No identification requirements, same-day registration, no signature verification, no chain of custody requirements, completely irreversible and unauditable ballots... Partisans have created a system designed for abuse and now are incredulous that anyone question the results.
You’ve effectively deleted the server logs, claimed your system is perfect and impenetrable, and are now asking anyone with questions to prove otherwise.
This gives you a rough estimate of voter fraud of having an impact of <0.01% of the election results. The tightest race this year was 0.25% margin--that's a full 20× a reasonable upper bound on the incidence of voter fraud. Fraud doesn't change election results.
On the flip side, some of what you claim about--particularly ID rules--has a real disenfranchising effect on people. Having valid ID isn't an issue if you're someone who drives, but if you're someone who is physically incapable of driving and can't get a driver's license, well, obtaining that ID can be quite difficult. (Even getting a driver's license in my state requires going to a particular building in the hours of 9-5 M-F--sucks if you have an hourly job you can't get time off to get an ID!)
A lot of the rest of what you complain about... [citation needed]. The complaints I've seen about signature verification aren't about requiring a signature on the ballot, it's about requiring a second signature (IIRC, unrelated to you!) to "witness" you doing the ballot yourself. In all the states I'm aware of, the voter is still required to sign the ballot themselves.
How many people actually exist in this country that have no form of ID? You need it for even getting various utilities in some areas (maybe all?)
Further, why can’t we fix this issue? If it takes 3 hours to get the ID then compensate hourly workers to get it and pass a law requiring jobs to allow time for such a thing. Why because it’s difficult for some we give up on the entire idea of requiring IDs?
I don't have hard statistics, but for the photo ID usually advocated for, that number is going to be something like 5-10%.
> Further, why can’t we fix this issue? If it takes 3 hours to get the ID then compensate hourly workers to get it and pass a law requiring jobs to allow time for such a thing. Why because it’s difficult for some we give up on the entire idea of requiring IDs?
I would have no problem supporting voter ID laws if the issue of the difficulty of obtaining voter ID were addressed. However, my experience is that nearly every politician who advocates for voter ID laws is unwilling to address these measures, because their real goal is usually to disenfranchise voters who will vote for the opponent.
This is the crux of the issue. I think there should be a constitutional amendment not only guaranteeing every citizen (felony convinction, in jail, or not!) not only the right to vote, but also requires them to vote. There should be a federal department in charge of finding you and collecting your vote. Too much politics is about getting people alternately mad, apathetic, or lazy, and we need to stop that.
Don't assume people in power want to fix the issue. After the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013, states began shutting down DMV locations where IDs are issued. In Alabama, 31 of 67 locations were shut down, primarily in Black parts of the state. This was done specifically to disenfranchise voters, and was done in conjunction with pushes for Voter ID laws.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/23/us/politics/voting-rights...
https://www.aclu.org/blog/voting-rights/voting-rights-act/al...
†I did have a photo provincial health card, but oddly enough, it's legally not considered a valid government ID in many contexts. I also had a passport but I had let it expire and didn't renew it for a while. Even when I did renew it, I would not carry my passport around with me, so it would not count as day-to-day photo ID. I have since acquired a provincial photo ID card, which looks like a license, but is a different colour and doesn't permit you to drive (Duh!) These weren't available til a few years ago.
What State has you personally sign your ballot?
Every state that does mail-in voting at all requires a signature. Alabama, South Carolina, North Carolina, and Missouri also require a witness -- Missisipi requires a notary.
I'd go out on a limb and posit that a good chunk of the individuals here would advocate and insist on all sorts of various audit trails, cryptographic hashes, check-digits, security layers and "oversight" with privacy and security guarantees with certification and training and and and... if this were health data. But when it comes to something like the leadership of a nation, we suddenly revert to "it's okay, trust the election officials and pieces of paper with dubious transportation mechanisms and security", don't worry, there were official "processes" to ensure no irregularity.
I'm all for auditable, verifiable processes, paper trails and all of that. Thankfully election security officials do work on that! But the people standing up to claim massive fraud are not claiming that because they have evidence, it's because they lost and they are pissed off about it. What they are proposing for remedies is to just throw the whole process out and declare Donald Trump won. Interestingly, they are not challenging any Senate results (Georgia TBD), House results, or even local results.
People are claiming massive fraud because of complete lies. They aren't claiming "something might be fishy here, let's check, recount, etc." Because we did that. All of the swing states recounted their votes, some twice, by hand. They went into the signature verification, observation process, the whole show. No, instead, the crazies go right to the rails and the people who yell the loudest are out there right now showing us exactly what they think of the US Constitution, the law, and this whole process.
I'm still on the lack of evidence fence but I'm seriously leaning toward the side of "Thou dost protest too much" when the response isn't the most gruelingly painful enumeration of every detail of the process to the rest of the country.
You can throw all your numerical arguments about why it shouldn't matter at me that you want. I'm not buying it.
This is the simplest god blessed process to automate. It's literally a counter. There should not be anywhere near as much opportunity for controversy or hell, even something to hide!
The tech behind it should be absolutely boring, and yet, no reckoning. No public release of auditable source code, or machine images.
I don't give a damn who won. I give a damn that someone questioned it, and heaven and hell were not moved in an attempt to answer the question.
Not trying to Gish Gallop mind, I just think the integrity of the system is important enough to warrant keeping the process transparent and dirt simple enough, your State should be able to account for it to the rest of the nation. Voting is not a joke, and I don't even like entertaining the possibility that some irregularities could even exist to explain.
Isn't it the case that when votes are hand counted they match pretty darn close the "machine without auditable source code" results? As someone from outside the US the entire US election process seems like a sad joke but I guess those machines were bought under some sort of commercial contract from some sort of private company and presumably as part of that deal the source code isn't available to the public. But it seems that when the machine says X won and you like X then it's great and when it says Y won and you don't like Y then it's a faulty/irregular process? Is "someone questioned it" really a bar? Isn't there always someone who will question everything?
I'm sure the tech behind the machines that count the votes is actually quite boring. Next time you vote for someone I guess make sure you vote for someone who is going to stipulate in the contract that the source code is available to the public? Is that gonna shut up the people yelling conspiracy?
The appearance of impropriety is assumed to be impropriety by half the viewers. Unless proven otherwise.
What was the final delta in GA? 11k votes or so? Are you sure it is impossible to move the needle when there are these razor thin margins?
I don’t know so I’m asking.
So now you have to move the goalposts to saying that there was massive voter fraud in every battleground state.
Let's be clear, every state certified their votes. This includes states with republican leadership. And every court case brought against the election results has failed.
Even if you accept the idea that in many ways it is difficult or impossible to audit the results (I don't agree), the only evidence that has been presented against the result are absurd conspiracy theories and patent falsehoods as well as testimony from people with an axe to grind.
In other cases we have seen (Gore) there was an actually agreed upon issue. Hanging chads on the ballots were real and verifiable. This is not the case today.
Also let us be clear that this has not happened before. It is not before the current administration that "massive voter fraud" has entered the conversation. It was presented in 2016 despite Trumps win (amusing). It is presented now for no other reason than to distract, raise money, and serve the fragile ego of the President.
To there could have been fraud but not enough to win a state
To, ok, maybe one state but not enough states
No dude. No amount of potential fraud is acceptable.
My point is quite clearly that not only are the allegations being made about the election results being invalid are absurd but that even if you accept parts of it unless you accept all of it it doesn’t even have an impact on the outcome.
This is mischaracterization of the article.
1. The title that shows up in the browser bar (the HTML <title>) is: "As More Vote by Mail, Faulty Ballots Could Impact Elections".
2. The title as shown on the page is "Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises". So, clearly, the article speaks about both fraudulent and faulty ballots. In my view, the article is not well organized. The two ideas are too fluidly mixed.
So, with this context in mind, let's discuss two paragraphs from the article:
In 2008, 18 percent of the votes in the nine states likely to decide this
year’s presidential election were cast by mail. That number will almost
certainly rise this year, and voters in two-thirds of the states have already
begun casting absentee ballots. In four Western states, voting by mail is the
exclusive or dominant way to cast a ballot.
The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the
potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than
innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud
that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say.
* Except, of course, in extremely close races.
This must mean that no in person votes should count at all!
But I will say: it's almost impossible to prove an election has been stolen after the fact with mail-in ballots. Once the outer envelope is removed and destroyed, the ballot is irreversibly anonymous. It's impossible to tell if an anonymous ballot is fraudulent or not -- there's no ability to audit it by contacting the voter.
Mail-in ballots are particularly vulnerable to fraud, something the New York Times correctly worried about back before Trump.[1]. And we just had more mail-in ballots than ever before thanks to Covid.
HN has long been suspicious of voting systems; we all know how often systems are hacked by bad actors. I don't think it's a stretch to think that election tampering is possible, particularly in close elections.
1. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...