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Comment by evantbyrne | Hacker News Reader

Trust is a social challenge, not a technological one. It is effectively impossible to stuff ballot boxes at scale in the US, but a large number of people still believe the last presidential election was stolen.

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Who needs scale? Doesn't the election ultimately come down to a couple of counties in 2 or 3 swing states?

Even sneaking a single box of ballots into an American polling station would get caught in a key district. Please see my response to baggy_trough.

You literally have video evidence from 2020 of people driving up with their cars and shoving 100+ ballots into absentee boxes; and you wrote the above with a straight face?

No, I haven’t seen evidence of that, and a quick googling for “2020 us ballot stuffing” doesn’t show me such

Did you try very hard? https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXAp8My7Js

So there is a clip of someone dropping multiple ballots in a drop box. Apparently [1] that is not necessarily fraudulent, you can drop multiple ballots from family members.

There were international observers in the 2020 election and they found no evidence of fraud [2], and many mainstream media sources that I hold reliable, (e.g. [3]) fact-check multiple claims of election fraud and nothing has showed up that would suggest that the election was "stolen".

I don't think it is at all preposterous to assume that the 2020 US election was fair, unless you subscribe to a view that the global mainstream media apparatus is in on some grand conspiracy.

[1] https://apnews.com/article/fact-check-election-ohio-ballots-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_United_States_presidentia...

[3] https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-55016029

Different people could look at the same clip and assign different probabilities to P(ballot stuffer) vs P(Family ballot courier). It would depend on your Bayesians priors. If a person from a high trust society like Sweden or Finland were to see this video, they might have a prior expectation of someone being helpful. Whereas there are much lower trust societies in the world where that would not be the case.

We've gone from "haven't seen evidence" to "seen evidence at probability P-prime". Trust in an electoral system is an important enough issue that this should be investigated to the same thorough degree as a capital crime.

You're entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts. Delivering absentee ballots on behalf of other people is not ballot box stuffing. Taking a clip of something completely mundane and attributing imagined facts and motives to it is not evidence of a stolen election. There is still an audit trail for all of those ballots from registration, to requesting the absentee ballot, to printing, and to shipping. Where are the people claiming they lost their absentee ballots and getting flagged as double-voting because someone took their ballot? This is according to all available data a made-up problem by people who are clearly worried that the "wrong" demographic is going to vote against their candidates of choice.

I've only watched the first minute (due to the presentation style), if there is better evidence later please link to it directly - but the supposed evidence does not show anybody "shoving 100+ ballots into absentee boxes". It seems to be maybe 10, at most 15 ballots, which is an absolutely realistic number for somebody dropping off ballots for their whole family.

Did you mean to send a different video? Or are you deliberately misrepresenting evidence to support your position?

Thank you for serving as demonstration of this poster's point.

Why do you believe so?

Representatives from both parties are present for voting and ballot counting. They have observation areas. Plus they keep electronic and paper records. The few people who attempt voting fraud are easily caught. Parties abandoned ballot box stuffing in favor of gerrymandering and other voter suppression tactics long ago.

Where I am located, there are ballot boxes literally on the side of the road, and we have universal absentee balloting. Anyone who can acquire ballots, perhaps from non interested voters, or those who can be pressured, can submit ballots and there would be no feasible way to know.

Election day, in person secret voting, with voter ID is the way.

The absentee voting process is still audited at every step. They even have observer areas in the ballot printing facilities now. How would a party ever subvert the process that exists to stuff ballots at any scale?

Control and visibility of absentee ballots (in my state, all of them) is completely missing between mailing and drop-off. That is how.

Sure, but how much can/should the state do about people in the same household hypothetically stealing each other's ballots? The registration process requires ID, so I'm not convinced additional authentication is needed.

Don't limit your imagination to households, although that's also a problem. What about apartments that receive all their ballots at the same time, or congregate living shelters, etc. etc.? It's not that hard to conceive of collecting tens or even hundreds of ballots if you have the right access to mail.

The state should eliminate this problem by requiring everyone to vote in person on election day with voter ID using a secret ballot.

People who order absentee ballots are presumably expecting them to arrive. It would be pretty obvious if someone started taking ballots from such a highly engaged voting demographic. If not from people looking for their missing ballots, then it would show up as double voting eventually. Every apartment I've ever lived at also had locking mail boxes. In the absence of evidence that any ballot box stuffing happening at any scale, and having so many controls in place, we can safely assume it is not happening. But sure, perhaps mailed ballots could be improved to further combat the possibility of mail theft.

I've tried to explain this, but I will repeat. Nobody orders them any more; they are sent by default. That includes to the lowest engagement voters who may not even be aware of them.

We should not expect there to be much evidence that this is happening because the system has in effect, if not by intention, been designed to prevent any such evidence from being collected.

That is why there is some legitimate doubt in the tamper proof nature of our elections.

Must be a state-specific thing. Here is Michigan we still need to request them separately. Either way, it's still authenticated at time of registration, and it would still be relatively easy to catch. Someone would notice for all of the reasons mentioned plus there are cameras everywhere in residential areas these days. People are occasionally convicted of voting fraud btw. It's just extremely rare because it's an incredibly high risk and low reward crime.

Why stuff ballot boxes when you can just make it harder for people that typically vote against your party to even get their ballots in the first place, or divide up cities in convoluted boundaries to prevent non-white communities from being able sway districts? All perfectly legal methods that have worked well for the GOP, which didn't even win the popular vote with their last president. That is the real reason GOP leadership pushes anti-absentee ballot narratives and DNC tries to expand those programs.

All of these things are problems that weaken trust in the system.

Widespread absentee ballots are bad, early voting is bad, gerrymandering is bad, lack of voter ID checking is bad, non-secret voting is bad. I'd like to see them all done away with.

- those who print ballots can print some extra ballots in secret and put them in the box

- the ballots can be printed at non-monitored facility. I am sure FBI has such capabilities, there are many talented people

- those responsible for transporting ballots can "forget" some of them accidentally

- at polling stations where there are no election monitors, they can take as much ballots as they need

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