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Comment by rayiner | Hacker News Reader

Americans have a really tough time with the notion of materiality. America is such a big country that, as a matter of statistics, anything that can happen is happening. That doesn’t mean it happens often enough to call into question our basic systems.

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.

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> No, it doesn’t happen often enough to undermine the integrity of elections in the aggregate.

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.

> Even changing the outcome of a Presidential election doesn't require any kind of sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign. Just enough well-placed ones

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.

> Were that to have happened, analysis of the voting results would show a divergence in results in those “well placed” areas.

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?

The analysis never found fraud? Or there was no analysis at all? According to the DOJ, the fraud centered on Democratic primary elections [1], which don't receive anywhere near as much scrunity or participation as Presidential general elections.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-ele...

Let me put this in different terms. What algorithm should they have ran to detect this? If we have such a infallible algorithm why isn't it always used? If it's not a algorithm but instead more of a handy wavy "analysis" by "experts" how do you know for an empirical certainty they didn't just actually fill a room full of monkeys, waited a week and said the results are good?

You asked "Why didn't that sort of analysis find fraud in Philadelphia in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018?" And I answered it. Is that a sufficient answer or not?

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.

That doesn't really solve for all the ways you can rig an election. For example in '2000 Mules' they propose that democratically aligned charities like homeless shelters and elder care homes would gather ballots from their vulnerable populations, fill them out for their preferred candidates, and then have mules distribute those ballots to publicly accessible ballot boxes 3 to 5 at a time.

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?

>For example in '2000 Mules' they propose that democratically aligned charities like homeless shelters and elder care homes would gather ballots from their vulnerable populations, fill them out for their preferred candidates, and then have mules distribute those ballots to publicly accessible ballot boxes 3 to 5 at a time.

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?

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YJyQbckMDw

In 2020 in Pennsylvania the standard was that a signature existed not that it matched the voter rolls.

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...

Thanks for sharing this! That's absolutely concerning, and definitely opens up a possibility for monkey business if fraudsters can just scribble down anything in the signature field. Given the millions of mail ballots in Pennsylvania in 2020, I would expect someone noticing ballot theft at scale (i.e., "I never got my mail ballot but it says I already voted!"), but regardless this is something I would still want corrected if I were a Pennsylvanian. Is the standard still the same?

The signature match is an important part of the mail ballot process, one that even California does.

The standard for a match is so low, its practically useless.

https://youtu.be/v_liXxu0XL8

He did an audit of the envelope images for the Maricopa county election board, and testified under oath.

It is astonishing to me that anyone thinks signature matching is a good idea. It’s incredibly subjective, and I have no idea what my own signature from years ago looks like.

It is mostly a stand-in for voter suppression. It's not useful otherwise.

I should start off by saying 2000 Mules is a film by Dinesh D'Souza, noted scumbag. It's also a conspiracy theory. Asking "how can you prove this conspiracy theory false" isn't productive.

Comparing ballot totals to exit polling is a fairly accurate way to detect fraud (within a certain margin pf error). But increased mail-in/absentee voting, increasing the number of days on which voting occurs, etc. make it more difficult to outright impossible to perform quality exit polling any more.

It looks like this was pretty small-time voter fraud in local and low-level elections, where there weren't teams of data operatives scouring returns for any inconsistency.

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.

> Why didn't that sort of analysis find fraud in Philadelphia in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018?

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.

Wasn’t 2020 election was decided by 5 states and within them no more than a dozen counties?

No. It was decided by votes in the swing states. There wasn’t a swing in votes in “a dozen counties”. Votes trended toward the democratic candidate across demographically similar counties in all 5 states , and also trended the same way in states that were not critical to the election (for instance, in Texas: “Biden improved on Hillary Clinton's 2016 vote share by 3.24%, giving him the largest percentage in the state by a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter carried the state in 1976. Trump's 5.58-point margin of victory was also the narrowest for a Republican since 1996.” - Wikipedia )

>Votes trended toward the democratic candidate across demographically similar counties in all 5 states ,

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.

Sorry for the imprecision, I thought it was clear we were discussing the Presidential candidate voting specifically.

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.

Whose analysts?

>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.

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".

unsure the exact math here, but certainty isn't the required bar for an investment, just positive EROI .

I wasn't addressing a question of whether election fraud happens or the motivation for it. I was specifically criticizing the idea that "changing the outcome of a Presidential election" is possible without 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 the EROI is high enough you try it prior to knowing the outcome. Because there is a curve of investment that eats into the Return portion of the equation, they should push up the number of votes (cost) until they hit their desired (cost of capital + profit margin). That is the rational way to act at least.

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.

Yes, but if the question was "did someone give you $2?" then your ROI is irrelevant. The question wasn't whether someone would want to attempt this fraud. It is whether someone could successfully execute this fraud.

> It is whether someone could successfully execute this fraud.

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.

>> It is whether someone could successfully execute this fraud.

>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.

>It would have taken roughly 80k votes to switch the 2016 election from Trump to Clinton. However people had no idea of that beforehand.

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?

Election returns centers have a lot of people in it. You'd need a pretty sizeable conspiracy to carry out an attack you describe. At the very least, such a conspiracy would produce some kind of written communications or financial transactions. You'd need pretty good coordination to pull it off, and people are neither psychic nor capable of playing verbal "telephone" at scale.

> Election returns centers have a lot of people in it.

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.

Can you link to evidence of this happening? Because all I could find were stories about how Trump's lawyers argued this was the case, but were forced to admit in court there were poll watchers acting on Trump's behalf:

>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...

https://www.phillymag.com/news/2020/11/05/election-watchers-...

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.

Except the entire process was being recorded and that never happened. https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-factcheck-philadelphia-po...

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.

>such a conspiracy would produce some kind of written communications or financial transactions.

How would we ever know if those exist?

How do you know anything exists?

This is a hysterical question to ask, primarily because -- if you look at the statistics of election night -- it appears that exactly what you're describing happened.

You mean that as absentee ballots started to be counted (after the in-person ones, as required by Republican officials), that the polls started to swing just as everyone (including then-President Trump) had expected before the election? Is that what you mean?

They would need to be able to mobilize tens or hundreds of thousands of votes on hours of notice. 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. These votes would also need to be cast intelligently enough to match all expected down ballot elections not to draw suspicion. I don't think there is a way to do all of this without a sweeping multi-state conspiracy.

> They would need to be able to mobilize tens or hundreds of thousands of votes on hours of notice.

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.

If you are going to make claims like this, you really should back them up with sources. I was only able to find info about one of the issues you mentioned.

>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...

LOL, this is about the time someone points out that faking the moon landing would be more expensive than just doing it. Tell me how you coordinate a pause across even a few different precincts, much less states, and then it'll be worth discussing whether you could invent 80K fraudulent votes in just the right places.

Ridiculous to just throw this out as if it's a concrete fact.

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.

I wonder if Watergate's operations continued uninterrupted by 'you pesky kids (reporters)' what kind of innovations would be expected in that market?

I don't understand what this means, sorry.

I don't think concrete facts are generally arrived upon by appearances. I consider your first sentence self-contradicting.

For all the conspiracy theorists out there who still think there were more than seven million fraudulent votes cast in 2020, I wish I could give them the opportunity to try and vote fraudulently, with no legal consequences. You can do whatever it takes (caveat: no violence) to get those fake votes in. Document everything you did, record it all, present it when you're done and there will be no legal repercussions. We'll thank you for pointing out how easy the system is to game.

Give it your best shot, talk is cheap.

All you've done is add insult to a hypothetical and pretend it's a point of argument. I shouldn't be surprised though, because "talk is cheap"

That's not an insult, it is a challenge. Put up, or shut up. Calling into question our fundamental democratic systems just to score points in identity politics is low brow, we should challenge anyone who makes those accusations to back them up with facts.

> No, it doesn’t happen often enough to undermine the integrity of elections in the aggregate.

Nah election fraud matters pretty materially. If it werent for this rigged election, we would have never gotten the 1964 civil rights bill

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal

Seems a stretch, the civil rights bill was JFK’s baby initially, and if JBJ hadn’t been president it’s pretty likely that another democratic president would have signed it, possibly Humphrey or McCarthy.

The book "master of the senate" makes a pretty compelling case against this. LBJ was a masterclass politician (honestly much better than JFK or Humphrey). It makes the point that basically every liberal president since the Civil War had tried to pass some sort of civil rights bill only for it to fail

>No, it doesn’t happen often enough to undermine the integrity of elections in the aggregate.

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.

Have you read the discussion D'Souza has with someone at the WaPo?

There are holes in 2000 mules you could drive a big rig through.

I'm not saying there aren't holes...but there is a lot of evidence shown that can't really be disputed. I'm certainly not saying to take it 100% what they say...but it should be investigated further. Why take pictures of the ballot boxes after dropping off a bunch of ballots at 3AM? Why go to so many different ballot boxes one after another after another? Why use gloves and then throw them away right next to the ballot box...all starting right after someone was charged with voting fraud by using their fingerprints? I don't believe the numbers they calculated for sure...but individually the video evidence shown is damning.

The gloves one is easy - some people took Covid as a serious threat to themselves and wore gloves - I saw many people wearing gloves to shop and then throwing them away before getting to their car.

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.

>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...

I don't understand why this is supposed to be suspicious -- can you please explain?

Holes in the methodology are small enough, though, to convict January 6 rioters/protestors/whatever-they're-called-now.

I was under the impression that video evidence as well as social media posts were used in addition.

> a few isolated instances of innocent people being falsely convicted

And otherwise abused by the legal system. It's not a few isolated instances; plenty of research shows that it is widespread and systematic.

I agree with your basic point, and it certainly applies to both political tribes. However,

> 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.

All human systems operate on a “good enough” basis. You can tweak the knobs to trade off false positives versus false negatives in whatever balance is politically viable. But there will always be false positives, and in such a huge country even a systematically low false positive rate will generate many outrage-inducing stories of injustice.

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.)

Just focusing on error rates leaves out the details by which false positives are created, which are very important to everyone's individual sense of justice.

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.

Compared to America, many other democracies manage to get by with far less fraud. For example, election fraud is effectively unheard of in France; the system is so robust that even in very close elections there is never any real drama about recounts or such. For a country that considers democracy to be fundamental to its identity, the US's performance is embarrasing in comparison.

If you don't start out with one person, one vote then I think you should not be calling yourself a democracy to begin with. Votes from different persons should be exactly equal in weight.

What country has an unequal weight in votes?

No, the US is not that country.

>For example, election fraud is effectively unheard of in France

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...

> Which doesn't mean that it doesn't exist

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".

There is nothing specific about the French system that cannot be replicated.

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.

When elections run close enough that the outcome is in doubt for days and hangs on a few counties, it doesn't take much to swing an election either way.

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.

> 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.

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.

Why would you commit fraud if you didn't think you could tip the results? Unless you're also saying that everybody who does this is stupid.

The fact that you can buy votes for $300 does show a fairly fundamental issue in the system

Take Florida in 2000, population 16 million. Assume no fraud at the presidential level, but even a tiny amount of fraud in local city/county races could have tipped the Presidential count one way or the other. With 6 million votes cast, it seems likely that there were 600 fraudulent votes in the state. TLDR; even a very small amount of fraud can have world changing consequences.

> seems likely that there were 600 fraudulent votes in the state

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.

you just said a bunch of stuff in what you probably think is a "fair and balanced" voice, but you didnt offer anything in the way of support. not to mention empirically wrong on the justice system.

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