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Comment by dralley | Hacker News Reader

Voter fraud and election fraud are two entirely different things.

So all this time, "election fraud" is entirely plausible but we've been building a strawman around "voter fraud" and saying that it doesn't happen? What level of bad faith debating is this?

Certain politicians use the myth of widespread voter fraud to push targeted disenfranchising policies like voter ID requirements and mail-in voting restrictions. Conflating individual voter crimes that might supposedly be stopped by these laws, with election official crimes that have nothing to do with them, would be bad faith debating. So it’s important to be clear about this distinction.

That's a fair point. Though I would argue that improving controls around voters make it easier to detect election fraud. If you can tie each vote to a real person, it becomes very difficult to add an arbitrary number of anonymous votes to a candidate, like how Michael “Ozzie” Myers was doing.

If we're looking at it from a cost-benefit perspective, the ability to ensure that election fraud isn't happening (which disenfranchises all voters) is more important than the downsides of extra voter requirements (which may disenfranchise a much smaller number of voters).

We already have a public list of people who voted. In order for a corrupt election official to undetectably add a large number of votes, they may need to add people to that list (perhaps registered voters who didn’t vote). Election transparency measures and audits might make that harder; voter restrictions do not.

Huh, the DoJ article didn't make it clear that they were using existing identities for the padded votes, only that they were incrementing tallies. From the way it is written, it sounds like they don't need any existing identities at all. Do you believe it impossible to accomplish what Michael Myers did without re-using existing identities?

I’m not sure of the details, but it seems in this case small numbers of votes were added in down-ballot contests, where there were likely sufficiently many voters who would have voted in the election but not in those contests.

As a non-American what's wrong with asking for voter ID? A particular party pushing for open border and waving voter ID requirement seems like a ploy to influence the election. I am open to hear how people can justify both of these policies at at the same time.

Not everyone has ID that meets the requirements laid out by voter ID proposals, and sometimes getting those IDs can be extremely expensive. Defenders like to say that the ID is free but when you point out the cost of getting birth certificates and proof of name change (common in marriage) they disappear quick.

And if it can't be shown that the number of people prevented from voting is fewer than the number of fraudulent votes, the policy is bad and should not be pursued.

Opponents of voter ID never seem to address the fact that Americans need a valid drivers license or state ID to do virtually anything as an adult in America. Including, but not at all limited to:

- Opening/accessing a bank account

- Driving a vehicle

- Requesting government assistance

- Renting or buying a home

- Getting married

- Buying tobacco/alcohol/cannabis

- Registering children for school

- Getting a hotel room

- Getting a cell phone

Where are these mythical minorities who want to participate in absolutely nothing else in American life except for voting?

Plenty of people haven't done any of those things in years. I don't think my grandmother had any reason to show id during her last few decades of life, and why should a possibly expired id be cause to prevent her from voting?

This is addressed elsewhere in the discussion. Access to ID is inequitable. So you need to either be willing to fund the solutions to that problem, or at least show that the supposed voter fraud problem is worse than the ID inequity problem, and neither has happened.

https://www.democracydocket.com/news/wisconsins-dmv-holds-th...

Nobody is pushing for an "open border" and the absence of a voter ID leading to fraud is just a dumb conspiracy theory promoted by people that are ignorant of how elections actually work.

All voters need to be registered in the first place at which point they verify your identify, your ability to legally cast a ballot, and your address (falsely registering is a felony in most jurisdictions). On voting day, you show up to the correct precinct and tell the administrator your name, they typically verify that your address is correct and then you can cast a ballot. Casting a fraudulent ballot is also a felony.

So the theory is what? That all of these illegal immigrants are going to register to vote? They wouldn't be allowed to register as non-citizens and falsely attesting is a crime. They would show up on election day and cast a ballot under their own name? They're not registered, so their votes wouldn't be counted. That they're going to imitate an actual voter on election day? Instant felony which is easily caught if the real voter shows up at any point to cast their own ballot. That they're going to intercept the mail-in ballots somehow? Again, when real voters figure out their ballots are missing but votes are recorded in their name, the fakes would be immediately found out.

When the states advocating for voting IDs have a long history of race-based voter suppression, analysis shows the ID mandates have race-based impacts that would suppress votes, and there isn't an actual "attack surface" that would be solved with voting IDs, it's clear it's just a transparent attempt to suppress votes.

> and saying that it doesn't happen?

Why yes, that is a strawman. I know a bunch of people who think that voter fraud is rare. Clearly it's not zero, because a few people get caught double voting every year.

Election fraud is exactly what Donald Trump and his conspirators are about to be dragged over the coals for by the Jan 6 committee. He begged the GA SecState to cook the election in his favor. Basically the exact thing Myers was caught and convicted of in this story.

Trump made the accusation multiple times going back even to 2016 that millions of illegal votes were cast against him. The details of his allegation were never made clear. He convened a Congressional committee with full subpoena power to investigate and after a little over a year they disbanded having issued no findings nor held a single public hearing. There is certainly _some_ voter fraud that happens all the time, but it's not widespread, not coordinated and has never been plausibly suspected of tilting any election.

https://apnews.com/article/north-america-donald-trump-us-new...

You don't need to prove voter fraud. If you show that ballots were counted that should not have, you should prevail.

For example if under law there needs to be a signature match on the envelope, but such matches were not done, or done to such a low standard that they are useless. Then technically you should be able to have those ballots thrown out. Since a signature on the envelope is a big part of verifying whether the ballot was filled out by the person it belonged to.

This was the contention that Trump was arguing about. Whether the election rules were followed. In the end, they pretty much counted everything. And no judge wanted to overturn that. So that pretty much summarized last US election. There was a result. They recounted the ballots. And no judge wanted to step in to question it. Procedure was followed.

From an outsiders perspective, or even from the perspective of someone that uses some critical thinking. The procedure is flawed. There are multiple opportunities to cheat, by either cheating at the source, stuffing envelopes and faking signatures. Or cheating along the path. By swapping out the ballots after the leave the envelopes and before they get to the machines doing the counting.

It seems to me that both were possible. The extra long time it took to count ballots in select cities, made it more likely.

It "seems"? There are observers and safeguards at every step. There were also 65 separate lawsuits filed around the country related to the 2020 presidential election where a judge was presented with the best evidence available that mistakes had happened (there were zero cases actually alleging fraud) and every case was tossed for failing to meet basic standards.

https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/jan/08/joe-biden/...

There were also multiple statewide audits conducted by outside parties that found no wrongdoing and an insignificant margin of error in counting.

Conversely, this case in PA which was small scale and local was caught, tried, prosecuted and convicted. So, no. Judges are doing their jobs.

I just don't think voting by mail can be done securely the way they did it.

Sorry still have doubts about the integrity of your election.

Somehow Biden out performed Obama with Black Americans in Detroit, who apparently came out and voted in record numbers for him. Yeah, I just don't believe it.

81 million votes. The most popular president ever. Yet the same guy couldn't get 10k views on some of his youtube videos. Yet had problems winning his own party. Somehow won the fewest counties ever, yet had the most votes ever. Delayed counting, strange ballot drop offs in the middle of the night, reversals in counts by the morning. I just don't believe it. I'm not an American. This is just my opinion. Election looked Soviet tiered.

You know, judges existed in Communist countries too. Good luck getting anywhere with any of them by claiming the elections were fake. They obviously were. The judicial system is a rubber stamp for the system, 99% of the time. The fact that none of those appeals went anywhere should be more of a tip off than anything.

I mean you're wrong. We've been doing mail in ballots for decades. It's what the entire military uses. It's been under a microscope for the last 20 years of republican election conspiracy mongering and no one has found a flaw. Like I posted earlier, a Congressional committee spent a year looking for wrong votes (fraud or errors) and found absolutely nothing.

And you're also underestimating how many people feel utter existential dread at the prospect of another Trump term. He was if not the worst president in our history, he was assuredly the worst person to be president. We were only spared a worse outcome because he is so incredibly inept and stupid. I would vote for the slumped husk of Jimmy Carter if he ran against Trump.

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