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Comment by oilkillsbirds | Hacker News Reader

You think there’s no voter fraud in Europe?

Correct. In my country anyone is able to audit the process, and the only case of fraud was an instance of "granny farming" for local municipality elections - which after a full redo resulted in... exactly the same outcome.

Stopping voter fraud really isn't that difficult. Just don't over-complicate it with silly things like electronic voting machines or mass mail-in voting and there's not a lot that can go wrong.

With paper ballots or even an auditable paper trail from electronic voting machines, it's basically impossible to commit large-scale voter fraud, and every audit that I'm aware of in recent first-world elections has shown voter fraud to be a tiny number of votes at most.

We should be very, very wary of non-auditable electronic voting though.

voter fraud around here is mostly people buying votes, not so much having people registered who didn't have the requirements

Yes. Just like there is basically zero fraud in America. This isn't a problem. It is only for the dumbest people who believe Trump that 'millions of illegal immigrants voted' yet they haven't produced a single bit of evidence to prove it, but I'm sure it's real.

For context:

Illegal immigrant voted: https://www.justice.gov/usao-mdfl/pr/colombian-national-plea...

6,600 noncitizens registered, 400 noncitizens voted, undisclosed how many, if any, are unlawfully in country: https://www.ap.org/news-highlights/elections/2026/6600-nonci...

from that source: a dmv program errored and registered some people to vote. So the government itself made the error. Out of 4 million voters in NJ, 400 ineligible people voted. And were caught. Oregon found 30 ineliglbe voters cast ballots. And were caught. Colorado, none were allowed to vote. In CA, 1.5k incorrectly registered voters _may_ have voted, and of those, _some_ might not have been US citizens.

This is the strongest evidence the nation can turn up on voter fraud. It sure looks to me that the system is catching the absolutely minuscule amount of non-voters voting and that voter fraud is mostly a non-issue.

It appears the more common voter fraud is a US citizen voting in elections outside their home residence. Like Ken Paxton, running for senate in TX, who it appears voted numerous times using his ex-wife's address, including to vote for himself.

https://www.texastribune.org/2026/07/07/ken-paxton-voting-el...

To be fair, as was seen with Bush v. Gore a very small number of votes can change the entire political landscape. Something probably ought to be done about that as well.

And how many votes were cast? Did it impact the election in any way? It's a non-issue and we should be happy about that.

That's all in the cited sources. I didn't offer an opinion. I added contextual information related directly to your positions.

You deliberately left out facts to support your bias. 4,000,000 votes case. So 0.01%. If the election was that close a recount would be done anyway. It does not effect anything at all because our system is already solid and that's a good thing. There is no crisis. There are no major issues in this area. There are major issues with Texas closing down polling places in black neighborhoods but lets all pretend it's illegal voting.

I posted 2 sources. I did not post a comment. Take it up with the authors.

It's bizarre to me that putting numbers on something with high quality citations gets downvoted like this.

I explained this in a sibling comment to this one, but it's +4 points [flagged] because someone didn't like the explanation.

No, it was flagged because you said something untrue and unkind about your political outgroup. In fact, it is not just untrue, but something that said outgroup constantly clarifies to the point where the meme ("but they have to come legally") is a rallying cry. And to the point where many of their strongest voices are legal first or second generation immigrants.

I can literally prompt ChatGPT with

> What examples of American voter fraud (real or alleged) have been promoted in right-wing media within the last 28 days?

and find multiple results with considerable detail. If you want to hear anecdotes from ordinary people who've witnessed it (or at least had good reason for suspicion), it's not hard to find the right circles for that, either. But by its nature, few have access to the information that would be needed to evidence it properly.

More importantly, though, there are plenty of people who can point at how insecure the system is and how cheap and easy it would (or should) be to fix that. It's hard to understand how there can be such strenuous objection to fixing it if there is actually no problem. It's hard to understand how there can be so many people who are definitely following the law, but would face a hardship if expected to prove it even minimally.

Canadians must identify themselves in federal elections (https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&do...) and normally register in advance (https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=reg&do...) which is usually as simple as ticking a checkbox to give consent for the CRA (equivalent to IRS) to pass on your data to Elections Canada (which is independent of the government). None of this is even slightly controversial here; even our most left-wing parties (and the centre of gravity of our entire system is generally considered to be well to the left of the US's) are not trying to eliminate the requirement.

The Canadian comparison is apples to oranges when you look at and compare the ease of identification and registration (can register at the polls; a massive number of verification methods - vs - sometimes can't, very few verification methods)

So we have 'anecdotes' from chat gpt. Totally valid.

Did you know that when you use ChatGPT for research, it gives you links for its citations automatically which you can then verify? I did this.

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