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Comment by sethg | Hacker News Reader

Obama took PA by five percentage points, which is consistent with his margin in the state-level polls that were taken throughout October. In absolute numbers rather than percentages, his margin is about 300,000 votes. Are you really trying to argue that a voter ID law would have taken enough people out of the electorate to flip the state?

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Yes. Fraud in Philly voting is legendary and almost on par with Chicago.

I can't find the registered voter turnout for 2012 yet, but in past years Philly RV turnout has been as high as 108%.

Ahh that's Philly for ya:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2012/11/06/judge-issuing-ord...

Unfortunately, it happens everywhere and from both sides.

Excellent John Stewart segment on the issue of voting fraud and these voter ID laws. For the most part, not a single example of fraud was found, so it's hard to justify laws that disenfranchise large segments of society.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/10/03/jon-stewart-slams-v...

I can buy that voter fraud is pretty limited. But it's simply untrue that there's not a single example.

People are convicted and go to jail for it. Not many, but some. Saying they don't seriously undermines the credibility of the argument.

Allocating massive resources to stamping out a statistically insignificant issue (given that we have no intelligence on who those votes are for, the end result is moot) makes it hard to take Republican voter ID frenzy at face value.

Those strategists are smart and they know exactly what happens if you make it harder for the down-trodden to vote.

Moderate, intelligent Republicans should be embarrassed by Voter ID. Is this the small government you keep referring to?

That's true, the more careful version of the argument is that it's in such minute quantities that it could not possibly swing elections. In addition, to the extent any voter fraud does happen, it's extremely rare for it to be of the kind where voter ID would solve the problem, i.e. people voting under false identities. The most common kinds of voter fraud are people with perfectly legitimate documents, e.g. voting in both your old and new residence in the same election, under your real name with a real ID in both cases. Or, registering in a jurisdiction that isn't actually your primary residence.

Some numbers I can find for Texas: they convict about 5 people/year for voter fraud, of which 0.3/year are of the false-identity variety. (http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/voter-fraud-real-rare/st...)

Philly turnout in 2008 was around 60% of registered voters, and seems to be roughly the same this year.

There is a lot of conspiracy theory going around, but not much solid evidence of irregular voting outside noise levels. Especially true because of how closely the outcome matched polls: it seems unlikely that these mythical ballot-stuffers were also able to somehow rig all the telephone polls over the past few months, so that the eventual results would match.

ok so reality check...

Philly county has 644,768 total votes currently with close to 100% reporting.

10% rather than 8% of that total is (generously) 65,000

Current lead for Obama in PA? 284,000 votes

So even if we amplify your 8% claim to 10% and over-round it is still not even close to making a difference.

Also if you are going to make claims about such contentious things it would be nice to cite some source.

My numbers above come from google's election results site

http://www.google.com/elections/ed/us/results

Not that I agree with patrickzgill's evidence-less assertions, but in his scenario, the fabricated votes wouldn't be the percentage over 100%, but the percentage over the real turnout rate (which might be 70% or so).

That's true. I was assuming he meant 8% OVER expected turnout, since 108% turnout is frankly ridiculous. That's one of the problems when people don't cite anything we have to assume what the numbers mean.

Taking a more nuanced view, one way the numbers could be true is by people voting in specific precincts that they don't live in. I.E. they go to the polling place near work not home. Which would just mean that one PA vote is counted in a different part of the state, not actually affecting the outcome.

States have different rules governing this kind of thing and I have no idea what the laws in PA are like.

WOW I am re-reading almost word for word a thread that I read during Bush v. Gore 2000.

Despite common wisdom to the contrary, documented vote fraud is virtually nonexistent in the United States. Highly (overly) motivated individuals with all the resources of government behind them are unable to find it. You can read a summary in this Justice Department report, http://www.justice.gov/oig/special/s0809a/chapter6.htm , skip on down to "Voter Fraud and Public Corruption Matters".

We do have a fair bit of voter registration fraud, where a fictitious name is registered to vote. This is because registration is handled by the political parties paying contractors per registration, leading to fraud for money. The key is that even if Mickey Mouse, or the roster of the Dallas Cowboys is registered to vote multiple times in the country, they don't actually show up and do it.

There are cases of people deliberately multiple voting, but the most common fraud is a convicted felon who has lost their voting privilege continuing to vote. Some states have strange and complicated laws about which crimes render you ineligible to vote, and many felons are not well versed in the law. It certainly sucks to lose your probation because you tried to do your civic duty.

For highly motivated individuals who are able to find evidence, see this article:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/29/121029fa_fact_...

Republicans who support tighter voter security say that they are not seeking political advantage. But last summer Pennsylvania’s Republican House Leader, Mike Turzai, was caught on tape boasting to colleagues that the state’s new I.D. law was “going to allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” Earlier this month, a state judge suspended the controversial law’s implementation until after the 2012 election; a federal court has done the same with South Carolina’s new I.D. law."

Admittedly I only got 2/3 of the way through the article, but I didn't find any cases of voter fraud supported by evidence in that part. The author teases a bit, but they turn out to be clerical errors or similar.

Lots of voter registration errors though. e.g. registrations not culled when the voter moves away.

As far as dead men voting. I'm aware of two in this election. They voted absentee with the reasonable expectation they would no longer be living on election day. Legality apparently varies by state.

I was teasing, too. There is no real evidence of a significant pattern of voter fraud. The outcry is just part of a media campaign by right-wing organizations to justify legal measures intended to suppress voter turnout among Democratic constituencies.

Speaking as a former Chicagoan: the way you swing an election is with the connivance of the people who administer it, e.g., by making sure that the ballot boxes from “unfriendly” precincts end up in the bottom of the Chicago River.

Voter ID does nothing to prevent this sort of thing: the election officials in “friendly” precincts can just wink at forged or missing ID.

And voter ID makes a certain kind of election-skewing even easier, since officials in “unfriendly” precinct can discourage people from voting by rejecting valid ID, or simply by spending so long examining the IDs and arguing with the voters that everyone has to wait for hours in order to vote.

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