happens here. I was not intimidated. [2] Voter intimidation is a federal crime and defined in the Civil Rigts Act and the Hatch Act.
> A more specific look at how to fix an election might dive into the details more, but grouping them in one category doesn't really affect the analysis here.
It absolutely does affect the analysis. You should be able to see that, since I pointed out two specific threats that your categories didn't cover. There are more, too. You cannot properly model threats unless you identify the actors, the vulnerability, how the vulnerability can get exploited, and some sort of analysis. You need to create a model of risks, not just pronounce "There are basically three kinds of voter fraud" using an incorrect, incomplete list. If you don't model risks, how do you know your categories are correct? THat's like when Oracle called itself, "Unbreakable". [3] [4]
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Ballot_stuffing
[2] https://ballotpedia.org/Intimidation_of_voters
[3] https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240043867/Ellison-Oracle-is-unbreakable
[4] https://www.cnet.com/news/oracle-unbreakable-no-more/The analysis is why strict voter ID laws didn't have an effect on actual or perceived voter fraud. So tell me why distinguishing undercounting matters for that analysis.