Could be coincidence, could be a data leak from Meta that wasn't reported, could be outside groups using LLMs to match profiles of text to external sources that do have your name...

It's a wild world out there in political technology, and I probably can't even guess what's going on with half of it.

Way back in the early 2010s I went to a data science meetup, way before facial recognition and face processing was easy, and found out that Facebook was tracking the faces in every photo, building databases of locations, times, and people out of it all, even for people without accounts, etc. And that was just a side project! 15 years ago!

For motivated groups operating without the usual bounds of being part of the US government, the sky is the limit in what they can do. Buying data from Thompson Reuters is really mild compared to what I'm sure is going on inside of PACs within the US. When you add in the state groups operating outside the US on US social networks with the goal of spreading distrust and disunity, I have zero doubt that it's possible somebody is scraping the replies to political articles and trying to take control of accounts that show any interest in politics, to use those accounts for other purposes because they appear to be valid accounts instead of bots.

Each California county maintains a list of registered voters. Every voter gets sent a ballot in the mail, but is also allowed to vote in person. The consequences of this are that every single ballot and voter are tracked carefully.

Additionally, a person can vote anywhere in a county, so all in-person voting sites maintain connectivity to that somebody doesn't go to multiple voting sites and vote multiple times, in addition to tracking the mail-in ballots.

When voting in person, you provide your name, address, and sometimes age, etc. in order to disambiguate you as the particular person.

Mail-in vote counting happens with outside observers watching, with verified signatures.

So the system protects against each registered voter only voting once.

Registration of voters is usually tied to driver's licenses, when you file a change of address you can check a box to have your registration updated. If you're a new voter, you can provide or drivers license, or if not, the county will follow up with you to obtain other information to ensure that you're not registered by other means and are in fact a real person with that name and address.

> anyone simply vote by claiming they are who they say they are?

Of course they can! That's only just and fair.

If you tried to steal somebody else's identity and vote as them, that would get flagged for multiple voting. Additionally, local political campaigns get lists of every registered voter, as well as which elections they voted in and party affiliation (if they chose one), which they use to campaign and knock on doors. Campaigns have sophisticated information systems to ensure that they don't bother the same voter multiple times, to indicate likelihood of voting and whether the canvasser thought the voter was going to vote for their candidate, etc. If there were a batch of fake voters somewhere, that would show up pretty quickly in these campaigning efforts.

I can't speak for California, but here in my area of NY you show up, give your name and address, which they find in the registered voters list, and you sign on an iPad that gets checked against the signature on file. Then you get handed a ballot. By the local volunteers who are mostly people from the neighborhood, plus observers from both major parties. Your neighbors are there checking in alongside you.

Getting past all this risks years in jail for... an extra vote in a safely blue state.

None of this requires an ID, in part because in the US, there's no law that you have to have an ID in the first place. "Papers, please!" used to be a derogatory thing about totalitarian regimes.

(More practically, if we Dems were rigging elections, we'd win more often.)

You just don't require ID to know this. Voter ID is a very new construct and we don't need it, period. We already know who is and is not registered to vote and the voter registration process is pretty secure.