Illegal voting is so rare that almost every time folks go looking for it they come up empty handed. Examples of voter suppression, on the other hand, are trivial to fine. (And both parties do it, particularly around primaries.)
In my state, we’re trying to enact a citizenship-proof requirement which penalizes women who change their name on getting married and those who can’t afford a passport. In effect, a marriage and poll tax. Ironically, this will disenfranchise the MAGA voters who are themselves pushing for it, but I’m not really going to point that out aggressively.
(That said, a legitimate fraction of American politics right now is in convincing the other side’s likely voters that elections are rigged, the oligarchs are in charge, why even bother calling your electeds or voting, eat an ice-cream sundae and talk to your AI girlfriend.)
Surely if you can confidently state the system not only is this way, but is purposely designed this way, you should have zero problem describing it exactly step by step.
Extra credit if you can describe a method that can produce 10, 100, or 1000 votes.
And the trade off here is this person gets 10, 30, 100, or 1000 votes in a single county and at the minuscule risk of the rest of her life in prison?
(To be clear, this isn’t what DOJ is alleging, they alleged she was just collecting petition signatures, but I’m extrapolating out your proposed mechanism for actual voting)
So what? If it was illegal to register multiple voters at the same address then it could have been detected at the registration time.
>And the trade off here is this person gets 10, 30, 100, or 1000 votes in a single county and at the minuscule risk of the rest of her life in prison?
Did not you notice that this person has not been charged with voting with other people ballots (even though she was able and most likely did that) and only with paying to register? Such a charge would be very hard to stick.
Huh? There is literally no evidence or even allegation of that. The person was paid to collect petition signatures, so she fraudulently obtained petition signatures. Which obviously are way less closely tracked than actual votes.
> So what? If it was illegal to register multiple voters at the same address then it could have been detected at the registration time.
Well it's not illegal to register multiple voters at the same address, obviously. It's illegal to vote under someone else's name. A bunch of votes coming in from a single residence would be flagged. Should voter registrations from a single address get flagged? Sure! And they probably do! But as you say, that's not a crime. Voting fraudulently is, which is not even alleged here.
> Can you describe the specific chain of events required to create a fraudulent vote that is "impossible" to detect?
You literally just described a scheme that is possible to detect in any meaningful amount. 10, 100, or 1000 ballots coming from a single address is, obviously, trivially detectable.
Didn't you cite a charging document upthread?
Virtually every type of fraud is first detected by detection of a nominally legal but abnormal behavior, then it's investigated to figure out whether fraud actually occurred. That would – obviously – be exactly how any voter fraud detection scheme works, but I guess you're saying that because the initially detected abnormality is not itself illegal, it wouldn't be investigated?
This is like saying "it's not illegal for all the numbers on your tax return to end in $xxxx.00 and $xxxx.50, so therefore tax fraud is undetectable by means of analyzing numerical patterns."
Here's how it's detected: "There are 1000 ballots from this one address that has never had more than 3 ballots sent from it. We should look it up in our GIS and tax records and see how many people reside there. We should also make sure that the affiliated registrations are fully documented as having individual residencies there from e.g. their drivers licenses or utility bills at time of registration."
Sorry but you are naive beyond words if you think voting systems don't flag even a dozen ballots sent to a single residential address, or you don't think there's any investigative capability to look further into flagged cases.
Which do you believe? There are only three options:
1. You believe that 1000 ballots sent to a single address will not be flagged
2. You believe that it would be flagged but not investigated
3. You believe it would be flagged and investigated, but not actually result in any prosecutable offense
Talk about projection, lmfao! Not even here long enough to prevent your weird writing quirks from revealing that you're a foreigner, and yet comfortable implying some strange nationalist superiority to a native-born American. Beyond parody.
Are people from your country unable to answer simple multiple-choice questions like "which of these three options do you believe?"
How is it that you're immediately detectable as not-American on a messaging board then?
Hint: It's the low-trust third-worlder attitude, which unfortunately the legal process of naturalization doesn't always solve.
Hilariously, your allegation of me being a foreigner was the nail in the coffin, as any actual American would know they can have disagreements on stuff like this without accusing the other of being a foreigner. But, being what... Russian? Georgian? Israeli? Obviously everything must be infused with an (unearned) nationalistic superiority haha.
Or if someone knows their friend is sick and votes without an id, how do you detect that?
It seems like there are currently many ways to vote illegally that don’t get detected.
Doing this even 10 times seems unbelievably hard.
Not that I think the election was rigged, but if you think it's "unbelievably hard", I think that's a failure of imagination.
Our documented examples of voter fraud come from a time when in-person voting was the only option, again something we teach in school, while the modern concerns from security professionals focus almost entirely on electronic voting machines.
You get followed up in an audit, if anyone asks. This happened like three million times in Arizona.
> there are currently many ways to vote illegally that don’t get detected
There are. None of the proposed plans limit them. (No county requires scanning and biometrically verifying passports. You could buy a wrapper on eBay and inkjet the pages in most counties.)
There are also lots of ways to blow up public buildings. We don’t require ID to enter DC because the frequency of the harm isn’t matched by the cost of enforcement.
If what you believe to be true is in fact true, then you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. Either way, I hope that you desire to find the correct answer rather than the one that would be convenient for your political position, and that whatever hypothesis you have has not set itself up to be unfalsifiable.
The system is confidentially designed to provide little to no evidence of the fraud it allows. Even simple signature and ID checking is banned in California.
The system itself is the evidence of the fraud. It is purposefully designed to hide evidence and prevent detection.
You are obviously an intelligent person but you've allowed your curiosity to be subjugated by propaganda.
If you don't check ID then anyone with a list of registered-but-unlikely voters (or who registers unlikely voters ahead of time without their knowledge) could be voting multiple times and there is nothing to detect it. If you check ID then that doesn't happen as easily, but you still have no way to know if it would have happened in the alternative.
The closest thing to knowing would be if apparent turnout declines in response to checking ID, but a) different elections have different turnout anyway and b) even if you could detect a significant change, one party would then argue that it's a reduction in fraud and the other would argue that checking ID is reducing legitimate turnout, and you still don't know which one it is -- it could even be both.
In fact this is done regularly.
We know for a statistical fact that there is no meaningful amount of this type of fraud (unless you're also supposing that these people somehow also acquire a copy of each person's signature).
Why do you believe what you believe? What would be true if it were false? Is that a thinkable alternative? If not, do you really have a hypothesis, or do you have a political belief being presented in the guise of a claim of fact?