If he has an argument to make, let him advance it. If he fails to make a compelling case, it's not our job to look up citations and write paragraphs to fill in the gaps.

Also, please remember the context. The only reason so many states are considering mail-in voting now is because they are concerned that huge numbers of voters will stay away from physical polling places.

This is not a matter of "pick the theoretically best voting system." This is a matter of "how can we hold an election without accidentally killing thousands of old people by communicable disease."

I don't have to think that mail-in voting is perfect to prefer it over radically depressing turnout.

Sorry, I was talking about national scope and not the federal government actually running the election. The larger the electorate, the more votes cast, the more votes needed to change the results, and the more important scaling becomes in your plan to rig the election.

> If Washington, the 13th most populous state can conduct elections purely via mail-in ballots, why not any other state?

I agree.

Some unscrupulous person grabs a bunch, forges signatures on them and mails them back in.

Pointing out that trump is lying isn't a bad thing.

but for it to happen in any meaningful way is super super unlikely as most other democracy's around the world can attest to.

he's technically right, but its not going to be in the order of even 1%. even if EVERY person in the US voted by mail, fraud on a level that would less than 1% of the entire vote.

Its a stupid blatant obvious ploy to try and gerrymander the vote.

Paper-based voting like this is very hard to hack or commit fraud on a scale that is large enough to have an effect. If you were to fill out your aunt’s ballot, as someone suggested, it would have a nearly unmeasurable effect.

There is also the question of differential susceptibility. Sure election fraud is possible with mail in ballots. I'd even stipulate that it's easier than casting fraudulent in person votes. But I think it remains to be answered how easily it can be scales, and whether the rewards are worth the risk this would pose to perpetrators' freedom.

> Now we're expecting that states will radically alter their voting system, in 5 months, and that it won't be vulnerable to interference?

Are mail in ballots for everyone really a "radical alteration" of their voting system? Local governments already have the capacity to send and receive thousands of pieces of mail, and the method of counting ballots is the exact same.

How would you set up this system if you were tasked with it?

Sending mail and receiving mail is already a solved problem. The post office handles nearly half a billion pieces of mail each day, and 200 million pieces of first class mail.

You scoff at the reaction yet you've surgically extracted the political context of Trump's motivations for disparaging mail-in voting from your analysis. There isn't a new developing threat to mail-in votes, Trump has a clear political agenda. In Trump's own words a couple months back:

The things they had in there were crazy. They had things, levels of voting that if you’d ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again

Can you at least pretend to understand why some people might have a hard time accepting Trump's credibility on the issue?

It's not that weird. Mailed ballots can be coerced quite trivially at home, out of the view of authorities; no technology hacks or fake ID needed. That's why some of the "fact check" figures themselves are nonsense , such as the one claiming that only 0.00006% of mail votes are fraudulent. That's based on convictions. Nobody knows the real number.

In Northern Ireland postal voting is strictly controlled and monitored and permitted only in individually-reviewed case, because we had decades of coerced fraud by balaclaved men with baseball bats.

The reality is that most mail-in voting operates via what is effectively a two factor auth system or a handshake authentication system. Person A gets official mail being told they can register to vote. Person A goes to site and registers to vote. Then they receive a ballot sometime before election day, fill it out, certify that they are who they are, then it goes out.

The government can send a further correspondence indicating that you voted and where to check your vote to confirm. If someone attempts to vote multiple times using the same person this is easily verified. If the dead vote, you can cross-reference with obituary data to identify identity fraud. If someone votes for someone else (like their parents or their siblings) then that can be somewhat identified through the final check and letting people file a claim.

The reality is that actual fraud for mail-in votes is incredibly low and committing mass fraud requires the fraud to occur at the point of ballot counting. At which point you have a politician issue [1] not a voter issue. Which again, is pretty easily caught. The increase in mail-in fraud is likely offset by the disenfranchised voters that could gain the ability to vote as well as the voters in areas without easy access to voting booths.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2019/07/30/746800630/north-carolina-gop-...

And, of course, the discussion isn't actually about voting-by-mail, yes-or-now? Because that has been possible for a long time and isn't going to change. The discussion is about making it easier and/or the default to protect people from communicable diseases.

The issue, then, isn't even if voting by mail allows fraud. It's if the likelihood of fraud is significantly higher when, say, 50% instead of 30% choose that option.

This is yet another blatantly obvious attempt to stack the deck in Republican's favour. It's sickening to see people pretend to care about the integrity of democracy by engaging with all these phantom debates about voter fraud, in the complete absence of any actual fraud happening (except that Republican in South Caroline, of course).

Meanwhile, real damage is done to democracy by the unrelenting attempts to selectively make it harder for people to vote. Take a look at these changes in polling locations in Milwaukee for a blatant example (the red, suburban spots are predominantly Republican locations, while the urban core leans democratic) : https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EYoIrdZXQAILKlB.jpg

Which of these examples of election fraud are...not examples of voter fraud?

https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/datab...

Does 0.000001% fraud qualify as a problem in any reasonable sense?

Republicans' electoral strategy is basically "the less people vote, the better". Is that good for democracy? Is that just?

That's not how I interpreted the data. Not 1 incident = 1 vote, but 1 incident = 1 criminal case affecting 1 election. So election fraud at Timbuktu County could have impacted 2 voters, or 500 voters, but either way is recorded as 1 incident. I'm not seeing a link to their actual database so we can't dig into the records to confirm either way, which is disappointing. But the narrative text seems to support this.

This doesn't reason out.

The question is "What impact does voter/election fraud have on elections?"

You determine this by calculating the impact that these fraudulent votes had on the election. It doesn't make sense to say "because there was 1 fraudulent vote in one county in one state, we have to count all 500-100,000 (?) votes in that county as fraudulent too."

This Heritage Foundation report is literally an analysis detailing how voter fraud is a non-issue in American elections.

https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud

Here's one entry for the state of Pennsylvania: "According to Wild Acres Property Manager Robert Depaolis, Cowher approached him and asked him to provide Cowher with ballots that were due to be mailed to property owners in the community who seldom voted, for the express purpose of filling out those ballots and guaranteeing victory for Cowher's preferred Board of Directors candidates. Depaolis went to the state police, who surveilled a meeting where Depaolis handed over the ballots, catching Cowher in the act of filling out the mail-in ballots. He was arrested and subsequently convicted on 217 counts, including forgery, identity theft, and criminal conspiracy. His accomplice, Kupershmidt, was found guilty on 190 counts."

This proves the point even more in the extreme that voter fraud is a non-issue. An extremely motivated source like the Heritage Foundation was able to find 1,285 instances over 41 years? About how many billions of votes cast in that time period are we talking about?

Maybe my 0.000001% voter fraud estimate was too generous. It's looking more like 0.000000000001%.

Edit: Did you even click through more than one of these? The first 20 that appear for my state show that no votes were actually cast fraudulently, meaning some portion of that 1,285 instances accounts for zero fraudulent votes. This gets more hilarious the deeper we go.

>Donald Dewsnup, a housing development activist in San Francisco, registered to vote using a false address.

>State Sen. Roderick Wright (D_Inglewood) was convicted of eight felony counts of perjury and voter fraud. He deliberately misled voters as to his residency in order to run for office in a neighboring district.

>Immigrant-Rights activist Nativo Lopez pleaded guilty to one count of voter registration fraud when it was discovered that he registered to vote in Los Angeles while living in Santa Ana.

>Jose Fragozo, a trustee on the Escondido Union School District Board, pleaded guilty to a felony charge that he voted in the 2014 general election while registered at an address where he did not live.

>Alexander Bronson, former Trustee for Manteca Unified School District, California, pleaded guilty to charges of voter fraud. He listed a false address in order to qualify for candidacy in the November 2014 Manteca Unified School District Board of Education election.

etc.

>>in the complete absence of any actual fraud happening

That is an objectively false statement. Will you concede that?

>>>An extremely motivated source like the Heritage Foundation was able to find 1,285 instances over 41 years? >>>Did you even click through more than one of these?

Did you? California's list doesn't have a single entry pre-2000, and over half of them are post-2010. Texas? Same, nothing pre-2000. New York? One in 1983, one in 1999. Florida? Four entries pre-2000 (and a BUNCH 2002-2010, probably due to fallout of Bush-v-Gore).

So either election fraud enforcement has become significantly more vigilant post-2000, or election fraud incidents have seen an astronomical uptick. Or both. But what we DO know for certain is:

-The incidence rate is non-zero, especially in the past 10 years. -Some elections have in fact been swayed by fraud.

-We should probably spare at least some modicum of serious thought and allocate some resources to improving the process integrity and security of one of our most sacred civil institutions. We make it rain fiat currency for every other government boondoggle imaginable, why is there so much opposition to THIS?

On this website, there's an indication above each comment that notes which user left that comment. You'll notice that the comment you link was not posted by me.

>So either election fraud enforcement has become significantly more vigilant post-2000, or election fraud incidents have seen an astronomical uptick. Or both.

An astronomical uptick from 0.0000001% to 0.00001%? Horrifying! This is like when there's 1 murder in a town of 100,000 people one year, 2 murders the next, and the local paper prints "MURDER RATE DOUBLES".

>The incidence rate is non-zero, especially in the past 10 years.

Okay? Whether there was zero or greater than zero incidents doesn't tell us much.

>Some elections have in fact been swayed by fraud.

Fair enough. But again you're basing your argument on conveniently skipping over the real question which is not "was there at least one fraudulent vote in America in the last 41 years?" (the question you're trying hard to answer over and over with "yes!").

The question is whether it's a problem that has a material impact on our elections. Basically, is it really a problem? 1,285 instances over 41 years (and how many _billions_ of votes in that time period) makes the answer extremely obvious.

It's funny because I am in favor of voter ID on principle alone. But you have to acknowledge the fact that voter fraud is a non-issue in practice. There are better arguments to make in favor of election integrity.

You are....100% correct. My mistake to attribute that to you.

>>>The question is whether it's a problem that has a material impact on our elections.

Less than 600 votes decided the 2000 Presidential election. In the aggregate that seems tiny, but in swing states in particular, with close elections, the potential implications are massively outsized. And that's to say nothing of the State & local elections where even smaller absolute numbers are impactful ("all politics is local").

>>>But you have to acknowledge the fact that voter fraud is a non-issue in practice.

Today's news: https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/politics/nj-naacp-leader-cal...

Even one of the winning candidates said the election was trash, partially due to mail-in ballots. And it's not a bunch of minority-oppressing white Republicans in that article who are complaining about the election either (not saying that's your position, but that particular strawman has been brought up elsewhere in the conversation).

>The question is whether it's a problem that has a material impact on our elections. Basically, is it really a problem? 1,285 instances over 41 years (and how many _billions_ of votes in that time period) makes the answer extremely obvious.

>It's funny because I am in favor of voter ID on principle alone. But you have to acknowledge the fact that voter fraud is a non-issue in practice. There are better arguments to make in favor of election integrity.

We're just going in circles here. Have a nice evening :)

Am I misunderstanding something? Are you saying they completely closed down all those polling stations? It seems like the less populated areas have more* polling stations than denser ones, what is the justification for this?

Someone should coin a word for the act of getting nerd sniped, but rather than getting distracted by a fun puzzle you're sitting down trying to account for all of the nuances of an argument clearly made in bad faith.

"The Democrats are trying to Rig the 2020 Election, plain and simple!"

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/12647175457870069...

I think the rationale is that the existing incidence of local ballot fraud points at a widespread, under-reported problem that doesn't inspire confidence in the process.

Voting by mail is pretty normal to me, being in the military and outside of my home state for most of my adult life, but it's about as secure as WEP encryption for your Wi-Fi.

https://www.inquirer.com/news/voter-fraud-philadelphia-ward-...

https://www.dailybreeze.com/2016/11/03/how-more-than-80-elec...

https://www.heritage.org/election-integrity/commentary/datab...

The Dailybreeze is documenting a case where it looks like someone was trying to do a scam with 80 ballots. That could have an impact on a municipal election but would be lost in the noise in a national election and is hard to replicate in a coordinated and unnoticeable fashion.

It looks like the Heritage group is has been collecting cases of voting fraud for 4 years and have 1200 records. Not a huge number over so much time. It’s not clear that that is related to mail-in voting or other kinds of fraud. Again, this kind of stuff is hard to do in a way that has an impact on a national election.

Elections are never perfect but, based on the experiences in Oregon and Washington, I don’t see mail in voting adding a significant added risk. The virus on the other hand does.

> Trump falsely claimed that California will send mail-in ballots to "anyone living in the state, no matter who they are or how they got there." In fact, only registered voters will receive ballots.

This not "wondering about how susceptible mail in voting is to fraud," it's an outright lie.

How could you possibly know this, and how could twitter possibly know this? Surely that is the intent, but what do you make of stories like this one: https://losangeles.cbslocal.com/2018/11/05/goldstein-investi...

"Only registered voters will receive ballots", you cannot state a future event as a fact, since it hasn't actually happened yet. Stories like the one linked show that in the past, California has had problems with this.

Should twitter now fact check their fact checking? Perhaps the idea of future-telling is flawed to begin with and twitteer should not attempt to be a source of truth!

But if we're really drilling into semantics, you posted a link about dead people on the registry. That does not, in fact, preclude twitter's statement. Hundreds of dead people have active voter registrations! Twitter's statement is not invalidated by this.

But neither does it support Trump's claim about "significant" voter fraud. Hundreds of votes in the state of California is neither significant, nor guaranteed that the dead people's ballots will be used.

But Trump's claim is that ballots will be sent to everybody in the state. That's a far greater lie than your overwrought interpretation of their statement.

If he doesn't like it, he can direct Lockheed Martin and tell them to spend a couple billion dollars on making Litter. At least then it'll go to something slightly more productive than whatever contracts they're currently siphoning money off of.

This is an unproven statement. Numerous elections experts disagree with it. Why is Twitter not within their rights to warn people of this?

"NO WAY (ZERO CHANCE) THE YANKEES ARE GOING TO WIN THE WORLD SERIES!"

Am I making a statement of fact, or stating an opinion here? Should twitter fact check this statement with some ambiguous "experts" who think that the yankees are the best team of them all and WILL win the world series?

He is in a position of power and influence. His words have far-reaching consequences.