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Comment by stickyricky | Hacker News Reader

There is an interesting story about Madigan in Chicago. Ran the Illinois machine. Corrupt as all hell. A college student decided to run against him and collected enough signatures to get on the ballot. Madigan typically ran unopposed. Well come to find about, of the 500 people who signed the petition to get this kid on the ballot, 1200 rescinded their support.

You do the math. These people aren't loved. They just know how to work the system to keep the outsiders out. The article says in a district of 150k, the NJ Senate President never received more than 30k votes. 20% of the population was dictating policy. Its no surprise that, when given the choice, people will vote their preference.

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Grew up near Chicago but long gone before this happened so I looked it up:

> Krupa needed 473 valid signatures of ward residents to get on the ballot. He filed 1,729 signatures with the Chicago Board of Election Commissioners. He earlier said he filed 1,703 but missed a page of signatures.

> A crew of mysterious political workers — perhaps they were Buddhist monks, or the gentle sun people known as the Eloi, or maybe Madigan precinct captains — filed 2,796 petitions of revocation of signature. That means 2,796 ward residents filed legal affidavits that they wanted their signatures taken off Krupa’s petitions.

> The Madigan men filed 187 affidavits of revocation matching Krupa signatures. But Dorf, a progressive who’d done election work for the late Mayor Harold Washington and former President Barack Obama, put in a Freedom of Information Act request asking the board to give him all the revocations affidavits that were filed.

> All 2,796 of them.

> “And that’s where the fraud comes in, that’s where the felonies come in,” Dorf said. “Almost 2,800 affidavits were filed. But only 1,726 people signed petitions for Krupa. And of the 2,800 affidavits, the 13th Ward could only find 187 signatures that matched.

> Subtract 187 from 2,796 and you get 2,609 — that’s a lot of possible felonies, either perjury or voter intimidation.

Ref: https://www.chicagotribune.com/columns/john-kass/ct-met-chic...

We’ve got some pretty convincing evidence of corruption and election fraud here.

BUT, rest assured this is extremely rare and these same people wouldn’t dare tamper with any other kind of election. Nor would this happen anywhere else in the United States. Anyone who asserts an election was subject to fraud is attacking democracy itself. /s

> Anyone who asserts an election was subject to fraud is attacking democracy itself. /s

I trust you are referring to problems with the 2020 election? I would appreciate learning what analogies you see between mob-like coercion and the election

Yes, for the most part. I do not think the doubts and suspicious anomalies are new or unique to the 2020 election, though.

As for the mob-like coercion, I don’t think there was this same kind of intimidation going on in 2020. I was using this concrete example of election fraud to refute the oft-touted assertion that voter fraud is vanishingly rare in the United States, and, it is never serious enough to affect an election.

In a naïve way I hope it opens the door to people being willing to accept the idea that if fraud can happen in big corrupt cities, it can happen elsewhere and we should tighten up our oversight laws.

Election irregularities are regular enough that fraud should be a plausible conjecture. Maybe the implicit goal is to limit obvious fraud enough to only make a difference in very close elections when the elect do not receive a big mandate one way or another and to maintain the fiction of votes making a difference.

Followup to "Election irregularities are regular enough that fraud should be a plausible conjecture."

I think increased interest in election integrity after a contested election are great to the extent that high integrity processes are the truth to which society should work towards. Disputes about specific irregularities post-election are less valuable and a generic response could be "well, you should have cheated better."

And I assume those 2,609 were then charged and went to prison right? Right?

Ah who am I kidding.

People where I live get a ballot and a book in the mail weeks before the election with details for all the candidates and questions, and all you have to do is drop it in the outgoing mail. Takes no more than 30min of your time, maybe 1 hour if you are a slow reader. And yet, less than 20% voter participation.

It is ironic that turnout for national elections, where their vote is moot is much higher. But for school boards, county positions, and city positions that actually have an effect on day to day life and expenses, people do not care as much.

WA? That's how it was in Vancouver when I lived there. Best system I've experience so far. Also felt the government was very fair and in line with the community.

Yes. OR is the same.

I'm in WA now, came from MN. It infuriates me thinking about voting in-person: my wife and I used to go to our city hall, wait in line maybe a half hour to 45 minutes. We'd snake our way through the line, get our IDs checked, fill out these forms just so, and if you get a technicality wrong, you'd have to work with someone to fix it. Yadda yadda, finally you'd have time in a booth to cast your vote.

But now in WA, my wife and I typically make our morning coffee, sit out on the patio, read through the voter guide to understand what the arguments for and against a particular ballot initiative are and the statements given by individuals. We vote together, sign our ballot, seal it up, then we drive three blocks to a local drop site (only because I prefer doing that versus putting it in my mailbox).

It's super easy to participate in the system here, and in my jaded perspective, that's exactly why certain people and organizations hate it so much.

The secret ballot is normally considered a cornerstone of democracy. Mail in voting completely destroys that. In my jaded perspective, that’s exactly why certain people and organizations love it so much.

I think you can have a secret ballot with mail in too if you drop it off in person.

Indeed. If you think the results from yesterday were a shellacking, imagine the carnage if there was no early or mail-in voting. In VA in particular there were ballots cast as early as late September. Given the turn of the contest in the final weeks, nobody could say with a straight face they would have all lined up to vote for McAuliffe in person. There's a reason certain groups want to bank those votes in advance.

No one is forced to vote early with mail in ballots.

Mail in voting is still secret ballot - you have an internal "secrecy sleeve" that is in turn mailed in an outer envelope. The outer envelope signature is compared to the signature on file, and then the internal envelope is removed but is not opened in the same location.

https://www.sos.wa.gov/_assets/elections/wa_vbm.pdf

https://www.cnn.com/2020/09/11/politics/barr-secret-vote-fac...

That doesn't stop a determined group of canvassers from going door to door and pressuring people to fill out their ballots on the spot while they wait on their doorstep. It's also a perfect time to offer a bribe or incentive for a speedy completion.

There's no way that any form of remote ballot is going to be as secure as doing it in person. It's just not possible because you will never know the provenance. Like most things that involve the legal system, it's not the law abiding that we're worried about.

While the concerns are true, I am not sure if they are applicable to a society with higher levels of trust like I assume much of the US is in.

At least it is not a problem I know about where I live.

I actually wonder how viable it would be to devise a targeted ballot spoiling attack.

Picture this:

Have a canvasser or harvester pick up mail in ballots. They take it to a safe house and open the envelopes. If it’s a vote for the candidate they don’t like, put marks on it so it doesn’t get counted. Place it in a new return envelope.

You’ve just cancelled that person’s vote. If someone checked that their vote was counted they wouldn’t be able to see that it was spoilt.

You could potentially just throw away the ballot too, I doubt most people check that they were actually received. But it does seem slightly more likely to raise eyebrows. I’m sure you could chalk it up to just getting lost at the post office.

In Colorado, the return envelope has a unique barcode and has to be signed on the outside. Not fullproof, since they could print a new envelope with the same code and forge the signature, but not as easy as just having a stack of return envelopes to use.

You can't just return your ballot in any envelope, you'd have to have access to excess return envelopes which is a tall task.

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by adding marks invalidating the ballot. If you fill out a ballot incorrectly, the poll workers will notify you that there are issues with your ballot.

If there were canvassers knocking on doors and offering bribes for ballots you would hear about it here in Washington state. People here take their voting rights seriously.

Indeed. It's not unheard of that a local election in Britain is invalidated because of voting irregularities - someone collected ballot papers and made sure the vote goes to their man. I hear that that happens in ethnic enclaves in Miami as well.

The vote doesn't have to be convenient, but it absolutely has to be safe. Voter intimidation is impossible with in-person voting.

The book is terrible. I toss it out and read the proposal or at the worst look it up on a few sites that track issues. There is not enough information for complex issues and the wording in my experience is very biased. It takes me more time to vote, but at least I can make an informed decision.

> People where I live get a ballot and a book in the mail weeks before the election with details for all the candidates and questions, and all you have to do is drop it in the outgoing mail.

Are the votes not secret or are the votes not verified as authentic?

Votes are secret and verified to ensure there is only 1 vote per person.

https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/faq_vote_by_mail.aspx

It's not that simple. There was a multi-million dollar (I believe it was $18MM) coordinated campaign against Sweeny in 2017 that failed. It wasn't about offering voters a choice, they've had choices in the past.

You're right its not. But there's something to be said for voting for one of two insiders or an insider versus an outsider.

I don't think Mr. Durr's achievement is replicable. In my opinion, significant election reform is necessary.

> Well come to find about, of the 500 people who signed the petition to get this kid on the ballot, 1200 rescinded their support.

> You do the math.

I did and, well...

squints at those numbers

"The Chicago-School of Mathematics".

0.1% were dictating policy. The other 19.9% of the votes were just following directions.

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