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Comment by fsckboy | Hacker News Reader

>We can't "move back", it's where we are.

vote by mail (and similar ballot harvesting, bulk ballot dropoffs with hazy chain-of-custody as from a nursing homes and immigrant communities) are new, based on paper, and open to abuse.

It's not where we were.

traditional absentee balloting was a small scale thing used by college students, military personnel, etc. and if it was messed up, it was not likely to change outcomes or a threat to counting accurately (no election is perfect)

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So the question(s) to ask are:

1. why did absentee voting/vote by mail expand? What was the claimed intention and purpose? What has been the actual result (and based on what evidence) ?

2. who has an interest in underming confidence in vote by mail and why? What evidence do they offer that it actually is a problem?

those are not questions I have, nor answers I feel that I am lacking, and it fits a familiar online debate technique of bogging down discussions when you don't like the direction they are going in, wasting the time of your interlocutor. are you really so unimaginative and out of touch that you don't know the answers to your questions?

legitimately elected politicians cheat left and right all over the place, and there is every reason to rhink illegimate election is just as attractive to them as the fruits of the power they seek, it's human nature, it's in the bible, it's in the koran, it's why we have laws. I would prefer a voting system that was guaranteed as secure as we can because the power to vote them out of office is our best hope.

The reality is that in the USA there just isn't any evidence of widespread election fraud, and lots of evidence to support the claim that our voting systems, while not perfect, are secure enough to trust the results.

So unless you believe there's a whole layer of election fraud that nobody - not the losing party, not pro publica, not the FBI, not state investigators, not reddit - has been able to even detect, there's just really nothing to talk about here.

you keep trying to change the subject. Here's how the to understand the difference in our positions:

if security researchers find vulns in network software, should they be fixed, or should a hypothetical researcher PaulDavidThe2ndSmartestPersonInThisThread quash the discussion by saying "there is no evidence that these vulns are being exploited"?

fsckboy thinks they should be fixed

https://thegeorgiasun.com/government/your-vote/inside-the-fu...

understand that politicians who would benefit from fraud would also control the investigation, making your "see no evil" monkey brain's position as questionable as the election system security is

Nobody, certainly not myself is suggesting that discovered vulnerabilities should not be fixed.

However, vulnerabilities that have demonstrably led to the wrong person being elected are entirely different to vulnerabilities that are invoked only in hypothetical scenarios for which there is no evidence that they've ever happened.

There are lots of things in this world that ought to be "fixed", but I'd prefer we prioritize the ones that are actively, demonstrably causing harm rather than the ones which "could cause harm if A, B & C even though A, B & C have never been observed to occur together".

So sure, fix the vulnerabilities, all of them, but don't lie about their status or impact on actual elections.

> open to abuse.

This claim is frequently made and never backed job with any compelling evidence.

you don't need to have "compelling evidence" to show that something is "open to abuse", you simply need to point out the threat vectors

as we know from all over the internet and from various financial frauds, rug pulls, insurance frauds, etc., if there is something to gain, there is no shortage of people who will abuse any system.

If you don’t have compelling evidence, you have hand-waving, which is all the concern trolling about massive absentee voting fraud always ends up doing.

Mail-in voting has been operating for decades. Nobody fear mongering about for all these years has ever delivered a shred of evidence to back their claims. It’s flat earth-grade conspiracy nonsense.

No, that's just fear-mongering and spreading propaganda.

Our elections are designed to handle everything you said. I wrote another comment explaining, but you can also literally go watch it done yourself.

Everything's a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works.

This argument would apply to any voting method regardless of how secure it was. If the "threat actors" are the only important factor then the voting method is irrelevant.

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