4,607 karma · joined July 7, 2014
So what would that accomplish? The Trump playbook asserts that there is a massive conspiracy involving noncitizen voting. Their proposals involve proving citizenship to vote. And now your argument is to use ID that doesn't prove citizenship. Brilliant.
34 million people [1] or about 10 percent of the US population lack a form of ID that would be required under a voter ID law.
The fact that you assert otherwise, without evide, shows that you live in a privilege bubble. None of your friends lack an ID, so you conclude it's rare.
[1] https://voteriders.org/article/who-doesnt-have-an-id-in-amer...
That's not at all how it works. Typically, you do need to present ID to register. You also need to verify your address on the day of voting. If someone does commit fraud, it's easy to detect: as soon as the real voter tries to vote, the system will detect a "double vote." The fact that this almost never happens suggests that there is not much fraud, if any. And the amount of fraud required to actually change an election result with this method would require a concerted effort of tens of thousands of people, all risking federal prosecution.
> that is literally the American system.
No. Please stop misrepresenting the facts.
> But why not just... require ID to vote?
There are lots of good reasons, which you are probably already aware of, including the fact that many people eligible to vote do not have the requisite ID and are unlikely to get it. My litmus test for supporting voter ID is that it is accompanied by (a) free, mandatory, and automatic national ID cards, and (b) national holiday on election days. Republicans won't support part A for their own ideological reasons, and moreover their purported effort to support voter integrity is not sincere: the goal is simply to prevent undesirable (i.e. non-Republican) voters from voting.
> this is an assertion not an argument
What part of the statement "Before attempting to attribute fraud, one must first determine that it exists." do you disagree with? You are starting from the assumption that fraud exists, then creating a fantasy explanation about who is committing it, without any factual basis at all.
I already told you why planes are relevant. It sounds like you really don't know what survivorship bias is at all. Please read the article [1]. Why are you in such a hurry to a discuss a topic that you don't understand?
Applying survivorship bias to the current "invisible fraud" situation is putting the cart before the horse.
> I'm merely wondering why a system where it's difficult to attribute fraud to anyone should be allowed to continue.
It's difficult to attribute fraud to anyone in most systems, including systems where there is no fraud. Before attempting to attribute fraud, one must first determine that it exists, and that bar has not been met. Does that answer your question?
They are here. But their contributions are, let's say, not motivated by fact-based reasoning. Not surprising: it's very hard to defend what's going on in this country right now.
I know what survivorship bias is. The classic example of survivorship bias is analyzing damage patterns of planes returning from war. Clearly, some planes were shot down and did not return: we know that, because we know how many planes we started with. In this case, though, you are asserting that there are uncounted fraudulant voters (presumably Democrat) who were not caught, even though there is no evidence that they exist: in this way the situation is quite different from that of missing planes in war. You ascribe the frauds' invisiblity to a supreme level of sophistification. The problem with that mode of thought is that it allows us to assume anything, including that the sophisticated frauds are actually Republican. So you can't call it survivorship bias until you show that those "invisible frauds" actually exist; you are going backwards by calling it survivorship bias in order to justify your unfounded a priori belief that they do exist.
> if it were easy to counterfeit currency in an undetectable way for a conspiracy while stupid individuals can get caught. would you be asking this question or would you assume the currency is in a bad shape?
This argument makes no sense. (a) If it's easy to commit a crime, then it's not necessary to be sophisticated to accomplsh it. (b) Widespread mail-in voter fraud is not easy to accomplish, unlike your hypothetical "trivial counterfeit" example, despite what Donald Trump tells you. (c) If only Republicans are getting caught doing voter fraud, then by your argument, Democrats are smarter, which is.... accurate. (d) You haven't even posited a posisble mechanism by which millions of fraudulent votes could be achieved. Believing things without evidence is called "faith" and is not the basis on which we develop laws.
If voter ID advocates feel so strongly about their position, they would support mandatory ID. The fact that they don't support mandatory ID shows their real agenda: they don't care about securing elections, they care only about excluding the undesirable class from elections.
You assert this without evidence. People have spent years looking for evidence of widespread voter fraud without success [1].
> voting should have a barrier to entry. Your freedoms are important - people died for them.
That's not how rights work. Would you say that there should be a "barrier to entry" for freedom of speech or gun rights? They added a "barrier to entry" for voting after the civil war and it didn't go so well. [2]
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/disb...
Maybe GP is implying that, but that's not what they said, because what you describe is not survivorship bias.
> I don't know anything about elections, a question worth asking is what would it look like if a conspiracy set out to exploit mail ballots? could detection only originate from a defector?
You are asking the wrong question. The correct question is: If mail-in voter fraud cannot be detected, then why do people claim that mail-in voter fraud exists? If there isn't evidence that it exists, then the people who claim that it exists are making statements not based on evidence. In other words, their opinions are either not informed by facts, in which case we should disregard their opinions; or their statements are not sincere expressions of belief, in which case they are liars and we should not trust them.
Huh? Survival of what? Are you claiming that Democrat fraud was not found only because the perpetrators are all dead?
Mail-in ballots are currently accepted in 23 states [1], including Utah, Kansas, and Florida. Which "side" is that? Please note Donald Trump personally uses the terribly unsecure and unverifiable method of mail-in ballot, so either he thinks it's secure enough, or, uh, is not being totally honest with us.
> resisting all investigations of voting integrity?
Which investigations, specifically, are you referring to? As far as I know, Trump formed a voter integrity commission in his first term which was unable to find any evidence of voter fraud and was therefore subsequently disbanded [2]. Since then, the only source of information on the allegedly widespread voter fraud is from Donald Trump's own mouth.
[1] https://www.ncsl.org/elections-and-campaigns/table-18-states...
[2] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/disb...
[1] https://fortune.com/2026/08/29/europe-summer-drought-deserti...
What about it is "shocking"? Please be specific.
Please note that the alleged justification these changes is widespread voter fraud, which has never been shown to exist at a level even close to significant, despite many years of effort [1].
> the only way to do anything is to shove an executive order through the post office to prevent mail fraud.
Or, ya know, make a persuasive case based on evidence of actual fraud and pass a bill in Congress, the way the country is supposed to work?
> This is a kind of comment I would expect on Reddit and not hn.
Yours is a low-effort riposte if ever there was one.
[1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/disb...
The issue is not the article, but the president's own words. Do you find it concerning that the president has expressed a desire to cancel elections? Or do you think he was joking?
Follow-up question: was/is he joking about building the wall, mass deportations, eliminating birthright citizenship, or running for a third term?
That's a funny way of saying that they support the status quo, which has never been provably linked to large-scale voter fraud.
If you want voter ID, here's the procedure: establish evidence showing that its need outweighs its disadvantages, then pass a bill in Congress, then implement the bill. Signing an Executive Order that demands illegal overreach without justification is not the American way.
Yes. That's the point. The administration doesn't care about fixing whatever hypothetical mail ballot fraud may or may not exist; they are doing this to inject chaos into the election results, giving them cover to claim any result they want or even to just throw out the results entirely. Catastrophic problems are the means to that end.
It's easy for a company to build privacy-related features, if those features help sell products. But you are kidding yourself if you think Apple is willing to sacrifice billions of dollars for a "moral good".
I'm not saying (publicly traded) companies never act morally. I am saying that given a choice, they will always choose profits over morality.
> Not long ago, DEI and ESG were widely accepted and practiced.
And how much difference did they actually make? Studies show not much. It's performative posturing to improve the company's image in pursuit of profits, not a real moral stand. How does Raytheon putting a rainbow in their advertising for one month a year help anyone? And as soon as they feel the cultural tide shift, they drop those policies like a hot potato.
> That's a theory
Not a theory. It's literally the law.
In fact, corporate officers are routinely sued (or even criminally prosecuted) for failing to advance specifically the company's interests. Trying to "spin" general moral good as a net positive for the company when it negatively impacts share price typically does not sway a jury.
https://www.iod.com/resources/governance/fiduciary-duties-fo...
It's based on the (US) law. Corporate officers failing to advance the interests of the company can be prosecuted civilly or criminally.
There is no analogous legal obligation to act morally or in the interest of the general public.
https://www.iod.com/resources/governance/fiduciary-duties-fo...
I think you don't understand what this phrase means. In a publicly-traded company, "the interest of the shareholders" does not mean "whatever the shareholders want"; it means "whatever is best for the company." That means money.
It may be possible to be both profitable and moral; but if it isn't, the fiduciary duty obligates corporate officers to choose the profitable path rather than the moral one.
The easy way of looking at this is that there beyond complying with the law, there is no general obligation for companies to behave morally, but there is a general obligation to behave profitably. So it's not hard to see why they make they choices they do.
> It's entirely possible to still satisfy those requirements by building a sustainable and moral company.
It is, but it's a lot easier to be not sustainable and not moral.
Not sure what this means. I think you meant to write "fiduciary duty": the company's board have an affirmative legal obligation to act in the interest of stockholders, regardless of moral impact.
You're not wrong, but companies such as Google make business decisions, not moral decisions. It's far easier and cheaper for them to comply, while there is basically no incentive for them to fight the summons. Especially given the current administration's proven record of taking retaliation against anyone who stands in their way.
If you want companies to behave in the interest of the general public, you need to create an incentive structure that supports that.
I challenge you to find Python behaviors as weird and off-putting as anything here: https://wtfjs.com/
You seem to think the US government is a single monolithic entity. It isn't. Laws are passed by Congress. The Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces does not create laws. The issue under discussion, which you apparently don't understand, is the obligations of members of the armed forces in the increasingly likely situation that the the Commander-in-Chief gives orders that contradict the law.