Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
justice.gov
justice.gov
You can't just make people up! Every vote is tied to a specific registration. We do same-day registration, but those votes are cast provisionally, with a paper log; there aren't many of them, and they can all be set aside and audited after-the-fact.
You certainly can't just make up a final tally. The numbers from the individual voting machines and the paper ballots have to match up; we had to stay an extra 2 hours after the polls closed last time I did this (in 2020) because of an equipment screwup that kept us from doing the final certified count/reconciliation.
> You can't just make people up!
> You certainly can't just make up a final tally
> the paper ballots have to match up
It seems you live in an area with auditable physical copies of the poll receipts. Good. That should be the standard.
But 5 states still don't do that: https://www.axios.com/2018/02/16/five-states-without-paper-t...
And I seem to recall things were pretty disheartening nationwide in the early-2000s too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:2004_us_voting_machine_pr...
No doubt the machines were sold off to one of those. Should have scrapped them.
https://www.wired.com/2003/11/e-votes-must-leave-a-paper-tra...
There are multiple stories of electronic voting machines changing the vote on the screen. The voter corrects it, and the correct ballot is printed. But, if the voter misses the change, then an incorrect ballot is printed. Sometimes, the voter has to correct it more than once.
Here in New Hampshire, we use paper ballots marked with a felt tip pen. They are scanned with an optical reader, but it's straightforward to do a manual recount of the official paper ballots.
Electronic balloting machines are an invitation to programmatic fraud.
I attended a Free Software Foundation annual meeting some years ago. The assembled group was asked whether they preferred electronic voting systems over paper ballots. Not a single hand went up.
This is the best argument I'm familiar with against the electronic machines we used to use, and our state switched to paper oval-fill ballots that are then electronically tabulated. But, I haven't seen the statistics yet on how many mis-counts we now have as a result relative to the old system and I'd be curious to see them... Ask yourself how confident you are that 100% of voters know how to successfully fully darken the oval. And since the system is anonymous, nobody looks over their shoulder to verify they understand how to do it before the vote is dropped in the box (though in the event of a close race, a manual recount will be automatically triggered and at that point, at least it'll be human eyes deciding whether the voter circling the oval indicates their intent to vote for that candidate).
I agree so, that if a system isn't set up that way, early results should not be important.
The way French elections are run is insanely elegant though, it’s basically perfect from a security/transparency l POV.
It has a cost but most people involved are not paid. Referendums are uncommon but that has more to do with political culture than costs I think.
We just had presidential elections and are electing representatives for parlement next week, we had local elections in 2020, nation-wide elections are not that rare.
Having mandatory voting would mean that non votes don't screw up the results when one side manages to mobilize morw voters than others. And intentionally voting blank actually sends a pretty strong signal.
Sure, they don’t vote for judges and sheriffs and stuff, and it’s a system that’s more representative than participative as in, say, Switzerland. But it works.
One of the things that helps is that voting happens always on Sundays, when most people do not have to take a day off work to vote or to help counting.
- substantial social services that don't directly require individuals to have disposable income and aren't tied directly to employment
- humane policies for vacation days in general, and
- national holidays for things like election day.
In the USA, we teach our children that civic engagement is important, but then corrupt politicians at all levels make civic engagement as hard as possible, abetted by moralizing reactionary conservatives.
No wonder Americans are generally cynical and don't participate in politics.
Pay rates vary by locality (as elections are run by local councils)- typically it seems to be around £200 for the day.
There is even a race between a few constituencies to be the first to officially declare a result. These guys are really well organised, and for a few days it is a huge piece of civic pride.
Very clear printed text. No hanging chads.
Counting ballots by hand sucks. Moving paper ledgers physically sucks.
Unfortunately it has yet to be demonstrated that it can be done well, let alone perfectly.
Here's a paper with details in PDF form [1], and here it is in HTML [2]. Here's a paper proving that it is coercion-resistant [3]. Here's a Wikipedia article [4] on it.
Voting systems with these kind of verification/auditing capabilities are called "end-to-end auditable" or "end-to-end voter verifiable" systems, and here is some information on them in general [5].
[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...
[2] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...
[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...
Maybe in the US, a lot of places do it just fine so.
Meanwhile the few politicians that DID attempt to do go along with this effort... died. Maybe they "died", who knows.
Before election
Union boss: "we expect everyone to vote for candidate X"
After election
Union boss: "show me your vote receipt"
It's better than what we have. Vote-changing can be uncovered by an audit. ... But I still prefer the coercion-resistant systems that let you verify your own vote was counted correctly after the fact. Someone else posted a link to a bunch of papers.
What would be cool is if you combined that serial number with a hash generated by filling in the ballot after the fact.
Eg you go to a page, supply your serial number and the things you voted for, and it tells you if it was counted and matches what you're saying.
Of course, this could still be used that way... but in CA ballots usually have enough options that it would be difficult for a malicious actor to have that much intent haha.
Most people would probably forget which smaller issues they voted for though.... so I dunno if it'd be reliable.
Since you are asking me, If you read or scan the page you will see how unions historically operated in the US.
Companies can strongly suggest who employees should vote for and solicit donations to specific candidates.
As far as checking a record of actual votes, that's old days Tammany Hall kind of stuff. Not to say it wouldn't happen again if people could easily get away with it.
https://www.findlaw.com/legalblogs/in-house/can-a-company-te...
It is good that these laws continue to protect the voter's right to autonomy against new threats to it.
Always bugged me too, but the good news is dirty jerz just got new machines that are auditable this year. Just voted yesterday in primaries and the machines print a paper ballot with answers ready to review. Before it drops into a lockbox, it gives you a final chance to accept or reject what is printed.
The guilty parties were literally casting votes for people they knew would not show up.
It’s an identity issue, much harder, and with its own set of controversies.
After all, it's easy to imagine a situation where certain groups might want to manufacture evidence of voter fraud.
The recourse should a person's vote be stolen that way is proof that the vote was stolen followed by punishment for the thief, and that punishment can be fairly severe because vote tampering cannot be taken lightly given the impact it can have on the process itself.
Spoiled ballots go into a separate lockbox. At the end of the night everything is tabulated (winners, losers, provisional ballots, spoiled ballots) and posted at the voting precinct. The spoiled ballots box is sealed and taken to the election office to be inspected. This is for 1 state. Every state manages elections differently.
BTW, if you can sign up to be a poll worker. It’s a thankless job that takes 1 day a year. Most poll workers are retirees and I was one of the youngest there.
https://www.gannett-cdn.com/-mm-/b9fb2868c7c1a0e1f4f7e8f7c0f...
Unregistering has had some serious problems of hitting active voters in the past, though I'm not an expert there.
But I can easily say that checking ID, without first making sure valid voters can easily get the needed ID, is unacceptable.
Agreed. The issue is the Democratic solution is to never ID, instead of coming up with a way to easily get people IDs. That makes me rather suspicious of their motives.
No, it isn't, anywhere in the US. A bare majority (26) states have stop-and-identify laws which allow stops to determine identity based on reasonable suspicion of crime, but many don't, and those that do don't (and cannot Constitutionally) require presenting identification.
Everywhere in the US, the law around Terry stops[1] applies. In fact every time the police “pull you over” on the road is a Terry stop.
In such a stop, mere “reasonable suspicion” is required for police to require you to identify yourself. You’re not required to present ID but you must tell them your name (you could lie, but that’s another crime). You can be arrested for refusing to identify yourself.
In order to determine if your are experiencing a Terry stop, ask the officer “Am I free to go?”, if the answer is no, ask “Why am I being detained?” and the officer should state his cause. If it’s not valid you won’t be able to fight it until after the encounter, possibly after you’ve already been arrested.
Egregious example: The infamous NYC “stop and frisk” policy[2] was essentially a massive Terry-stop program.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terry_stop
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop-and-frisk_in_New_York_Cit...
IANAL, either, but I passed Con Law in law school, and it is.
> Everywhere in the US, the law around Terry stops[1] applies.
Yes, that’s what we are talking about.
> In such a stop, mere “reasonable suspicion” is required for police to require you to identify yourself.
Wrong. In such a stop, it is not federally unconstitutional for such a demand to be made, but it still requires that there is actual state law authorizing it. In 26 states there is, and in the rest there is not.
> You’re not required to present ID
Yes, that’s what I said, that even in the 26 states with stop-and-identify laws, permitted by the Supreme Court, you are still not, as the upthread commenter, required to present ID.
You’ve literally repeated what I said (except for confusing the federal limits of state authority with what police can do without supporting state law), after saying “It’s not that simple”.
Maybe after I take that course I’ll agree with you. I don’t think that’s a great option for most.
Regarding this topic, there are historical and recent reasons for suggestions of cleaning, trimming, purging etc. the vote roster to be met with extreme scrutiny and skepticism. The United States simply has a bad history of using tools like that for shaping the electorate to meet a desired outcome.
I know this is probably techno-utopianism, but it'd be pretty cool if every resident were issued a certificate (for free) with their state or federal government as the certificate authority, which would be used for voting, paying taxes, etc. instead of ad-hoc verification systems like Name + SSN + Address.
I can imagine so many horrible problems with implementing such a system in any US state (let alone federally), but it would be pretty damn cool.
Create a system like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31668814 for voting.
Voters remain anonymous yet can still verify their particular vote was counted correctly (and in fact that all votes are counted correctly)
You’d still want a paper trail.
Our new voting machines in our county are awesome, I hope they are used across the state (NJ).
You get a blank piece of paper that you insert into the machine. You vote electronically, and it prints your vote out in plain readable text on the paper, and presents it to you protected under a piece of glass (maybe pexiglass?) to validate your choices. If there is something wrong, you can reject it at this point. If you accept it, it records your vote electronically, and swallows the paper ballot as a record.
Nice clear printed text. No chads.
> Demuro fraudulently stuffed the ballot box by literally standing in a voting booth and voting over and over, as fast as he could, while he thought the coast was clear
TFA explains the other case was nepotism enabled conspiracy:
> Beren, who was charged separately and pleaded guilty in October 2021, was the de facto Judge of Elections and effectively ran the polling places in her division by installing close associates to serve as members of the Board of Elections.
https://nypost.com/2020/11/03/houston-woman-turned-away-from...
https://abc11.com/nc-vote-provisional-ballot-voter-already-v...
> North Carolina State Board of Elections data shows more than 2,600 voters cast provisional ballots during early voting this year. Around 19% of ballots cast were due to voters--like Prince--who were told they already voted.
Older people are much more likely to vote and much more likely to die.
I'm aware that votes cast in the name of the long-deceased has been used for fraud in the past. But some of number of votes cast by dead people should be expected! Just way below the number needed to influence elections.
People say this like there are no close elections, or are only talking about Presidential elections (and ignoring Florida 2020), but pretty much every year there are razor thin votes in statewide and congressional races. Good example is Iowa 2nd district in 2020 which was decided by 6 votes:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/democrat-rita-hart-ends-elec...
GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks was certified the winner in November by a mere six votes out of 400,000 cast, marking one of the closest House races in modern history.
Given 400,000 votes, there is guaranteed more than 6 fraudulent, mistaken, or sabotages ballots. Maybe that affected the result, or just missed flipping the seat, who knows. But small time voting fraud can still be a big problem.
Not in reality, you appended that to your local model.
It's true that there is only so much fraud you can get away with, and if the legitimate votes outnumber your ballot stuffing then your plan failed.
Presumably fraudsters do not know what the final counts are going to be (unlike how many people in this thread "know" things they have no way of knowing), so this would not necessarily alter their plans on sites that are plausibly (in their estimation) swingable.
> But in fact Meeks vs. Hart was newsworthy because results like that are incredibly rare. 99 times out of 100, if you try to juke the election, you're putting yourself at pretty grave legal risk and accomplishing absolutely nothing.
This rests on the premise of omniscience, and while this is a fairly standard convention on the internet these days, there is no scientific evidence I've seen that substantiates the phenomenon.
Assuming that's true, you just need to know when it is going to be close, and that only requires polling, not prescience.
https://www.thegazette.com/article/polling-shows-iowa-2nd-di...
Slightly more than two months before Iowans begin voting, polling shows the open-seat race in the U.S. House 2nd District as a dead heat.
In a live poll of 406 likely voters by Harper Polling, Republican state Sen. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Democrat Rita Hart each had the support of 41 percent of the respondents
So this is exactly the kind of race where a smart cheater would cheat, not trying to get Trump to win California or Biden to win West Virginia. But I assume people who are corrupt and cheat are going to be corrupt and cheat even when it is not in their own interest. And just by chance that will affect other elections happening at the same time.
No, this doesn't sound plausible.
What is rcv? How would runoff’s help if there are only two candidates?
https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2020/11/05/did-a-dead-11...
At least that’s what it sounds like in
> Beren and her accomplices from the Board of Elections would then falsify the polling books and the List of Voters and Party Enrollment for the 39th Ward, 2nd Division, by recording the names, party affiliation, and order of appearances for voters who had not physically appeared at the polling station to cast his or her ballot in the election. Beren took pains to ensure that the number of ballots cast on the machines was a reflection of the number of voters signed into the polling books and the List of Voters.
but what if they are all from the same party?
I'd say so, but not in a sense that the effect is only or even primarily associated with [insert political party here].
Edit: We like to envision Judges as impeccably impartial, but they have a considerable amount of leeway, ambiguity, and procedural caveats they can employ should they choose to make partisan decisions. Given that judges are often selected by, or elected with support from, a political party machine, it stands to reason that they can be swayed to help the party that is responsible for their position. Especially if there is plausible deniability of bias or wrongdoing.
And a member of party X is more likely to be willing to cheat to benefit party X,
Then having all the members that need to sign off be from party X does indeed increase the ability to cheat for party X.
I think you have to have some pretty huge procedural gaps to make this viable, which is my point here.
Second, the story we're talking about here is about a primary election; the whole contest took place within a single party.
Third, I'm not sure why it would matter. OK, they're all Democrats. Now what? Even if all 4 EJs wanted to corrupt the results of an election, it's not super obvious how you'd undetectably do that. The paper ballots get hauled back to the central counting facility; the registrations have to match the ballots, etc.
I don't know about you, but I used to change my party affiliation before the primary to be able to vote in the election I care the most about... (I'm not from that state though).
> Inside the polling place and while the polls were open, Beren would advise actual in-person voters to support Myers’ candidates and also cast fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates on behalf of voters she knew would not or did not physically appear at the polls (emphasis mine)
Step one, check the signature, the voter roles, and remove the envelope. Throw the ballot into the bin to be counted.
Step two, count the ballot. This ballot now has no identifiable information on it at all. There's no way to verify that a person's ballot was correctly tallied.
So if you wanted to ballot stuff, you could do so prior to step two. Recounts wouldn't identify fraud, you're just counting anonymous ballots again.
The NY Times wrote about the possibility for mail-in voter fraud back in 2012: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
That's one way to illegally harvest votes. One that almost certainly occurred in nursing homes around the country in the last election.
Citation, please.
https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2022/02/24/macomb-county-nursin...
https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2020/11/12/texas-nursing-home-w...
https://www.apr.org/2007-07-13/two-charged-with-voter-fraud-...
https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/4th-resident-of-villages-f...
https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/wisconsin-sheriff-wants...
https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/vote-fraud-election-sen...
False. I've encountered easily thousands of people who make such claims on the internet.
You might then say "No officials make such claims" - here you're technically correct, but somewhat misinformative: the people in such situations have public relations professionals at their disposal, and also tend to have years of experience (or at least observation) of how to do PR.
When election fraud is discussed, they choose their words carefully, opting to discuss not election fraud, but massive election fraud.
If the topic was other than this one (if "the shoe was on the other foot" so to speak), I don't think these things would be hard to notice...but, human psychology is what it is, so here we are.
> But as seen by the links you provided, there are people watching for these kinds of fraud, and people get caught all the time, even when it's just a single extra vote, much less enough to actually make a difference.
This is speculation, stated in the form of a fact - this, combined with the topic, may cause readers to form a belief that it is necessarily factual.
It is not speculation that there are people who look for election fraud (and then prosecute it when found). And folks do get caught/prosecuted for just about every election cycle, so "all the time". And the links demonstrate that. I may have expounded on that a bit but the language is not speculative except maybe the portion about whether or not there is enough to make a difference. That is my opinion, but heavily based on the reading on this topic I have done, checking claims from a wide variety of sources, parties, etc. I make no claims to expertise but I do believe the information I have shared is accurate to the best of my ability and folks can do with that what they will (hopefully spend their own time actually making sure they are not misled).
And while contemplating this idea, remember that we are dealing with human beings.
Technically, this isn't true.
> But the chance of the being sufficient fraud to change say the presidential election is extremely unlikely....
Technically, the likelihood is not known. Humans are welcome to state estimates of the likelihood, and believe those estimates to be true (and rebroadcast them, seeding the "fact" into other minds), but base reality is where the truth lies. We can (and do!) pretend that our estimated reality is factual but this is a collective cultural delusion, and a harmful one at that (which sometimes people can see clearly (in the behavior of our outgroups), and other times not (in their own and ingroup behavior)). Pick any culture war topic thread on HN, and observe how people describe "reality" - the phenomenon is not really hiding as much as we aren't able to see it (similar to how we couldn't see certain things until we developed techniques, like using lenses to see into different realms of reality).
> ...especially given the evidence that we have.
Our discovery of evidence has no influence on that which preceded it, it only has influence on our beliefs of that which preceded it. Unfortunately, we often tend to not form a distinction between the two.
I personally think that fraud of a significant scale in a country with thousands of different voting systems is basically impossible to hide, and a lot of people are looking for it. We take many steps to reduce that risk. And when we catch someone trying, we should slap them down hard as an example to others.
Citation, please.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/12/bladen-cou...
[1] https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public_interest/election_...
Citation? This article shows 2 out of 2 as Democrats.
This article shows a guilty plea from a Democrat who for years rigged votes with a Judge of Elections and Democrat Ward Leader, Domenick J. DeMuro. Demuro pled guilty in 2020.
In the 2000 Washington gubernatorial race the number of votes counted exceeded the number of registered voters and the margin of victory was less than the number of excess votes.
And even if it is just a local school board seat or dog catcher, it’s still a violation of people’s civil rights. What’s more is local elections usually have way more direct impact on people’s lives than federal elections.
The Wikipedia page, as well as the cited sources, are a fun read. The final decision by a judge in the case was that 1678 illegal votes were to be removed from the total number of votes cast. However, they were not apportioned to either candidate. The final margin of victory was 133 votes.
Otherwise, keep the sarcastic BS to yourself. Please.
upsidesinclude wrote:
> You find a bunch of people that can't or wouldn't vote and collect their automatically mailed ballots, fill them out and have them dropped off in boxes.
>That's one way to illegally harvest votes. One that almost certainly occurred in nursing homes around the country in the last election.
thenewwazoo replied:
> Citation, please.
This isn't about substantial fraud. It is about a very specific source of fraud that upsidesinclude said was likely to have happened.
using the "left-over" ballots of people not voting, sure, all you have o do is to convince the other 3 to 4 people present at the polling station to go along. and since we have literally thousands of those stations you have to repeat that a lot. And as soon as the participation exceeds the other places, people will investigate. The provisional count done on-site is redone before it is official, so again deviations will be found. And if they are not, congrats, you managed to stuff maybe a dozen ballots, if you are lucky.
Otherwise, I agree with your point. The reason ballot harvesting is much less of an issue than made out is because there's a vast paper trail with each mail in ballot cast.
I don't believe 'signatures change' is reasonable or valid. By the time someone reaches adulthood and has an ID, their mark is likely to be quite distinct. Check your grandmother's signature sometime. My point being, that dismissal is not evidence or fact based, but likely aligns with your opinion.
>ultimately up to the counter
There's absolutely no reason to do that. Digital files already exist of all signatures and the envelope is coded to each voter. The comparison can be done trivially by image processing.
I have my own signature that I can check and I KNOW it has changed significantly over time. Why? Because I don't sign a lot of things! Hell, I hardly write anything down.
There are many, MANY, reasons a signature can change, for example, injury. But beyond that, there's just general drift in the way people write things. [1]
> The comparison can be done trivially by image processing.
No, it can't, because the signature is not exact, even in the best of cases. The software HAS to make allowances in differences and once that happens, we are in the territory of "what is this actually proving?"
Further, signature forgery is a thing. There's a reason banks and CCs no longer even check the signature. It's a relic that proves nothing.
But beyond all this conversation, the current process for states doing signature validation isn't to reach out to the person that cast the vote to verify their ballot, no, instead they mark the ballot as invalid and move on. [2]
Indeed, if the concern was voter fraud, why WOULDN'T you want to reach out to the absentee ballot caster to find out if they actually cast the ballot? Why would "throw it away" ever be the right move?
[1] https://www.thecut.com/2016/09/why-your-handwriting-keeps-ch...
[2] https://electionlab.mit.edu/sites/default/files/2021-07/swif...
I would be greatful to read that what you have stated is true, but I sincerely doubt it.
If you believe that to be true, it would be much easier to dismiss concerns
So that leaves people that are coerced into asking for mail-in ballots and are then forced to vote a certain way. Without being caught doing it at a scale enough to tip an election. good luck doing that in a system that isn't gerrymandered to the point that one district in, e.g. Florida, can decide a presidential election with only a handful of votes. In a normal system not election is ever close enough that this small scale tempering has any impact on results. Which is exactly why it happens so rarely, and is almost always detected.
EDIT: Thinking of it, I'll add policing to the list. Made worse by the fact that even dictatorships solved it better then the US, totalitarian regimes tend to have better rules and control over law enforcement resulting in targeted brutality, and not the random variety, inflicted by badly trained and scared officers, the US seems to have.
You can’t start your topic broad “every American” and then use the much less broad amount of immigrants to “prove” your point.
Because “every American” means I can’t bring up the non-zero amount of Americans that do emigrate elsewhere.
Your entire argument is in bad faith.
Seemed like a tongue-in-cheek quip to demonstrate that there are a lot more folks in the world who are trying to come to the U.S. than the opposite, which as far as I know is pretty true.
In my experience of talking to said Americans, that many can't is largely a case of restrictive immigration policies in most places Americans would like to move to.
So usually America has lower than average citizens wanting to emigrate. Trump made Trump haters want to leave, bringing it up to global averages.
That’s a significant jump, but being globally average does not fit the narrative you’re trying to portray.
Hoverer, US is weirdly stuck in local maximums in a lot of places.
But there’s no way to really know either way, can’t really do blind testing of this can we!
That’s a bullshit statement though because countries don’t agree on how they should approach those topics.
The healthcare in Canada vs UK vs Germany is starkly different. Canadians even come to the US for elective procedures.
Gun access is also vastly different between Switzerland, Canada, and the UK. In the UK you can’t even bring a baseball bat to a park.
The solution is not a simple one as you imply, otherwise it would have been solved already. Give people some credit!
Australia, imprisoned? Because of our gun laws?
I have access to four different shooting ranges within twenty minutes travel, and my friends go hunting every other weekend. How exactly are we imprisoned?
I mean, who exactly would you shoot? And after shooting them how would the outcome improve?
If you go to the airport how do you find a plane big enough to take you somewhere? Or enough people to prepare it to fly? And when you get to where you are going, how do you avoid getting arrested?
Ditto a boat. And a boat to where exactly?
Having a gun would literally have made zero difference on anything. Oh, wait, you meant that enough gun owners would get together, and perform some coup-like action to replace the government? Sure. That seems likely to turn out really well.
No Australian government agent is going to shoot fellow Australians, or be shot by fellow Australians, to enforce such an absurd prohibition on free and peaceful movement.
Such unilateral authoritarian nonsense can only occur when the majority of the population is disarmed first.
You'll note that the same thing happened in New York City during the 2004 RNC, during Bush's term and Bush's invasion of Iraq. There were unlawful mass arrests by NYPD of thousands of peaceful protesters, who were kettled and housed with limited food and water for 24-48h in large high-density camps along the river. Most were released without charges several days later (when the RNC was over) which, years later, resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money being paid out as settlement for the illegal actions of the police. This never would have happened if the protest were not approximately 0% armed; the police would not have attempted to kettle a crowd where even a few dozen were able to defend themselves from police violence.
This is why Hong Kong no longer has a free press, fair elections, or due process. They were forced to "fight" well-armed authoritarians with nothing more than umbrellas and laser pointers. Such a battle simply would not have happened in the first place were the population sufficiently armed. Police are not stupid; they will only engage with violence where they are nearly certain not to lose or be harmed (as we observed recently in Texas).
A well-armed population keeps the state from overstepping its bounds without a single shot being fired.
Not that this whole "armed people against the government" thing works in the US, after all the Jan 6th insurrection wasn't an armed mob storming the capitol. Despite being from groups that are peretty well armed.
No unorganised group of people will ever beat state actors just by being armed. Another counter point that often brought up is the rose of the Nazis and how the Nazis took away the guns first. Wrong, because there loads of illegal militias equipped with military grade weaponry around that time. It was exactly those grouos that enabled the Nazis rise to power and formed the core of the SA. The Nazis took the guns awau from the SA, a long with the leadership and the whole organisation, once they were firmly in power.
So then if Australians wanted to mass-disobey the stay-at-home order they could. As you say "No Australian government agent is going to shoot fellow Australians." So guns or no guns, if there was sufficient demand citizens who wanted to could simply have moved around. (Lacking planes and boats travel out of Australia would likely still be restricted.)
By your own point, it's not lack of guns that caused the population to follow the guidelines. It was rather a respect for authority, and the rule of law, that kept the masses at home. Sure a few would reject those guidelines, and be arrested, but that is literally the "few" - not the majority.
>> Such unilateral authoritarian nonsense can only occur when the majority of the population is disarmed first.
I'm not sure I agree. There is plenty of unilateral authority in places where people have guns.
>> You'll note that the same thing happened in New York City during the 2004 RNC, during Bush's term and Bush's invasion of Iraq. There were unlawful mass arrests by NYPD of thousands of peaceful protesters, who were kettled and housed with limited food and water for 24-48h in large high-density camps along the river. Most were released without charges several days later (when the RNC was over) which, years later, resulted in hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayer money being paid out as settlement for the illegal actions of the police.
Indeed the police committed illegal actions, and have paid out well for it. Perhaps they will learn from that, perhaps not.
>> This never would have happened if the protest were not approximately 0% armed; the police would not have attempted to kettle a crowd where even a few dozen were able to defend themselves from police violence.
um. So you're saying they were reasonably sure that out of thousands of protesters there weren't "a few dozen" who were armed? I agree that sounds reasonable. but if there had been say 100 armed those 100 would have opened fire on the police, and everyone would just have gone home? Given the follow up from another incident (Jan 6) I suspect anyone who fired would have been speedily prosecuted. Anyone who even brandished a gun would have been prosecuted. A bunch of people (likely from both sides) would be dead - and that's somehow a _better_ outcome?
On the other hand it doesn't really matter if the protesters were armed or not - ultimately it was the _perception_ that they were not which allowed them to corral the protest?
>> This is why Hong Kong no longer has a free press, fair elections, or due process. They were forced to "fight" well-armed authoritarians with nothing more than umbrellas and laser pointers. Such a battle simply would not have happened in the first place were the population sufficiently armed. Police are not stupid; they will only engage with violence where they are nearly certain not to lose or be harmed (as we observed recently in Texas).
I think you perhaps are miss-conflating local police in a small Texas town, to the discipline and willingness of well trained armed forces of authoritarian regimes. I don't think hand-guns in Hong Kong would have made the slightest bit of difference to the Chinese authorities in Hong Kong.
>> A well-armed population keeps the state from overstepping its bounds without a single shot being fired.
That's certainly a point of view, and it's obviously a very popular view with a lot of US citizens. I respect that you have that point of view, and respect your right to have that point of view. Personally I don't see that your view is accurate to the reality in the US, much less anywhere else.
It's widely reported that at least 40% of Americans believe the election was rigged. Whether they are correct or not is irrelevant. If 40% of a population _believe_ that democracy has been usurped, and are armed to the teeth, and yet clearly there has not been an (armed) uprising then I'm wondering what has to happen for said armed population to actually take action? Even the Jan 6 incident is laughable for how small, unarmed, and ineffective it was. Apparently there were lots of conspirators, much planning behind the scenes, all sorts of machinations in play, and yet all we got was some folk wandering around a building, then going home. If the outcome of the 2nd amendment is Jan 6, well that seems like a wasted effort.
I don't think we're in the final inning yet. The only thing I know for sure is that I don't intend to be in North America for any day in January 2025, and that I will have full and complete backups of all my irreplaceable data on my person whilst traveling.
The type of populace that willingly disarms themselves is the same populace that willingly accepts totalitarian lockdowns.
In America, if the government had tried anything near that, there'd have been riots immediately. And yes, rioters with guns are a lot less likely to be stopped.
Maybe it's luck?
Or maybe something to do with the prescience of several men who laid out a framework for federalism and distributed power with clear checks and balances, ensuring resilience and the longest running constitutional democracy in the world [1], understanding that reasonable people can disagree and that the most effective form of governance is a non-centralized distributed system that serves the needs of state citizens first.
Or it could be all the corn. [2]
[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2011/aug/08/jon-huntsm...
[2] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets-economy/090316...
Everything in the US is the way it is because it's best for SOMEONE, but rarely everyone.
You may have noticed that between 2016 and 2020 there were a bunch of media articles about voting security and how poor it was despite this. That's because the US media has no problem concluding that the voting system can't be trusted when the wrong party wins something important, like the presidential election. I'm not even exaggerating here, whether (say) voting machine security is portrayed as a non-issue that's impossible to exploit or a gaping hole that throws into question the entire results aligns exactly with who's winning.
Has anyone ever read any studies into this phenomenon, or anything closely related?
When contacting these people many claimed they did not request or receive the mail in ballot.
You have described one particular case that doesn't involve fraud or bad actors. That is called a strawman argument.
Nope, 8 states automatically mail ballots to all eligible voters: https://ballotpedia.org/All-mail_voting
Plus Illinois (and maybe others?) now has a permanent opt-in.
(Quick edit: More up-to-date source that removed the state labeled "temporary" from the previous source)
This is specifically about the US. Arguing some random position inconsistent with US voting systems is not helpful discourse
All that is required is the belief that it is imperative your team wins. The ideology that you can be dishonest if you do it for the right reasons grants considerable latitude for these types of corrections.
In the case you present, one bad actor is somehow able to manipulate the system en mass. That is certainly likely to draw attention, as you've pointed out.
Nothing would make me more convinced of an election outcome than having my ballot rejected due to signature comparison and getting the opportunity to cast it again
Their fraud used the voter information of real people who they expect to simply not come to the polling station. It’s hard to catch. If you notice double voting from when the person actually votes then they simply throw out both votes (legitimate and illegitimate).
This seems like a tactic that would work well in a place like the USA which has low voter turn out.
And I am describing just one way of how paper ballots work save, anonymous and at scale. You need some truly mind blowing organizational fuck up (look up the last election in Berlin) for it to not work. An even then it affected one single (?) voting district (as in polling places, not candidate districts if i remember correctly), was instantly identified and investigated and almost impossible to use to temper with the results (it was found out immediately).
Do they pay them?
Either (1) or (2) not being true makes elections way less secure.
The German system would be much more onerous if implemented in America than one tied to driver’s licenses that virtually everyone in America has already.
> requires showing up in person within a month of moving
Not during covid by the way. I moved in 2020 and could simply send in the documents by email. Then some time later I had to briefly drop by to get a stamp for my ID, but that was like 5 minutes.
> registering to vote is super easy and can be done online in most states
That is nice, but not having to register at all is even easier.
Sure, lots of things were relaxed during the pandemic. But you have to register in person normally, correct?
And why do think your German ID card won't work anymore if the address on it is wrong?
> Anyone who moves into a residence in Germany must register within two weeks of moving in. To register, you have to go to the registration authority of your municipality and present a valid ID card, passport or passport substitute document and a certificate issued by the person providing the residence.
> Persons moving abroad must deregister with the registration authority of their municipality, while those moving within Germany only have to register their new residence. It is not necessary to deregister the former residence.
> Both Germans and foreigners are required to register. Violations of the registration re-quirement are subject to fines.
I didn’t say the German ID card would stop working. But as I understand it, voting is based on your registered address, which must be current to vote, and that residency registration requires showing up in person.
The point is that voting in Germany requires showing up to a registration office with documents every time you move, which is more onerous than presenting an ID to vote in the US. Both voter registration and renewing a driver’s license or changing your address on your license can be done completely online in most states. I’ve only gone in person to deal with my driver’s license twice in my life (I’m almost 40), despite moving almost a dozen times. Once when I got my license as a teenager, and once when I changed my residency permanently from Virginia to Maryland.
Partially. You can fill out and send all documents online or by mail -- at least in the city I moved to. Then once everything is done you need to make an appointment to stop by and pick up your address sticker and certificate.
Having some in person part for ID things seems unavoidable, but nothing onerous.
In case you think I’m joking, Joe Biden has claimed that Georgia’s online voter registration (https://registertovote.sos.ga.gov/GAOLVR/welcometoga.do?#no-...) and free Voter ID card (https://dds.georgia.gov/voter) amounts to “the New Jim Crow.”
I do like postal mail. I've yet to see a convincing argument that the coercion risk is substantial enough to offset the other benefits. Voting slowly at my living room table is awesome.
It’s not just coercion risk. It’s the whole chain of custody.
Give the FEC the power to issue photo ID for voting. Legislate that it is only valid for that purpose and any other use is illegal. Send out census-style teams to track down every citizen and issue them a card, free of charge.
Of course, there are all sorts of problems with this that are entirely self-inflicted. Someone will oppose a national ID, even if we already have that. Someone else will point out that the states legally get to make their own voting rules, and they're right. This isn't a problem anyone actually wants to solve. Democrats want to make it easier to vote, Republicans want to make it harder. It's like every other tribal issue, neither side will give an inch because they fear the other side will take a mile.
Summary: They pretty much all responded "whoever thinks we don't have / can't get IDs is ignorant and probably a bit racist".
- 13% of Blacks, 10% of Hispanics, but only 5 percent of Whites lack photographic identification.
- 12% of adults living in a household with less than $25,000 annual income lack photo ID, compared to just 2 percent in households with over $150,000 annual income.
- 15 percent of 17-20 year olds lack photo ID, and 11 percent of those ages 21-24 lack photo ID.
So yeah, ID requirements are not a half bad way to skew election results in your favor.
And consider for a moment just how strong an advantage Republicans have in the house of representatives these days compared to how weak their actual number of represented voters is. All the little efforts absolutely add up to real results.
And how does the voter turnout look for those groups anyway? The only people who might be impacted negatively by ID requirement are those unable (for whatever reason? Why can't there be an easy way to get an ID in the first place?) and actually wanting to vote.
http://www.electproject.org/home/voter-turnout/voter-turnout...
I think almost every person interested in elections is someone with enough money to get an ID every 5 years. But hell give out a subsidy for the poor to get an ID card for free.
IANAL, but I believe that something like this would require a constitutional amendment, unless it could be squeezed in under the umbrella of the ICC like most other federal overreach laws.
If one agrees that this is true, that's not an answer to the question of why not do it; it does affect the mechanics—either a Constitutional Amendment (to do it federally) or a fifty-state compact (do it as a coordinated state-ID system for all state purposes, which is arguably closer to what was described) would be available mechanisms.
“The Constitution doesn't currently allow the federal government to do it” is not an answer to “why not do this in a centrally coordinated way”.
Personally I think there is some constitutional justification for a national ID system. The commerce clause gets abused a lot IMHO but identity is at the core of just about any contract. You could argue that state identification and plain old name, address, signature are sufficient, but it's not like SSNs are ubiquitous for no reason. Even as dumb as it is to use a single number for someone that never changes, the benefits of a single static identifier that is the same across a person's lifetime and established by the government outweighs the horrific insecurity of it all. Fundamentally a government is the root authority of legal identity for all the citizens of that country. The government should provide a modern secure way of establishing identity for both public and private matters.
Wow, I didn’t know I live in a black neighborhood!
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-01/alabama-c...
When one considers action such as this in light of the GOP being caught red-handed attempting to shape the census questions to deprive states of Congressional representation (https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/30/us/census-citizenship-que...), it becomes, at the very least, suspicious. For at least a short time (politically speaking, maybe half a generation), the GOP has lost the benefit of the doubt regarding its actions being race-neutral and some healthy skepticism is justified.
Many US problems could be solved if Americans could get over our irrational fears about comprehensive databases. The boogeyman is already real. Let's be tracked in one auditable location instead of 36+ incomplete and contradictory databases where the contradictions can be used as "evidence" of fraud. The downsides are already here, let's acknowledge reality and then build systems to give us a chance at enjoying the benefits of centralized intelligence.
Ballots need serial numbers that trace back to a person that we can pick up a phone and confirm their vote when elections are contested. Being unable to do a spot-check audit is just plain stupid. Every person should be able to look up their ballot and see how it was counted at the end of the election.
Let's say voter fraud is indeed very low in the US, why not make obvious moves to make it even more accurate and honest?
That would mean that elections are no longer secret. There are many good reasons why elections are secret in most (all?) democracies. It makes it impossible for people to be pressured into voting a certain way or payed to vote a certain way. It also means that you can't be prosecuted for voting a certain way. Giving up all of this would open up so many new avenues for voter fraud.
Edit: This is not necessarily an argument but secret ballots are part of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The secret ballot is essential, as compromise of that secrecy enables vote selling and voter intimidation. One of the reasons New York had tabulating machines and kept them was to limit the ability of political machines to interfere with elections at the local level. Tammany Hall operatives and others would retaliate against voters who didn’t do what the machine wanted. (Later those machines aged and became a liability)
There’s no such thing as a perfect process, and while your idea is a worthy way of providing validation, it creates more serious issues that ultimately undermine the democratic process.
If you have any kind of audit background they answer to ensuring integrity is always a same: a well defined process where different individuals are responsible for different parts of the process and are audited to achieve best practices.
The reality is that measures designed to target individual voter fraud are solving a problem that doesn’t exist and are done to suppress turnout.
The actual risk of voting related fraud is pretty obvious - political partisans with the access and ability to intimidate or bypass civil service employees from following the process. As a nation, we should be lauding the courage of the GOP election commissioners in Georgia who risked their careers and perhaps their lives to defy a demented president. Whatever the politics, those are people with integrity.
The tabulating machines or the political machines?
I meant the physical devices. Towards the end of their tenure, there were some statistical irregularities that suggested the gears were failing to roll over correctly, resulting in undercounting.
The formula is simple: Central, automatic voter registration, easy access to ID cards (the general one, not a voter Id. You know, the thing most use to identify citizens instead of drivers liscences), easy access to polling stations, no Gerrymandering and paper ballots. That's all you need.
Generally the thinking is that there must never exist a mechanism by which you can prove to some other person how you voted, or voters can be coerced into voting a certain way.
> Let's say voter fraud is indeed very low in the US, why not make obvious moves to make it even more accurate and honest?
Because if you aren’t careful you can make it worse.
There were also a number of reports on the integrity of the election, many legitimate audits (including in Antrim county). Did you read them? Did you look for them? Or are you trying to undermine something by feigning concern and sowing doubt?
Edit: also it is useful to remember that the 2020 presidential election wasn’t close. Nothing like 2000. Neither in total votes, electoral votes, or the margin in any of the marginal electoral-vote supplying states.
I’m of the understanding that ballots stripped from their envelopes were transported to counting centers. Perhaps bribing one driver would be sufficient to swap 1000s of ballots and there would be no trail.
I find the following from https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/05/gateway-pu...
“”” Only after ballots were validated were they delivered to the TCF Center for election workers to process and tabulate them.
Shane Trejo, a writer for the right-wing website Big League Politics, told the Gateway Pundit that he was at the TCF Center where he said he witnessed thousands of ballots being unloaded early Wednesday morning. "There were at least 50 boxes that I saw unloaded at 3:30 a.m.“””
It’s my understanding that the validating process results in the naked ballots being placed into boxes for delivery to a counting center.
The linked article debunks that the ballots were late, but that is not my concern.
I was going to write more about Georgia but then I came across this article which eliminated most of my concerns there. I don’t know why it took a whole year before this was printed though.
https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/investigators-locate-n...
I did see some of the audits, which mostly removed my concerns of cheating. However there were claims in Georgia of mail in ballots that appeared marked by computer and I knew there was going to be a court case on this, but I never saw any reporting on this case. The above article says there were never any such perfect ballots found.
I think the perfect ballot is where my fears come from. Where in the chain could you swap out ballots and put in generated ballots.
Where does it say that ballots were stripped before delivery? Do you have evidence of that? The politifact piece says the signatures were validated then they were taken for processing. Signatures are on the outside of the envelope. That isn’t delivering naked ballots. Stripping the envelope happened at the processing center based on the videos of them describing the process [0], videos of them carrying out the process which were live-streamed and still available, and the State’s published documents describing the process.
Everyone is concerned that voting is done well. Your concern seems to move between ‘specific things which didn’t happen’ and ‘hypothetical perfectionism’ which is an unmeetable standard.
Edit, added video link: [0] https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/...
https://aceproject.org/ace-en/topics/vc/vcf/vcf02/mobile_bro...
I appreciate your response, it has made me question my thought process.
> Beren and her accomplices from the Board of Elections would then falsify the polling books and the List of Voters and Party Enrollment for the 39th Ward, 2nd Division, by recording the names, party affiliation, and order of appearances for voters who had not physically appeared at the polling station to cast his or her ballot in the election. Beren took pains to ensure that the number of ballots cast on the machines was a reflection of the number of voters signed into the polling books and the List of Voters. After the polls closed on Election Day, Beren and her associates would falsely certify the results.
Obviously, I believe this actually happened. But: how? What is Philadelphia not doing that we do in Chicago? You couldn't do this here; it's hard for me to even imagine how someone could walk into a precinct and cast multiple votes. And how would they cast their second and third vote? Do you give them a list of no-show registrations from the precinct? And then they just sign the pollbook multiple times?
They can't just re-vote at the same precinct. The EJs will absolutely notice a person coming in and voting more than once. If that gets noticed a single time, the EJ calls the sheriff (in Cook County, at least).
It takes, like, best case, 10-15 minutes to vote in a precinct. There are lines!
How many votes can you cast this way? 10? 20?
I'm not saying you couldn't manage to cast a fraudulent vote by doing this. I'm saying that your odds of influencing the election by doing it, while at the same time not guaranteeing you end up in prison for trying, are so low that my mind boggles that anyone would try.
To quote further up:
> and also cast fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates on behalf of voters she knew would not or did not physically appear at the polls.
And:
> They can't just re-vote at the same precinct. The EJs will absolutely notice a person coming in and voting more than once. If that gets noticed a single time, the EJ calls the sheriff (in Cook County, at least).
From the article:
> Beren, who was charged separately and pleaded guilty in October 2021, was the de facto Judge of Elections and effectively ran the polling places in her division by installing close associates to serve as members of the Board of Elections.
The election judge was the one doing this, didn't have to get past anyone.
https://blockclubchicago.org/2018/10/24/chicago-and-rigged-e...
Pretty sure that quite a lot has changed since 1922, including damn near every single adult alive.
The Heritage Foundation, which is very much in love with the idea of voter fraud, has been able to find a total of 19 cases since 1997 where somebody used a deceased person's registration to (attempt to) vote.
So maybe let's kick the facetious "supposedly" of the last sentence.
And if we wanted to do better with that - the same crowd that is oh-so-concerned with voter fraud is oddly opposed to a federal registry, federal ID, or free state ID. All things that'd help tremendously with increasing the accuracy of voter rolls.
On the larger topic of voter registration, it shouldn't be that hard for them to keep relatively clean rolls. Even if it's not causing an issue, having clean rolls promotes the integrity of and trust in the voting system. I mean, most of the dead people voting is just people signing in the wrong spot.
I'm not sure how a federal registry would really help much. I doubt there are really people voting in multiple states. There is a federal ID - the passport. Although that is relatively expensive, but it is also valid for a much longer duration, so the card can be cheaper than a state ID. I do believe that state IDs should be free if people are under the poverty level, but I also have a hard time believing that $40ish dollars every 4 year is the real barrier (things like the documents needed to get one are a bigger pain in my opinion, like birth certificates, marriage certificates for name changes, bill with your name and address, etc; even more so for Real ID). Plus the hassle of spending hours at the DMV.
"So maybe let's kick the facetious "supposedly" of the last sentence."
I'm not being facetious. Many states have implemented new programs to clean up the voter rolls. There's very little data to show if it's any improvement. In part, that's because the problem had little baseline data to go on (few occurrences of dead people voting). The other part is that many places haven't been very strict about cleaning (like Philly having approximately 1M registered voters when there's maybe 700k eligible to vote just based on age). So not much to speak of on the actual "problem" side since it wasn't large to begin with. But also not much progress on the trust side with cleaning up.
Also, I think that 19 number is low. I thought they found something like 35 in Philly in one election (year 2016? out of the 6k dead people who voted). The rest were simple mistakes. Still not a big problem, but certainly more they 19 nationally in 25 years. Again, it's mostly a trust and integrity issue than a true functional issue.
By the way, that's not "every instance". The database is a "sampling".
"This database is not an exhaustive or comprehensive list."
- some wise someone somewhere
So can each vote be attributed to a individual (tracked)?
> You certainly can't just make up a final tally. The numbers from the individual voting machines and the paper ballots have to match up; we had to stay an extra 2 hours after the polls closed last time I did this (in 2020) because of an equipment screwup that kept us from doing the final certified count/reconciliation.
Honest question: what if the final count _didn't_ match, or people _were_ made up? If all of the judges were corrupt, and they gave a false count, whose job would it be to step in and fix it? The police? The current (potentially lame duck) government? Ideally the regulations would be enough of a disincentive that no one would risk it, but if the set of people who finalize the counts blatantly lie, who has the authority to overturn them? And what's stopping that authority itself from being bribed to overturn legitimate results?
Really, all these systems rely on humans so they have inherent weaknesses.
Continuing the hypothetical you suggest, what would an individual actually be able to achieve if they did somehow get the evidence they were looking for that the vote count was fabricated? Is there some sort of civil procedure for contesting the vote tally? Would it require a lawsuit against the person or group of people who lied about the totals? Is there some sort of hearing where people can make a case that whoever is supposed to certify the count (e.g. the legislature) can argue against it? Or would it just be a matter of fighting in the court of public opinion to mount enough pressure to get the lying party to cave?
If that's the case then one could simply use deceased persons to vote. It's not like they'll come back from the dead as a voter fraud zombie
I wish people defined their acronyms. It doesn't appear in the linked document either.
But there is no political WILL to do it. Making voting hard, complex and open for abuse is literally how the parties want it.
Bribe the Judge of Elections who oversees everything. Dilute the vote tallies by using the voting machines to increment the votes for specific candidates. Certify that the fake results are correct. Lie if anybody asks.
This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so easy?
[1] https://www.vote.pa.gov/About-Elections/Pages/Post-Election-...
> Why is it so easy?
I don't know, it doesn't seem easy to me. I mean, it seems like the result of a ton of long-term planning to implement processes that allow each instance of this to be easy. But the fight against electronic voting machines was fierce, and took a long time.
We lost, by the way.
Sure there is
No idea how the US just fails at the most simple thing in a democracy, voting. Or rather I have an idea, with gerrymandering and such shenanigans it seems to be by design to keep certain demographics from voting too much.
Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US. It’s OK if you didn’t know that, lots of people from other countries are dumbfounded to learn that all you have to do in the US is show up and give the poll workers the name of a registered voter in order to vote.*
* Well, in some states you have to show ID. But one political party in particular fights very hard against this requirement.
And as another commenter points out, it’s not that an ID requirement is racist, it’s that the motivations for it, knowing its impact, are racist.
Interestingly enough, the intersection between those who would advocate for national voter ID requirements and those who would fundamentally oppose a national ID is very large.
Compare the US to the EU.
The US is over 4.5x the population of Germany, the largest EU member. The entire EU is only about 25% more people than the US. California alone is larger than all but four of the EU member nations.
The US Federal Government is more like the EU itself rather than any member country. The states are more analogous to the countries in the EU.
So a US National ID is kind of like a EU Citizen ID.
What we have instead is an agreement between states and the federal government on ID guidelines. From that perspective it’s not so different.
This is not the argument people are making, so I hope you aren’t making it intentionally. No one is saying that requiring voting id is inherently racist.
The argument is that requiring voting id without a commensurate effort to make sure everyone has voter id ends up disproportionately affecting minorities. These efforts are subsequently dubbed racist by political opponents because the people implementing them know this to be true and do it anyway, because they prefer the outcome that minorities are disenfranchised.
Republicans have been found in court to play these tricks with “surgical precision”, to make sure the rules they come up with impact minorities more than whites.
Another example is closing polling places so that it takes 8 hours to vote in black precincts whereas it takes 8 minutes to vote in white precincts. Yes, the act of closing a polling place is not an overtly racist thing to do. But the way in which it’s done and the actual impact make clear it is done with the intent of disenfranchising minorities.
Which is racist.
Democrats have never negotiated in good faith over the requirement to make IDs available though whenever the debate is brought up. States like Wisconsin require voter ID and will make an ID for voting available for free, through the mail, and yet there is still opposition that always relies on handwavy arguments about how utterly baffling and difficult it is to obtain a photo ID, even in Wisconsin. Arguments which are ultimately disingenuous and yet still persist in light of accommodations by states that require voter ID.
If Republicans were serious about non-racist voter ID laws they could have demonstrated that in Georgia when they overhauled election laws there. They didn’t and we know why: more “surgical precision”.
So long as the people who’s votes you are stealing don’t come in, then you are safe.
There are no systems safe from fraud if you allow human judgment to be a part of the system.
Note, I am not a general proponent of electronic voting machines either. They can easily make fraud easier by reducing the number of people to bribe to the few engineers with access to the blackbox code and the few officials who certify that the code is valid and was used on Election Day.
There's a pretty good chance of being safe even if they do come in: https://nypost.com/2020/11/03/houston-woman-turned-away-from...
You're generalizing too far. Much of the US works just like you described for your local voting. The US has tens of thousands of voting precincts with their own rules. For better or worse.
Surely that's the failure being described. There are always parts of the US where corruption is winning, and those places ultimately have enough political or other capital that they are worth corrupting, and that puts the system of the entire country at continuous risk.
Voting has been solved centuries ago. And voting machines will never be part of the solution.
The story is literally about ballot stuffing at precincts where there weren’t observers like that watching. Which makes the electronic voting part a complete red herring
If electronic fraud is a concern, we should mitigate it, because encryption, identity, and date integrity are solved problems.
Furthermore, spot auditing and paper receipts/copies are a thing, or could be.
(Also, voting may be "solved" but voting systems and universal access to the ballot has not. First past the post voting is possibly the worst system to use short of flipping a coin.)
And first past the goal post works, or rather can work. It is aggressive Gerrymandering, allocating senators by state and not population and the electoral college that screw it up in the US.
Multiple parties makes gaming elections much harder for moneyed interests.
For the vast majority of it's existence, the 5th republic has had proportional representation in the legislature (only changed with Sarkozy, who instituted 2-round elections - IIRC).
Presidential has been 2-round for much longer, perhaps from the beginning of the 5th republic.
Straight FPTP as implemented in many places in the US allows plurality winners (ie, winners that don't get 50% of the votes), France's system does not.
Uh, no. The Fifth has has two round legislative elections since its beginning. The entire reason for it was that the Fourth and Third showed what an overly powerful parliament caused, as well as the relative instability of having only a single round to elect députés.
Hence, the Fifth was started by a former general who thought that putting immense amounts of power in the president was a good idea. Because clearly counter powers are overrated.
Additionally, french legislative elections can have a very peculiar situation where the second round has three candidates, but that requires a specific amount of votes and to all be extremely close. I believe there's 10 of them planned this year according to polls, over 577 circonscriptions.
Regarding the 3 candidates in 2nd round - yes that's only possible because France allows 3 & 4 candidates to go into 2nd round if they have over 12.5%. This is usually not the case, so 3-rounds are very limited but as you indicate they do present a plurality win possibility.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_French_legislative_electi...
Hilarious to read that as the US presidential elections take over a week to tally results, when french elections have 90% of the results at 10PM on the same evening (most voting places close at 7PM)
That seems to just introduce a new vulnerability where you could intentionally get caught cheating in precincts that leaned contrary to your beliefs to invalidate everyone there who voted legitimately.
If you multiply the voting places, where instead of having a single place which will tally over 10k votes, have 15 places that tally 700 votes each, you have now made both cheating much harder, and less worth it in the scenario you propose.
Yes, but then we threw in a huge wrench when we decided that votes needed to be secret, too.
If it was the old iVotronic system, there would be no ballot to check against (the vote was held in the machine memory in redundant locations), but that's no protection against the machine being activated illegitimately and the judge of elections entering illegitimate votes. In the new system, the machines are just tabulators and physical "SAT-style" fill-the-oval vote cards are used as ballots, but again, there's nothing stopping a judge of elections from filling out a pile of invalid ballots and entering them into the machine if the other team members (majority and minority inspector, and the clerks of election) have been bribed to look the other way. In fact, the judge would have to do that, because the fraud will be obvious if the total count of record doesn't match the total count of paper ballots in the box... But structurally, this is equivalent to just activating the iVotronic machine several additional times to cast fraudulent digital-only ballots.
The nature of the fraud here is simple, old-fashioned stuffing the ballot box, and the only protection against that is physically barring access to the hardware (be it a computer or a pine box with a padlock), which is incompatible with the duties of the judge of elections.
You don't just cold call a judge. Presumably he knew enough about what his options for judges were that he could pick the ones who would be amenable to the idea and approach them.
The bribe at that point is just payment for risk (because the judge presumably doesn't have plausible deniability)
>Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.
The people commiting this type of fraud make similar mental leaps about the definitions of words like "treason" and "patriotism" to justify their actions. It's not a good road to follow.
Did they not break any laws as defined by the forefathers who wrote the constitution?
I don't really understand this bizarre worshipping of the creation of the US as if it must have been done too well to question. Eternal vigilance is identifying the bugs, talking about them in public and proposing appropriate size patches. Failure to do so is being overthrown by a risk not accounted for by the forefathers, or that they assumed we weren't too stupid to handle.
My suggestion that election fraud by a sworn judge should be dealt with as seriously as treason is in no way the same as someone's secret dialog with co-conspirators to justify undermining all trust in the republic being democratic for their own goals.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_convicted_of_tr...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg#Ros...
It's not a "judge" in the sense someone who oversees a criminal or civil trial.
It was fun. The other judge at my poll location was a guy who served in the Wehrmacht during WWII (was conscripted at age 14).
But I easily could have stuffed the box. Most people don't vote. At 7:45pm, you could just vote for people who didn't show up. Nobody but the other judge would have the chance of stopping you.
https://www.azmirror.com/2021/09/10/voter-canvass-features-b...
...
> Nobody but the other judge would have the chance of stopping you.
Those ought to contradict each other. We have multiple judges for exactly this reason. It is a sincerely tall order to get even one other judge, especially when it's required to be from the opposing party, to agree to your ballot stuffing. You're likely to end up prosecuted the moment you pose the question, before you get anywhere near stuffing a box.
Because nobody was watching when they meddled with voting machines. If there was someone oberving or at least a camera, this would be easy to discover.
As others have pointed out, these "judges" were actually minor, elected election officials, close to being volunteers. They were doing this to make small additions at a local scale. There was no need to add fake voter registrations, to modify vote counting, or to add votes not connected to legitimately registered voters: they just added ballots and records for registered voters they knew weren't going to show up. At a local enough scale, you might simply know, personally, of voters who are out of town, for example.
This doesn't require any major conspiracy at multiple levels. Depending on the organization of the election, it might be possible for a single poll worker to do it on their own. It would be very hard to defend against at higher levels. Most voter ID ideas wouldn't help (short of digital IDs and cryptographic signatures), because it's being done by the people who would be checking the IDs. Having multiple, adversarial officials keeping records of each person coming in could help, but now you've multiplied the number of people you need at each precinct. Contacting people listed as having voted could help, but they could well have been chosen specifically because they would be unlikely to notice or respond. Checking counts and registrations wouldn't help, because the counts and registrations would be valid. Voting technology mostly doesn't matter, and in fact, the method is likely easier with paper ballots.
It is limited in how much of an effect it can have, of course, but in tight races, or down-ballot races where few people actually fill out those races on their ballot, that might be all you need, or you might be interested in just statistically helping your party by making larger numbers of your party's candidates win, rather than helping one particular candidate.
A big part of the integrity of the system comes down to controls that are instituted at the precinct level, where there's less oversight but also less ability to plausibly influence the election, coupled with much stricter oversight at the central counting stations.
Downballot elections typically happen concurrently with statewide elections, so that doesn't help you: they don't get counted separately, and you're still stuck evading the same controls that protect the statewide elections.
There are tight elections, but in a reasonably run election system, any one precinct is going to have a very narrow margin --- in the best case for attackers --- to influence results. You can't predict where that narrow margin is going to actually be helpful. But it's going to be incredibly risky anywhere you try it.
It doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a crime.
Which is exactly why charities and get out the vote campaigns shouldn't be given voter roles and voter statuses.
Not exactly.
Keep going on this scenario. If voters had to show ID like in Europe, when someone shows up and is denied to vote because “they already voted” it would be an immediate red flag for fraud.
With the IDless system, someone could be denied and it does not necessarily imply malice.
There is a whole system of provincial ballots - because this and other mistakes in ballots happen often enough. Voter ID wouldn’t secure anything but in Europe it brings more confidence, I’m not sure why it wouldn’t in the USA.
Yes, exactly.
The ID checks "at the gate" don't help if the people on the inside running the system can just go and add some additional votes, either for people who didn't turn up (which they know about) or if there is no cryptographic proof of attendence then just by going up to the machine, who doesn't know how many voters are expected anyway, and presses the button a few more times.
The truth is that a lot of the system is fundamentally based on trust so it is crucial that people who commit fraud against voting are treated as extreme criminals who are trying to subvert the importance of a democratic vote. Not sure how many people would fiddle it if they risked getting a 30 year prison sentence.
Apparently this demonstrates the power of the invisible hand of the marketplace.
And that's why we should decentralise power to the most local entity we can (somewhere between a central government and the individual affected by a choice) and have as few elected officials as possible.
Imagine if San Diego wanted water from the Colorado River (what nerve!). They’d have to negotiate with every little town next to the river. And if one town doesn’t want to negotiate, well, they can attract business with offers of “take as much water as you want” and “emit as much toxic waste as you want”, and we’ll fuck the people downstream.
Many know of "The Wealth of Nations", but how many have read Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith#The_Theory_of_Moral...
> Although The Wealth of Nations is widely regarded as Smith's most influential work, Smith himself is believed to have considered The Theory of Moral Sentiments to be a superior work.[79]
> Rae, John (1895). Life of Adam Smith. London & New York: Macmillan. ISBN 0-7222-2658-6. Retrieved 14 May 2018 – via Internet Archive.
Easy and cheap! TFA says it was only $300 to $5k per election total... Which was then split _at least_ two ways?? I mean, sure, the average politician hasn't been accused of having integrity in a long time, but this is just ridiculous.
Why does a conspiracy involving only 3 people seem so impossible to you?
The most staggering thing for me is how _tiny_ the payments are
Many of us would assume the sums of money needed to bribe officials would be huge, but unfortunately many people don't consider corruption to be a big deal, so small payments can make an impact.
I suppose the same can be said about government employees, although the fact that it can be directly in the current government’s interest not to do that is another problem.
It's a good lesson in how ratcheting up punishments can be counterproductive, even or especially even, in critical areas.
From fiction and movies, one would think that selling the country's secrets to foreign governments would lead to wealth enough to set you up for life on a private island. Yet when the accounts of the treachery emerge at trial, it's always troves of highly classified documents for a few thousand dollars here or there, maybe a few $100k over decades of espionage.
It still just stuns me every time I read how in reality, while honest people would die before selling out their country, some people will sell out everyone so cheaply.
No stock trading, no deals to get a private job after you leave office (unless you leave time to make sure your decisions could have no impact on the business you're joining), and no public speaking fees. You can still speak publicly but you shouldn't be getting paid for it if the whole reason for speaking is that you were a public servant. I think we have some sort of fundamental disconnect between expecting people to be a public servant while still saying they can act as a private individual financially
A simple Google search exactly like above was sufficient in this case, but there's also a C&H-specific search engine which has been discussed on HN a few times before:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1600211
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26119380
The official publisher for C&H can also search them (though it also finds matches in other comics they publish), e.g.:
https://www.gocomics.com/search/results?utf8=%E2%9C%93&terms...
Humans will sellout for peanuts. Corruption is a huge problem.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Myers_(Pennsylvania_po...
For example
PHILADELPHIA (WPVI) -- Union boss John Dougherty and Philadelphia City Councilman Bobby Henon were both found guilty of conspiracy and multiple counts of honest services wire fraud in their federal corruption trial.
In all, Dougherty was found guilty of eight of 11 charges against him. Henon was found guilty of 10 of 18 charges against him.
Prosecutors said Dougherty kept Henon, a union electrician-turned-Philadelphia City Council member, on the payroll of a $70,000 no-show job to help his union keep a tight grip on construction jobs.
https://6abc.com/jury-deliberations-bobby-henon-johnny-dough...
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/arizona/2022/06/0...
It's like steroids, once everyone starts using them the honest people are no longer able to qualify.
But if Washington were to publicly tackle it, USA would be a less attractive HQ for MNCs.
I believe this behavior is the norm. I grew up around DC and know the types of people that work there and what they're actually like. It's also possible I'm just jaded.
I personally regret doing it and justify it due to peer pressure. 'If so and so is doing it and their uncle is a congressman and their father is an elected judge it must just be how its done.' I'd tell myself.
I've been asked to work on at least 2 of their campaigns at different times but It's not been something I'm interested in anymore. Me and the other folks not in public office now all came from families that could barely afford to send their children to that school, I nearly got pulled out twice due to financial strain. I think we were used as the fall people if the group ever got caught because the anointed ones would never get in trouble.
Since then, I've served in the military for the US for 6 years (to pay for college) and feel I've done my part to pay back my debts to society.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Myers_(Pennsylvania_po...
>Michael Joseph "Ozzie" Myers (born May 4, 1943) is an American politician who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1976 to 1980. A member of the Democratic Party, Myers became involved in the Abscam scandal during his tenure in Congress and was later expelled from the House of Representatives after being caught taking bribes in an FBI sting operation. In 2020, he was indicted for election fraud.
Whether I am honest, or simply risk averse, or privileged, or scared... you'd have to add at least a couple of zeroes for me to even contemplate or understand or fathom somebody doing this. How fearless or stupid are these people? Or alternatively, how easy and safe is it to do this, for it to be worth such minor sum of money (compared to power/damage wrought)?
>>"After receiving payments ranging from between $300 to $5,000 per election "
Really the issue that some small town election officials can fraudulently cast a couple of hundred votes is the least of your worries. Also worth pointing out, they were caught, so it wasn't actually so easy.
Most places in the country are positively starved for judges of elections (who are local administrators, one per polling location) and the rest of the elections team (who both manage the mechanics of the election and serve as an observer / check-on-power for the judge). If you want to help, it is a two-day time commitment per year, and the job and responsibilities are extremely straightforward.
You can often get yourself elected (in most states, these positions are elected but nobody runs for them so you can write yourself into the job). You can also reach out to the county elections office and volunteer; the positions are so chronically under-staffed that they're usually extremely thankful for volunteers, and when nobody is elected to the position in a given voting location, the county has to pull from volunteers to appoint people to the task.
You get a chance to meet all your neighbors, and there's no better way to ensure your vote isn't stolen or compromised than to secure it yourself.
In this case it’s the right that fails to grasp materiality. Yes, people vote illegally, ballot boxes get stuffed, their is collusion, etc. No, it doesn’t happen often enough to undermine the integrity of elections in the aggregate. But the left is just as susceptible to such thinking. They take, for example, a few isolated instances of innocent people being falsely convicted or forced to plead guilty as proof that such errors are pervasive and undermine the integrity of the justice system. It’s two sides of the same token.
Ridiculous to just throw this out as if it's a concrete fact. Even changing the outcome of a Presidential election doesn't require any kind of sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign. Just enough well-placed ones where the vote will be close enough that the fraud doesn't have to be too large.
I'm not saying it has or hasn't happened, but it's certainly possible.
Were that to have happened, analysis of the voting results would show a divergence in results in those “well placed” areas. For a presidential race, there are a lot of eyes on this comparing demographic data with vote totals.
For instance, in 2020 there were some allegations that cities were faking votes for a specific political party, but analysts found the same voting trends against the incumbent president occurred in suburbs and in states controlled by the other party that were not decisive to the outcome. For the fraud to not be obvious, it would have needed to be committed in every major city and state.
Why didn't that sort of analysis find fraud in Philadelphia in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018? How are you so certain of its infallibility given it's apparent inability to find fraud like this?
[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-ele...
To your new questions, yes, there are well-established ways to detect monkey business from machine-maniputation or ballot-stuffing. Basically, you make sure that the results line up between the paper ballots and the machine counts, and that the number of paper ballots you have matches the number of voters who checked in at the precinct. https://www.vote.pa.gov/About-Elections/Pages/Post-Election-... By law, elections generate a lot of data across independent sources. Rigging an election undetected is hard because you need to make sure those data sources remain consistent.
If you're skeptical of elections, I encourage you to volunteer to be a poll worker. Learn your state's procedures and carry them out more faithfully than how you think they're otherwise done today.
They have some interesting footage of those boxes, and a lot of the footage is apparently conspicuously missing. However nothing concrete, so take this as a thought experiment.
How do you prove they didn't do that from the raw ballot counts and voter roles in a way that I don't have to take someone else's word for it?
In order for this to actually work, the nefarious operatives would need to forge people's signatures on those mail ballots. Otherwise, they'll fail the signature match at the elections returns center and the ballot will get tossed. Here's a good rundown of how that works, at least in California [1]. Do you have reason to believe that the signature check doesn't work?
Stepping back, rigging elections by stuffing mail ballots makes zero sense from a cost/benefit perspective. It requires massive amounts of effort to coordinate all those people so the plan proceeds undetected. A rational attacker would be better off taking an opposite approach: throwing away opponents' mail ballots. That requires far less effort. I'm skeptical of these mail ballot stuffing claims because it's an overly complex Rube-Goldberg-machine of a plot.
Other than throwing away opponents' mail ballots, is there a viable attack that could actually work?
The incentive not to closely scritinize signatures when mail in ballots in your county strongly favor your perfered candidate is clear.
"If the Voter’s Declaration on the return envelope is signed and the county board is satisfied that the declaration is sufficient, the mail-in or absentee ballot should be approved for canvassing unless challenged in accordance with the Pennsylvania Election Code.
The Pennsylvania Election Code does not authorize the county board of elections to set aside returned absentee or mail-in ballots based solely on signature analysis by the county board of elections."
Source: https://www.dos.pa.gov/VotingElections/OtherServicesEvents/D...
The signature match is an important part of the mail ballot process, one that even California does.
He did an audit of the envelope images for the Maricopa county election board, and testified under oath.
When people talk about "there is no voter fraud", mostly what they mean are federal elections. The US has great gobs of elections, there's no reasonable way to analyze them all, and we simply don't have the data in most of the cases.
You can’t look at votes a local candidate for city office received in Massachusetts or Iowa because those candidates are only on the ballot in Philadelphia. The type of national vote trend analysis I’m describing only exists for national elections.
Categorically false.
Increased and majority number of Republican governors were elected. Republicans increased house seats. Trump out performed himself in all counties he won in 2016.
Democrats did not trend upwards.
Yes, Republican congressmen improved their performance compared to 2018. some voters ticket split and voted for Biden for president and republicans for congress. Although I guess some would say the election hackers just forgot to update the other database columns or something.
This only looks true when viewed retroactively. It would have taken roughly 80k votes to switch the 2016 election from Trump to Clinton. However people had no idea of that beforehand. That 80k vote number accomplishes the goal only if one knows exactly where to place them. Someone would need to add hundreds of thousands if not millions of votes across numerous battleground states in order to be convinced that their changes would have the desired impact. That certainly sounds like a "sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign".
The EROI doesn't matter in that context because the goal is a singular binary event. It either was enough to sway the election and it qualifies for this discussion or it wasn't enough and therefore doesn't support OPs original point.
If someone says to you pay $1 to have a 75% chance at $2. you definitely should take it. It's the same with millions of dollars or billions of dollars.
Wouldn't this become a certainty given enough Investment? if so then the EROI is a real factor because it tells us that someone not only could spend $ALOT but could also expect to profit from and so is likely able to fund the project.
>Wouldn't this become a certainty given enough Investment?
No, because the larger the fraud, the easier it is to detect and detection would make is unsuccessful. This requires an expertly targeted fraud that is both large enough to change the overall result while being small enough to go undetected. I don't think that specific combination is possible without a large conspiracy behind it.
What if they paused ballot counting on the night of Election Day, assessed how many votes they needed, and worked overnight to get the votes needed, reporting new totals the next day? Wouldn’t that solve the issue you raise here?
In Philly they barred GOP poll watchers from observing the process and they (GOP) had to get a court order to force the center to allow them in...so all it takes is a few partisans at the top of the food chain.
>Judge : “Are your observers in the counting room?”
>Trump lawyer: "There's a non-zero number of people in the room.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/11/trump-law...
The city played the covid social distancing game and forced poll watches to be so far from the action that one reported needing binoculars to even being to see what was going on. The commonwealth court ordered the city to allow the poll watches within a reasonable distance so they could, you know, observe.
Love how temp accounts can post partisan hackery (and post a comment noting they have an obvious agenda), so we get to hear all the old, lame conspiracy theories from twitter on hn.
How would we ever know if those exist?
The ability does exist, for example in Fulton County there is video of workers pulling suitcases full of ballots out from under tables and running them possibly multiple times through machines after poll watchers had been sent home. An investigation revealed there was no widespread voter fraud, but in an alternate universe those ballots could have been shenanigan votes.
>They would also need to be able to distribute those votes broadly enough not to cause suspicion when an unexpected trove of votes are added late.
The votes that were added overnight actually weren’t broadly distributed at all. Suspicion was raised (and dismissed, since investigations suggested no evidence of widespread voter fraud).
>These votes would also need to be cast intelligently enough to match all expected down ballot elections not to draw suspicion.
If I recall, many if not most of the votes added overnight did not have downballot selections at all. Of course, this fact is not evidence of widespread voter fraud.
>I don't think there is a way to do all of this without a sweeping multi-state conspiracy.
I tend to agree. A multi-state conspiracy is more likely than districts in Atlanta, Detroit, Philadelphia and other swing state cities acting independently of each other - that is, if widespread voter fraud did occur, which of course there is no evidence of.
>The ability does exist, for example in Fulton County there is video of workers pulling suitcases full of ballots out from under tables and running them possibly multiple times through machines after poll watchers had been sent home. An investigation revealed there was no widespread voter fraud, but in an alternate universe those ballots could have been shenanigan votes.
"The 90 second video of election workers at State Farm arena, purporting to show fraud was watched in its entirety (hours) by @GaSecofState investigators. Shows normal ballot processing. Here is the fact check on it." [1]
>The votes that were added overnight actually weren’t broadly distributed at all. Suspicion was raised (and dismissed, since investigations suggested no evidence of widespread voter fraud).
Source?
>If I recall, many if not most of the votes added overnight did not have downballot selections at all. Of course, this fact is not evidence of widespread voter fraud.
Source?
[1] - https://twitter.com/GabrielSterling/status/13348252336106332...
It appears to be a concrete fact this fraud did not change the outcome in any election. The scrutiny also goes way up as you move up hierarchy of election importance.
Give it your best shot, talk is cheap.
Are you sure about that? After watching 2000 Mules, even with some skepticism about the evidence presented it certainly appears there is an effort to undermine elections in very specific places that were key to the 2020 election. Video evidence is hard to argue with. Can't say if it actually affected the outcome because I don't have all of the evidence to review it, but what was shown should be enough to get people up in arms about election fraud and finding ways to stop it.
There are holes in 2000 mules you could drive a big rig through.
It's also interesting that the map of ballot drop boxes was wholly incorrect in 2000 mules.
Finally, one of the alleged mules was reached out to - and it transpired he was not, in fact, a mule, but was dropping off the ballots for himself, his wife, and adult children, which is entirely within the law.
...and one was reached out to that said she was part of a bigger conspiracy on collecting ballots and dropping them into boxes that weren't being monitored by video. One example doesn't mean it applies to all. How about the guy that dropped off ballots at 3AM, starts to bike away and then goes back to take a picture of the ballot box? That doesn't seem suspicious to you...or the other cases they showed where people were doing this in a way that didn't appear like a "hey everyone look I voted" social media post...
Nah election fraud matters pretty materially. If it werent for this rigged election, we would have never gotten the 1964 civil rights bill
> a few isolated instances of innocent people being falsely convicted or forced to plead guilty as proof that such errors are pervasive and undermine the integrity of the justice system
The justice system does not operate on a best effort "good enough" basis. When the "justice" system harms an innocent person, it takes on the exact role of a criminal attacking a victim and does so in all of our names. The victim would have been much better off if the system had not been given power in the first place! Thus, we should insist that the false positive rate for the justice system must remain extremely low, lest it effectively function as the injustice system.
Furthermore, we should insist that the people operating the justice system are held accountable under the same laws that they uphold for everyone else. Otherwise all those lofty ideals come across as quite hollow.
Both election results and criminal verdicts are, and should be seen as, statistical determinations with error bars. All we can control is the size of the error bars, and we can control those only by trading off other things we care about (cost of the system, speed of the system, etc.)
For example, one of your examples was "forced to plead guilty". The word "forced" implies something else responsible for the erroneous outcome. Rather than merely saying that was a "false positive" that could be tuned, we should focus on that specific thing responsible - if it was the system's high-stakes dynamics depriving a person of their right to a trial, then those dynamics need to be reformed. If it was a bad faith prosecutor/cops pushing falsities to get a baseless conviction, then they need to be criminally prosecuted for abusing the power of the state to suit their own personal ends.
Everybody knows that bad things do occasionally happen. The outrage isn't merely due to the initial miscarriage of justice, rather it's the nonchalance of the entrenched system shrugging it off rather than reifying and prosecuting its own crimes.
No, the US is not that country.
Which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, and the other way around, American politics is dominated by discourse about election fraud more so than actual evidence of it (this case excluded). On the contrary elections in America are extremely rarely fraudulent[1]
You're actually buying into a politically motivated narrative that tries to characterize American democracy overall as not worth participating in.
[1]https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-c...
It really doesn't. I've voted in French elections and volunteered in American polling places, and the French system visibly has much better safeguards. I am not regurgitating some invented narrative, just believing my "lying eyes".
You need to be registered on the voter list, show up on election day with your passport or ID card, take a bunch of small papers with candidate names on them, go into a privacy booth to put whichever candidate you want in an envelope, then you walk to the center of the room where the election officers check your passport again, you have to sign your name on the list, and the head of the voting office opens access to a big transparent urn where you drop your envelop.
At the end of the day, the count of the votes is done in public.
I don't remember any history of voting fraud in any kind of election.
And otherwise abused by the legal system. It's not a few isolated instances; plenty of research shows that it is widespread and systematic.
Likely? I'd buy that there were probably 600 screwed up votes, but that's a lot of fraudulent votes to be cast without detection. The odds are very much against it.
I think you misunderstand the nature of the critique. Granted I’m just one leftist among a few tens, but the systemic prejudice of the justice system is not a few isolated cases, not limited to wrongful convictions, and mostly invisible by design. Most of it is fully legal and unassailable from a legal standpoint. They don’t need to get away with crimes if the law is in their favor.
I think the scandal with the last few election rounds in the US was the notion that a foreign nation (Russia) was putting their fingers on the scale, getting away with it, and even succeeding to swing public opinion on a number of topics. And of course Trump managed to declare Putin a genius days before he invaded Kiiv.
Pensylvania, where this latest scandal happeed, was one of the states where the margin between Trump and Biden was razor thin and of course one of several states where the outcome was challenged. Considering that Trump lost that state you might see his point. But then of course there were other places that narrowly swung his way. Just not enough in the end.
With most of the election rounds since the Clinton era there have been states that were too close to call that used obviously flawed equipment and convoluted/weird auditing processes. Where the winning party appears very reluctant to address the serious issues in their state because the outcome suits them. E.g. the drama with voting machines in Florida has been dragging on for decades.
All this stuff just calls into question the outcomes of the major elections in the last decades. This stuff is disgraceful and the fact that both parties are working hard to ensure nothing changes is more disgraceful.
Carter called it almost a decade ago when he said that the US no longer has a functioning democracy. And that was way before a lot of the crazy stuff in more recent years happened.
Quite a rotten two square miles of Philadelphia there.
Surprisingly affordable relative to today’s campaign budgets.
Makes you wonder.
https://www.npr.org/2020/12/08/943242106/how-private-money-f...
https://www.realclearinvestigations.com/articles/2022/06/07/...
What is MM - million million, i.e. 4e14 - 400 trillion. That's 15+ times entire US gross domestic product
>On or about May 19, 2015, Domenick J. Demuro, and others known and unknown to the grand jury, added 40 fraudulent ballots during the primary election in the 39th Ward, 36th Division, on behalf of defendant MICHAEL "OZZIE" MYERS' client candidates running for Judge of the Court of Common Pleas in the First Judicial District of Pennsylvania, and on behalf of defendant MICHAEL "OZZIE" MYERS' preferred candidates for other state and local offices.
(this is just one incident on the list). I don't know what the campaign budget for a Judge of the Court of Common Pleas is, but I suspect it's not that high if they're willing to bribe someone for an extra 40 votes!
There were no consequences for trying to vote twice, these people were simply turned away. (There was a mechanism for resolving disputes too. Provisional ballots could be given to voters and these would be counted only if the race was close enough for provisional votes to make a difference in which case these votes would be adjudicated before being accepted.)
can everyone agree that this is insane? it should be at least a federal crime to attempt to cast a fraudulent ballot in a federal election. surely, everyone here—pro- or anti-voter ID—should agree with this?
game theory wise if attempting voter fraud goes unpunished, then the optimal thing to do in order to win is to attempt as much voter fraud as possible, as you have nothing to lose by trying.
is this not about as self-evident as it could possibly be?
The other scheme was advising voters inside the polling place (illegal) and signing in non-present voters and casting votes on their behalf (also illegal), so the counts would all look legit. They got caught for that too, it sounds like.
https://www.forestry-suppliers.com/product_pages/products.ph...
The flight attendant definitely counted like 3 times on a recent flight I was on though.
And that looks to be a continuing trend judging by stories like this.
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/01/gop-contest-electio...
These voters were "active voters". They voted in the past like 6 years! Sure, it wasn't them and instead an impersonator but whatever step you want to use to only ensure active voters are on the rolls, one can do as an insider.
Need a signature? Grab the one on file. Need something mailed back? Just fill it out and drop it off in outgoing of their post office. Need them to vote? No problem, "they've" been doing that already.
> Inside the polling place and while the polls were open, Beren would advise actual in-person voters to support Myers’ candidates
Definitely cannot do this.
Meyers was convicted of bribery in 1980 as part of the ABSCAM investigation and on Oct. 2, 1980, the House of Representatives expelled him in a 376-30 vote.
Source: https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/michael_myers/40809...
More on ABSCAM: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abscam
Each congressman who was approached would be given a large sum of money in exchange for "private immigration bills" to allow foreigners associated with Abdul Enterprises into the country and for building permits and licenses for casinos in Atlantic City, among other investment arrangements.
The FBI recorded each of the money exchanges and, for the first time in American history, surreptitiously videotaped government officials accepting bribes.
After closing the polls, the paper votes are counted manually (in from of candidates representatives and public in general) by the poll station "vocales".
"Vocales" are citizens (4 in total) randomly selected for each poll, who must operate the poll during the entire day. They must report the results of the counting directly to the central system and sign a certificate, so everything is traceable down to the polling box, and it is very difficult for a candidate to conspire against a fair count. Results are normally available from 1 to 3 hours after closing the polls.
I'm completely against e-voting as I feel that transparency in every election is way more important than efficiency, and I think that it cannot get more transparent than this.
The way I see it, it's a system that only works in elections when it's not needed. Otherwise, all you need to suppress people's votes is some thugs saying "we have men on the inside - if you vote for someone else, we'll know". It doesn't need to be true, just plausible enough to make people think twice before voting.
(Maybe I am reading too much meaning into "recorded correctly")
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity looks sort of complicated.
For the voter who wants to check later that their vote was included correctly in the total they have to also to note the codes that are revealed when they fill the bubbles.
Voters that wish to check that the have not received a rigged ballot can ask for two ballots, and then pick one of the two at random and reveal all the codes before going into the booth and using the other to actually vote with. They can afterwards look up all the codes on that first valid to verify they are all valid. This actually just shows that the ballot they picked to verify with instead of vote with was not rigged, but someone trying to slip in rigged ballots has a 50/50 chance of being caught each time a voter asks to do such a check.
If the randomness gaurantees hold and everybody knows they hold, I have trouble imagining a better system. It has a blockchain-y feel to it, you have no reason to trust any single rando, but a bunch of random non-colluding people all acting consistently is a very strong indicator that they are actually telling the truth.
The better system is what you described, plus a box that I insert my ballot in that counts it. The electronic machines used in SF are basically the same as an additional random poll worker, with the added benefit that the machine's count can only be manipulated by physically inserting ballots into the machine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_voting_in_the_Unite...
The fact these are all known yet nothing is done to change things means that those in power have no incentive to do so, and the public doesn't care or is misinformed enough to not care about it.
Great, so now this gives extra credence to the "the election was stolen" narrative. Well, I mean it looks like in this case it had actually been stolen for years in that particular ward in Philly.
Hopefully one day we can have paper trails, IDs, registration records matching and so on. We can fly satellites beyond the solar system, but managing voting integrity of a few hundred million people is seemingly unsurmountable problem. Every single election it's an endless tirade of debates afterwards that it was stolen or not stolen and so on. This is stuff that even poorer countries with even more people seem to manage.
Did you look at the data at all? I am curious if you, individually, even looked at it at all even once
These things have an impact even if the data doesn't support the narrative.
You understand this happened right..? The extra votes weren't just ballots stuffed into a ballot box. The numbers of ballots matched the turn out numbers. They specifically used registered voters who they knew wouldn't be voting in this specific election. The issue was the people who check registration, ID, etc were in on the scam.
Of course.
The numbers match but the people didn't vote. Is that an impossible task to prevent his kind of fraud. It doesn't have to be technological, it could be a mix of human (procedural) and technological.
https://www.reddit.com/r/electionfraud/comments/v85iy4/mind_...
edit: better resolution https://i.redd.it/zrpj1pxf2i491.png
I'm gonna go ahead and guess 2020 wasn't tacked on for obvious reasons.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/arizona-woman-admits-guilt-in-b...
A new formation needs > 55% and the old one needs < 35% for a change in leadership to happen.
It will be wonderful if there is instant retaliation or instant rewards.
Verifying an election process is one thing. If you're saying that if we can verify an election, and it can still be corrupted by criminals, so be it. All the more reason to end the farce. Sticking our head in the sand in pretending it's viable is not reasonable, and is perilous.
Of course the popular vote would also have the bonus of being more democratic (with no downside, since we no longer need to help slave owners feel a sense of equity).
Also, the indicted former politician is 79 years young.
apparently its “the big lie”
Especially wonder how much it would get if it was a republican.
1. We have a single federal, non-partisan (ie. beauracratic not political) electoral commission, governed by federal laws that ensure that every federal election is managed the same way, uniformly across the federation (doesn't matter what state you are in). The Australian Electoral Commission is truly the jewel in our democracy. Check out https://www.aec.gov.au/
2. We don't use voting machines. Our system (whether via polling booth or postal) is entirely paper based. We have one of the slowest counts in the western world but also one of the most accurate. A slow count isn't an indicator of fraud - it's an indicator that the system is working.
3. We have compulsory voting. As another commenter pointed out, one fraud vector is harvesting real people's votes when those people haven't actually voted. Compulsory voting largely eliminates this vector. It also has the benefit of "centralising" the political compass as most people tend to be fairly reasonable. In optional voting systems, the political distribution is skewed to the edges due to the correlation of motivation-to-vote with more-extreme-political-position. Do you want to encourage centrists and discourage extremists? Implement compulsory voting.
4. We have preferential voting i.e. candidates are ranked. It's not the candidate with the greatest primary vote that wins the parliamentary seat for that electoral area, its the candidate that is "most preferred" i.e. garners the greatest overall preferences compared to other candidates. e.g. in the recent election some government MPs lost their seats even though they had a higher primary vote, because the rest of that electorate preferred the other gal/guy. I may vote Green as my first preference but my 2nd preference is for the Labour person and then the climate-change independent candidate ahead of the incumbent.
But like so many other things in the US, the cultural history of the primacy of the individual's right to vote or not, and the primacy of the states to define their own rules for how elections are run, along with the benefit to the political duopoly of your current system, means the chances of the US implementing any of the above is probably close to zero. Then again what do I know? Literally a month before the Soviet union fell apart I insisted to my then-girlfriend who was Lithuanian, that they would never be free and to stop wishing for fairy tale endings.
Australian "democracy" is hardly a shining star in the world, given state politics is a corrupt mess with branch stacking (featuring cash in manilla envelopes exchanged in car parks, no really, this happened!) and outright corruption. Then you have both major parties being practically identical (both vehemently voted for anti-encryption and metadata retention bills).
You also made the common misconception that the US is a democracy. It wasn't, never was, and was never founded as one. The US is a republic, and elections are based on state representation and not individual voters. This prevents coastal elites in California and New York from dictating policy for poor farmers in Idaho.
I also find it hard to believe the AEC is not partisan, considering their mainstream bias (the three majors receive preferential treatment).
Preference voting is also terrible, given it severely punishes minor parties, who are rapidly rising in popularity. 1/3rd of Australians don't vote for the corrupt major parties yet they are barely represented.
As for "encouraging centrism", I'm not sure anyone should want that given Australia is a basketcase of mass surveillance, war crimes (indiscriminate slaying of civilians in Afghanistan) and violating UN Human Rights guidelines they are a signatory to (they prevented citizens from leaving the country). Such a shining star for democracy and centrism, blasting away Afghanistani civilians and covering it up. Sounds amazing!
WIth respect to party branch stacking, you're conflating the internal selection of candidates within a party, to the external election among candidates for an electoral seat. Please refer to the context of this article that we're all commenting on. I stand by my characterisation of Australian electoral system as one of the least corrupt in terms of the way the elections are run (which is what we - or at least I - are talking about).
As for your self-proclaimed "belief" that AEC is partisan ("the three majors receive preferential treatment"), please provide a citation for ANY kind of evidence that is true.
While preferential voting is not the same as proportional representation, the recent federal election here shows that people are less wedded to their blue/red inherited voting "teams" than ever before, with the greatest ever election to parliament of independent candidates and Greens, and the Greens now holding the balance of power in the Senate.
You may well look at Australia and see a "basketcase". I look at the US and see far worse than that. Is Australia perfect? Clearly not. I vote Green and I agree that most of what you've cited as issues, are indeed that. But my kids aren't more likely to die from gunshot wounds. A person won't die just because they can't afford private health insurance. As for "blasting away Afghanistani civilians" - there is a very public court case right now underway against the (highly decorated) soldier I assume you're referring to. Meanwhile, to the best of my knowledge, not a single individual at any level responsible for the "Collateral Murder" incident has been punished. I won't hold my breath.
I imagine if Biden or Trump was stacking state electors or state nominations with shills by using cash-stuffed manila envelopes you would've mentioned that in your original post -- why do you not care about this corruption in your own country?
The proliferation of cash payments in envelopes to rig selections seems to disqualify Australia from the title of "not corrupt" elections. Again, not isolated.
As for the AEC, they have a long history of targeting people in rules that effectively prevent them voting [1]. Wow, so democratic! Not to mention the privacy breaches, or the audit that said they lied to the public repeatedly about cybersecurity. Wow, AEC elections are so secure! [2] [3]
Let's look at a quote: "Insufficient attention was paid to ensuring the AEC could identify whether the system had been compromised," Mr Hehir said.
Whoops. They didn't even have the capability to know whether the election was compromised, then they lied about it.
>But my kids aren't more likely to die from gunshot wounds
Gun homicides have been declining for 40 years in the US. Increased gun sales are correlated with decreased gun homicides. It seems like you're extrapolating data from media sources rather than looking at crime statistics?
>A person won't die just because they can't afford private health insurance
This is pretty much a lie. Medicaid ($672bn yearly budget) provides coverage to those on low or no incomes. Not to mention those "bill shock" images you've no doubt been manipulated by are highly misleading. People don't pay those figures. Never. Hospitals negotiate 90% or higher discounts for those who aren't insured. Go read personal finance subreddits for yourself to confirm.
>Meanwhile, to the best of my knowledge, not a single individual at any level responsible for the "Collateral Murder" incident has been punished
Australia is covering up the war crimes perpetrated by the military. The only reason it was ever public was because of leaks. The US military (as warmongering as it is) felt the Australian military had a bloodthirsty reputation.
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-06-19/nt-voters-racial-disc...
[2] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-05-18/aec-sends-electoral-r...
[3] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-01-22/aec-misled-public-abo...
Only with the ACA expansion, which 12 states have declined, does Medicaid cover non-disabled, non-pregnant, childless adults, and even with children may not cover them except at a very low income (exact eligibility rules vary by state, income-based eligibility for adults with children can be as low as 17% of the federal poverty level.)
What you are referring to relates to the way parties select their own candidates for a given seat. Rules for such things are entirely party issues and nothing to do with either the federal election itself, nor with the AEC. Some parties allow for "higher-ups" to veto the selection of party branch members, or to carry greater weight. There's typically horse-trading as factions of parties jockey for position to become "the" candidate for a given seat. Yes, branch stacking (with shill party members) happens. At the end of the day, they still have to present a candidate that the electorate finds palatable. E.g. in the recent federal election, the Labor party "parachuted" a high-profile candidate into a seat against the wishes of the local branch. That candidate was soundly beaten - contra to the trend in adjoining seats and the rest of the country - precisely because of those sort of shenanigans.
You're clearly a troll and I know I'm not going to convince you of anything, however there are others reading this and they deserve respect. Hence my responses.
Yes. The AEC is not perfect. Never claimed it was. But as far as these kind of institutions go, it's pretty damn good, and you could argue prima facie that it's leagues better than what you've got in the USA.
You've got to be kidding about the gun deaths. Yes, overall homicides may be down, yet active shooter events at schools are up. In what other country not actively at war or suffering a terrorist insurgency would anyone need a school desk like this? https://www.defendourchildren.org/safe-space-security-desk
Answer: only the USA.
I'm going to stop now but if your aim is to convince people you're a reasonable, good-faith interlocutor, you have singularly failed.
It's one thing if their security was bad, but they actively covered it up and lied to the public. That shows malice.
But I agree, we should put aside partisan bullshit and come up with some meaningful improvements, but that will never happen as long as we have politicians who insist on trying to rig everything their way. We should be pushing for an end to gerrymandering, a way to count votes that makes it reasonable for every eligible voter to vote, assures to a reasonable degree that only eligible voters can vote, and that the count is accurate. Let me know when there's a conservative idea that actually does those things and I'll be behind it.
How anyone could state this with any particular confidence is beyond me. The truth is, when someone votes by mail, you have no idea who filled in the ballot. How could anyone possibly collect metrics? No one can possibly say what's going on, unless you trust the populace at large, which not everyone does. Many countries have systems for dealing with this. In many countries, they ink your finger to indicate you voted. Why not just do that at physical polling stations.
Honestly, mail-in ballots are very difficult for me. They get mailed to you, and by the time I finally have a chance to sit down, I often have to go searching for where it went / whether my toddler put it somewhere. On the other hand, when I voted in person, I would just go to the polling booth in the morning and be done. Super easy. I don't understand the desire for pure vote by mail.
One year, I didn't even receive my ballot, and it was difficult to get a replacement. Whereas, when I lived in CA, it didn't matter. You show up to the polling station (which is conspicuously noted), and just vote.
How do you know who filled in the ballot at the polling place? All I would need is to show up and know someone else's name and address and I could vote for them. Vote by mail isn't any worse than that and is possibly better because there's a stronger confidence that whoever filled it out actually lives at that address. As I recall from my own mail-in ballot, it is also signed by myself and a witness.
> Honestly, mail-in ballots are very difficult for me. They get mailed to you, and by the time I finally have a chance to sit down, I often have to go searching for where it went / whether my toddler put it somewhere. On the other hand, when I voted in person, I would just go to the polling booth in the morning and be done.
The poling place is open on exactly one day, and you have to wait in line for your turn. Have to go to work that day? Well, tough shit. For some people this is simple, but for quite a lot of people in overcrowded polling places and inflexible working conditions it is not. The option of a mail in ballot provides a convenience for people less privileged with the ability to make it to a polling place during a sub-24 hour window.
Notice I said option. If filling out a ballot is difficult for you, you can still do it by showing up in person.
> One year, I didn't even receive my ballot, and it was difficult to get a replacement.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
Presumably by some kind of voter identification? Like the way most countries do it.
> The poling place is open on exactly one day, and you have to wait in line for your turn. Have to go to work that day? Well, tough shit. For some people this is simple, but for quite a lot of people in overcrowded polling places and inflexible working conditions it is not. The option of a mail in ballot provides a convenience for people less privileged with the ability to make it to a polling place during a sub-24 hour window.
I guess I don't get it. The polling places open at a ridiculously early hour and end at 8. You could have multi-day polling too, that's fine. I don't understand why this is so hard in this country.
> Notice I said option. If filling out a ballot is difficult for you, you can still do it by showing up in person.
No I can't because I live in Oregon, which despite being a high tax state, is unable to conduct even the most basic election.
> Perfect is the enemy of good.
It's not when we have an easy answer to this problem -- have a physical place to vote. I've voted absentee in California, and one year, my ballot got lost there. Do you know what I did? I went to a polling location. In Oregon, because it was COVID, there was no place to get a ballot. EIther you use the byzantine system set up by the state which was too complicated, or tough shit. That's not acceptable. Why aren't these 'voter suppression' tactics used in liberal states not up to questioning? Why is only the motivations of one party suspect? I don't think it is easier to vote in Oregon than any other state, despite what everyone here wants you to believe.
Ok, sure, just find a way to implement that which doesn't allow it to be abused disenfranchise voters, which is what typically happens here in the states.
> You could have multi-day polling too, that's fine. I don't understand why this is so hard in this country.
Yep, you could. No politician suggests this for some reason.
> No I can't because I live in Oregon, which despite being a high tax state, is unable to conduct even the most basic election.
Sounds like your problem is less with the concept of mail-in ballots and more with the fact that your state can't handle running a polling location.
> It's not when we have an easy answer to this problem -- have a physical place to vote.
For all the reasons I already outlined, it is not actually an easy answer.
> Why aren't these 'voter suppression' tactics used in liberal states not up to questioning?
They are. If no one is talking about it then they should make a bigger stink about it.
Truth is, if you continue to allege fraud, some people will stop voting. And you can push laws that restrict voting to a specific time and manner. That also reduces turnout. And it just so happens that turnout is negatively correlated with republican election victories. That is the playbook and we are watching it happen, because “just asking questions” isn’t generally being done in good faith.
Could you explain the thought with this? If the people saying "there is fraud" are Republicans, and the people believing "this is fraud" are Republicans, and subsequently they are less likely to vote, wouldn't that lead to them losing more elections, and by a larger margin?
In my experience, non-conservatives tend to believe conservatives are 'regurgitating' Tucker Carlson. Most of Carlson's audience are actually democrats. Polls show that most conservatives distrust fox news. And the whole 'bad faith' thing is a way to dismiss people. You shouldn't every think that what people are telling you is in bad faith. If you think that what someone is telling you is so preposterous as to not possibly be in good faith, perhaps you need to recalibrate as to what is normal.
> And it just so happens that turnout is negatively correlated with republican election victories.
This is increasingly not true. The democrats have kind of maxed out on their voter turnout. It turns out that they mainly have voter turnout efforts for people who will vote democrat. They've ignored the non-democrats (not their fault of course), and these are the bulk of the people who don't vote. Several South Texas districts for example have seen higher turnout amongst formerly non-voting Hispanics, and most of these are new GOP voters.
https://www.congress.gov/bill/116th-congress/house-bill/2722
So, the Democrats are the racist right-wingers, and Mitch McConnell is the progressive in this story?
Note that, on their own, paper ballots don't actually address the attack described in the article, though the bill provides funding for mechanisms that would.
There's nothing in the SAFE act that can be considered partisan, unless you assume that one of the parties is against allowing people to vote. The Republicans in the senate blocked it for two reasons:
- It is impossible to print legible ballots on recycled paper. (The recycled paper requirement in the bill could have been removed in reconciliation, even if this argument is nonsense.)
- Establishing federal standards for election machines and paper ballots would discourage states from establishing redundant standards. (Note that the opponents of the bill didn't make the stronger claim that it would prevent states from establishing stronger standards.)
The bill would provide funding for standardizing best practices around paper ballot counting. That would speed up the count and reduce election fraud.
The bill doesn't touch voter disenfranchisement, except that it includes a small amount of research funding to allow people with disabilities to vote on paper ballots without trusting a computer or divulging their vote to another person (this is currently an open problem).
It was repeatedly proposed by Democrats + fillibustered by Senate Republicans.
I don't see how any honest conversation about voting counting issues in the US can't point out that there are low-tech solutions to the exact issues you're complaining about, that the bill has been written, and that exactly one party has been blocking / fillibustering it for 3+ years (without publicly providing any legitimate complaints about the contents of the bill).
Processing a mail ballot involves physically opening the envelope, removing the ballot, ensuring that everything matches against the records. This could not be done in a single night. There's no conspiracy, just obvious consequences of those rules when you evaluate the information critically.
> three ballot cues have attained legendary status in Cook County: gender, Irish ethnicity, and first ballot position. Female candidates are believed to hold a significant advantage over male candidates, a belief borne out by election results over much of the past twenty years. The advantage of an Irish-sounding name in Cook County has long been accepted as gospel truth, so much so that several past judicial candidates with non-Irish names have legally changed their names to suggest Irish ancestry. [1]
It's so common that they passed a law to make it so that you really have to plan ahead:
> if a candidate has changed his or her name during the 3 years before the deadline for filing nominating petitions ... the ballot must include a reference to his or her former name or names and the date or dates of the name changes [2]
Not a joke:
> There are only two kinds of people, the saying goes, the Irish and those who wish they were. Shannon P. O’Malley, who is running to be a judge in suburban Chicago, seems to fit into the second category. For, despite the name, O’Malley doesn't appear to be all that Irish. O’Malley is a 55-year-old Chicago guy formerly named Phillip Spiwak who insists he is not trying to pull the wool over voters’ eyes. [3]
[1] https://via.library.depaul.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&...
[2] https://www.ilga.gov/legislation/billstatus.asp?DocNum=4173&...
[3] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/illinois-judge-candidat...