Apart from everything else, if you're not trying to ensure that a candidate wins, regardless of their popularity, and are instead trying to skew the odds toward a candidate who already has a reasonable chance of winning, election fraud becomes easier and harder to detect.

As others have pointed out, these "judges" were actually minor, elected election officials, close to being volunteers. They were doing this to make small additions at a local scale. There was no need to add fake voter registrations, to modify vote counting, or to add votes not connected to legitimately registered voters: they just added ballots and records for registered voters they knew weren't going to show up. At a local enough scale, you might simply know, personally, of voters who are out of town, for example.

This doesn't require any major conspiracy at multiple levels. Depending on the organization of the election, it might be possible for a single poll worker to do it on their own. It would be very hard to defend against at higher levels. Most voter ID ideas wouldn't help (short of digital IDs and cryptographic signatures), because it's being done by the people who would be checking the IDs. Having multiple, adversarial officials keeping records of each person coming in could help, but now you've multiplied the number of people you need at each precinct. Contacting people listed as having voted could help, but they could well have been chosen specifically because they would be unlikely to notice or respond. Checking counts and registrations wouldn't help, because the counts and registrations would be valid. Voting technology mostly doesn't matter, and in fact, the method is likely easier with paper ballots.

It is limited in how much of an effect it can have, of course, but in tight races, or down-ballot races where few people actually fill out those races on their ballot, that might be all you need, or you might be interested in just statistically helping your party by making larger numbers of your party's candidates win, rather than helping one particular candidate.

EJs pretty much everywhere are volunteers.

A big part of the integrity of the system comes down to controls that are instituted at the precinct level, where there's less oversight but also less ability to plausibly influence the election, coupled with much stricter oversight at the central counting stations.

Downballot elections typically happen concurrently with statewide elections, so that doesn't help you: they don't get counted separately, and you're still stuck evading the same controls that protect the statewide elections.

There are tight elections, but in a reasonably run election system, any one precinct is going to have a very narrow margin --- in the best case for attackers --- to influence results. You can't predict where that narrow margin is going to actually be helpful. But it's going to be incredibly risky anywhere you try it.

It doesn't make a whole lot of sense as a crime.

>Most voter ID ideas wouldn't help (short of digital IDs and cryptographic signatures), because it's being done by the people who would be checking the IDs.

Not exactly.

Keep going on this scenario. If voters had to show ID like in Europe, when someone shows up and is denied to vote because “they already voted” it would be an immediate red flag for fraud.

With the IDless system, someone could be denied and it does not necessarily imply malice.

There is a whole system of provincial ballots - because this and other mistakes in ballots happen often enough. Voter ID wouldn’t secure anything but in Europe it brings more confidence, I’m not sure why it wouldn’t in the USA.

> Not exactly

Yes, exactly.

The ID checks "at the gate" don't help if the people on the inside running the system can just go and add some additional votes, either for people who didn't turn up (which they know about) or if there is no cryptographic proof of attendence then just by going up to the machine, who doesn't know how many voters are expected anyway, and presses the button a few more times.

The truth is that a lot of the system is fundamentally based on trust so it is crucial that people who commit fraud against voting are treated as extreme criminals who are trying to subvert the importance of a democratic vote. Not sure how many people would fiddle it if they risked getting a 30 year prison sentence.

You hit the nail on the head: "they just added ballots and records for registered voters they knew weren't going to show up."

Which is exactly why charities and get out the vote campaigns shouldn't be given voter roles and voter statuses.

I don’t know if there is a legitimate reason that any private or even public-private partnership (like the Democratic and Republican parties in the US) should have that info.

Transparency.

All the more reason why risk-limiting audits [1] should be standard procedure to sanity-check precinct results, especially for thinly-attended elections where fraud has a bigger impact on the outcome. Unfortunately, these things take time and money, and there's little immediate payoff in doing it, especially in the small elections that need it the most.

[1] https://www.vote.pa.gov/About-Elections/Pages/Post-Election-...

Risk limiting audits as described in your link would only catch ballot miscountings. In this case fraudulent ballots were added to the system, so the RLA result would not show anything suspicious.

> Dilute the vote tallies by using the voting machines to increment the votes for specific candidates

> Why is it so easy?

I don't know, it doesn't seem easy to me. I mean, it seems like the result of a ton of long-term planning to implement processes that allow each instance of this to be easy. But the fight against electronic voting machines was fierce, and took a long time.

We lost, by the way.

Having some familiarity with the Pennsylvania election machinery specifically, there is nothing about this story that required (or would have been stopped by the absence of) electronic voting machines.

If it was the old iVotronic system, there would be no ballot to check against (the vote was held in the machine memory in redundant locations), but that's no protection against the machine being activated illegitimately and the judge of elections entering illegitimate votes. In the new system, the machines are just tabulators and physical "SAT-style" fill-the-oval vote cards are used as ballots, but again, there's nothing stopping a judge of elections from filling out a pile of invalid ballots and entering them into the machine if the other team members (majority and minority inspector, and the clerks of election) have been bribed to look the other way. In fact, the judge would have to do that, because the fraud will be obvious if the total count of record doesn't match the total count of paper ballots in the box... But structurally, this is equivalent to just activating the iVotronic machine several additional times to cast fraudulent digital-only ballots.

The nature of the fraud here is simple, old-fashioned stuffing the ballot box, and the only protection against that is physically barring access to the hardware (be it a computer or a pine box with a padlock), which is incompatible with the duties of the judge of elections.

There is no mention of electronic voting machines. Nothing described in this press release would even require electronic voting machines. They cast actual (fraudulent) votes and then falsified the records in the polling books to match.

> The voting machines at each polling station, including in the 39th Ward, 36th Division, generate records in the form of a printed receipt documenting the use of each voting machine...Demuro would add fraudulent votes on the voting machine

Sure there is

They didn't hack the machine. They actually voted on the machines multiple times. The same scheme would have worked with mechanical machines or paper ballots.

I know for a fact that where I vote it is impossible to vote more than once (or close to, Berlin managed to fuck up voting last year for some reason). How is it impossible? Everyone is centrally registered with their primary residence. Based on these records, invitations are sent out prior to elections. With that invitation, or passport or ID, you show up at your voting local (of which there are plenty, the school just across the street has three of those and it is far from the only place in our town). There volunteers check you invitation or ID, hand you your ballot, verify you drop in the ballot box and strike from the voting list for this election. Not on the list? No ballot. No documents? No ballot. Since there are thousands of those locales, preliminary results are available in the first two hours after voting closes. We have no waiting lines (most of the time, Berlin is the exception that proofs the rule but then we talk about Berlin...). Mail-in voting works just fine and without any constraints. ballots are archived (for a very long time, I'm too lazy to check the exact duration), so if there are any doubts everything can be rechecked.

No idea how the US just fails at the most simple thing in a democracy, voting. Or rather I have an idea, with gerrymandering and such shenanigans it seems to be by design to keep certain demographics from voting too much.

How would it be "impossible" to vote more than once when the volunteers who are enforcing that have been paid off to allow it to happen? That's exactly what happened in this case.

Sure, and with hundreds of those places, and at least 4 volunteers per place, just how many votes do you think you can stuff? Plus any statistically significant deviation will be spotted. But besides theory we never had more then the odd case affecting a handful of votes every handful of elections for almost 80 years, so history proofs that for all practical reasons it is 1) not happening 2) impossible to do at a scale that would impact results and 3) easy to spot.

You're rehashing literally the same exact argument we're having about US voting, it's not different. Some people think fraud is easy, some people say what you just did, that statistically it's very unlikely.

> No idea how the US just fails at the most simple thing in a democracy, voting.

You're generalizing too far. Much of the US works just like you described for your local voting. The US has tens of thousands of voting precincts with their own rules. For better or worse.

> The US has tens of thousands of voting precincts with their own rules

Surely that's the failure being described. There are always parts of the US where corruption is winning, and those places ultimately have enough political or other capital that they are worth corrupting, and that puts the system of the entire country at continuous risk.

> With that invitation, or passport or ID

Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US. It’s OK if you didn’t know that, lots of people from other countries are dumbfounded to learn that all you have to do in the US is show up and give the poll workers the name of a registered voter in order to vote.*

* Well, in some states you have to show ID. But one political party in particular fights very hard against this requirement.

I followed this discussion in the US quite close actually. Simply because we need to have government ID. It is racist to require it if access to those IDs is, in praxis, limited for the demographics that should have limited access to voting. It is not if you are required to have government ID, and it is very easy to get one. getting a provisional passport for travel, with a validity of 6 months, takes all of one hour tops over here in Germany.

Precisely. You can’t make something a prerequisite to voting if every voter doesn’t have it. And the US is very much against the concept of a national ID. So you can’t have a national ID requirement.

And as another commenter points out, it’s not that an ID requirement is racist, it’s that the motivations for it, knowing its impact, are racist.

Man, the US is such a strange place. It is also the only country I know of, top of my head, that doesn't have national ID requirements. No idea why this can be seen as bad thing.

Too much power in too few hands.

Compare the US to the EU.

The US is over 4.5x the population of Germany, the largest EU member. The entire EU is only about 25% more people than the US. California alone is larger than all but four of the EU member nations.

The US Federal Government is more like the EU itself rather than any member country. The states are more analogous to the countries in the EU.

So a US National ID is kind of like a EU Citizen ID.

What we have instead is an agreement between states and the federal government on ID guidelines. From that perspective it’s not so different.

It's fundamental to the country. We are a federal republic of states, and as such the real power lies with the states. The feds get the nukes, sure, but culturally we are reluctant to hand more power to the central government of a nation of 330 million people.

Yeah, I don’t completely get this one either, but the way we are raised is that national ID is somehow a slippery slope towards federal agents wandering the street demanding “papers, please.”

Interestingly enough, the intersection between those who would advocate for national voter ID requirements and those who would fundamentally oppose a national ID is very large.

> Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US.

This is not the argument people are making, so I hope you aren’t making it intentionally. No one is saying that requiring voting id is inherently racist.

The argument is that requiring voting id without a commensurate effort to make sure everyone has voter id ends up disproportionately affecting minorities. These efforts are subsequently dubbed racist by political opponents because the people implementing them know this to be true and do it anyway, because they prefer the outcome that minorities are disenfranchised.

Republicans have been found in court to play these tricks with “surgical precision”, to make sure the rules they come up with impact minorities more than whites.

Another example is closing polling places so that it takes 8 hours to vote in black precincts whereas it takes 8 minutes to vote in white precincts. Yes, the act of closing a polling place is not an overtly racist thing to do. But the way in which it’s done and the actual impact make clear it is done with the intent of disenfranchising minorities.

> The argument is that requiring voting id without a commensurate effort to make sure everyone has voter id ends up disproportionately affecting minorities.

Democrats have never negotiated in good faith over the requirement to make IDs available though whenever the debate is brought up. States like Wisconsin require voter ID and will make an ID for voting available for free, through the mail, and yet there is still opposition that always relies on handwavy arguments about how utterly baffling and difficult it is to obtain a photo ID, even in Wisconsin. Arguments which are ultimately disingenuous and yet still persist in light of accommodations by states that require voter ID.

It's a pretty standard tribal division, much like abortion and everything else. Each side refuses reasonable compromises because they perceive that it would be a slippery slope allowing the other side to ultimately prevail.

Like I said, unfortunately Republicans have been found in court to have used similar tactics intentionally to disenfranchise minority voters. When they have full control of states they show their hand by passing voter ID laws without commensurate GOTV funding. So we know they are acting in bad faith before it even starts.

If Republicans were serious about non-racist voter ID laws they could have demonstrated that in Georgia when they overhauled election laws there. They didn’t and we know why: more “surgical precision”.

In Wisconsin? With that legislature? Want to guess how easy it will be for them, over time, to make certain cuts to the program that makes it so easy for everyone to get a free ID?

> But the way in which it’s done and the actual impact make clear it is done with the intent of disenfranchising minorities.

Which is racist.

In this case it looks like you could bribe the volunteers to simply give ballots without checking for ID, then bribe the overseers to validate the fraud.

So long as the people who’s votes you are stealing don’t come in, then you are safe.

There are no systems safe from fraud if you allow human judgment to be a part of the system.

> So long as the people who’s votes you are stealing don’t come in, then you are safe.

There's a pretty good chance of being safe even if they do come in: https://nypost.com/2020/11/03/houston-woman-turned-away-from...

elections are as fraud save as they are because you have humans in the loop. Hundreds of them, all over the place. And it is not judgement, but decentralized supervision that solves this problem for you. Not some flimsy electronic system without auditable paper trail.

Hundreds of humans who can all work for a single individual or organization. Without any additional rules, adding more people to supervise is simply security theater.

Note, I am not a general proponent of electronic voting machines either. They can easily make fraud easier by reducing the number of people to bribe to the few engineers with access to the blackbox code and the few officials who certify that the code is valid and was used on Election Day.

I can’t tell if this is a joke.

Is that really a Democrat position? I feel like there must be a “quiet part” no one is saying out loud, because it makes no sense to me.

The "quiet part" is the US' long history of using ID requirements and other tactics to suppress and disenfranchise black and other minority voting[0,1], especially in the South, for example in North Carolina[1] and Texas[2], going all the way back to poll taxes[3].

If considered in a vacuum, completely absent the context of historical precedent, voter IDs seem like a simple common sense solution to the (practically nonexistent) problem of voter fraud. Unfortunately, we are talking about the US, and it's simply not possible to assume good faith.

[0]https://time.com/5855885/voter-registration-history-race/

[1]https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/new-...

[2]https://www.npr.org/2021/09/17/1038354159/n-c-judges-strike-...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_State...

[4]https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/22/politics/ted-cruz-texas-voter...

So, are you saying Europe’s voter ID laws exist to solve no problem? Because from where I sit, confidence in the electoral process seems to be a larger problem preventing than imaginary racism using real racism of low expectations.

Yes, that is really a Democrat position, along with opposing signature checks on postal votes, supporting sending out unsolicited mass postal voting forms, opposing removing people who've moved states from the electoral register on the state they left, dismantling any system for identifying people recorded as having voted in more than one state, and fighting even the most basic checks on their programs for literally paying workers to fill out voters' ballots for them. The stated justification for all of these is the same: not doing so is an evil attempt to suppress the black vote and disenfranchise black voters. The ACLU and the non-Fox News media generally support them on this. American politics is wild by European standards.

How is this different than dropping in additional paper ballots into a ballot box? If it isn’t, then this has nothing to do with the machine, but rather control of the “ballot box”.

Tabulator could have printed a receipt from scantron sheet feed.

Stuffing paper ballots into a box or tapping the screen of an electronic voting machine are both very easy. This stuff has to be fixed at a higher level, like by making sure the folks running the precinct aren’t corrupt or by having a neutral observer present

Stuffing paper ballots is infinitely harder if your election system isn't entirely fucked. Multiple assessors, both from parties and individuals who just want to ensure that everything goes right, invalidation of the entire ballot box if any cheating is found post-votes, increase the amount of voting places so that scaling this up becomes impossible.

Voting has been solved centuries ago. And voting machines will never be part of the solution.

> invalidation of the entire ballot box if any cheating is found post-votes

That seems to just introduce a new vulnerability where you could intentionally get caught cheating in precincts that leaned contrary to your beliefs to invalidate everyone there who voted legitimately.

No. Any attempts at cheating caught live just invalidate that bulletin (and said cheater is brought to the police). With a well organised setup (having a record of who already voted, having a transparent ballot box that is only open for a moment when your identity has been verified, multiple assessors watching for the extremely obvious "hey there's multiple envelopes that fell in there"), cheating is already extremely hard, for almost no gain. Maybe you can stuff two votes instead of one, but at what cost, potentially invalidating hundreds for your candidate ? And since voter counts are recorded and compared to bulletin counts, even a difference of one will start an inquiry and potentially invalidate.

If you multiply the voting places, where instead of having a single place which will tally over 10k votes, have 15 places that tally 700 votes each, you have now made both cheating much harder, and less worth it in the scenario you propose.

> Multiple assessors, both from parties and individuals who just want to ensure that everything goes right

The story is literally about ballot stuffing at precincts where there weren’t observers like that watching. Which makes the electronic voting part a complete red herring

And 100% of the votes from those precincts without observers should’ve been discarded. The real problem is that we don’t fund elections properly. This sort of thing isn’t a problem in other developed democracies. It’s only one here by design.

What you’re proposing is that the official in charge of running elections can cut funding to precincts that usually vote for his opponent, and then later invalidate all ballots cast there?

I thought that they were simultaneously suggesting that funding be increased in a concrete and not easily reverse way. But I do see your point

I can register as an assessor for free (both for me and my city). The cases where cities have to pay for some is extremely rare. If you live in a city with even a hundred inhabitants, the chances to find at least one that is interested in their democratic process is already high.

That's an incredibly uncharitable read of my comment.

I wasn't trying to be uncharitable. You said that we should have retroactively discarded 100% of votes from specific precincts, so I pointed out why allowing selective invalidation like that is a really bad idea.

No, you uncharitably ignored the majority of my comment in your haste to make a sarcastic response.

I ignored the part where you called for mundane improvements, and zeroed in on the small bit where you called for blatant voter disenfranchisement

Other than speeding up voting calculations, reducing paper usage, enabling arbitrary language use at the booth, and other things.

If electronic fraud is a concern, we should mitigate it, because encryption, identity, and date integrity are solved problems.

Furthermore, spot auditing and paper receipts/copies are a thing, or could be.

(Also, voting may be "solved" but voting systems and universal access to the ballot has not. First past the post voting is possibly the worst system to use short of flipping a coin.)

Access to polling places has also been solved, including India where officials carry voting machines through the jungle for or only a handful of voters.

And first past the goal post works, or rather can work. It is aggressive Gerrymandering, allocating senators by state and not population and the electoral college that screw it up in the US.

FPTP is a disaster. Even if you have perfectly representative elections, FPTP essentially disallows anything but 2 parties. This makes both parties more easily corruptible (less people to bribe if you're paying for specific result or legislation).

Multiple parties makes gaming elections much harder for moneyed interests.

France has FPTP, and it works for a lot more than two parties. Admittedly, France has a second round run off in case no candidate has more than 50% of votes in the first round so.

Having two rounds is by definition not first past the post. And in fact that is the difference that makes it possible in France for third and fourth parties to get non-trivial support in the first round.

> France has FPTP

For the vast majority of it's existence, the 5th republic has had proportional representation in the legislature (only changed with Sarkozy, who instituted 2-round elections - IIRC).

Presidential has been 2-round for much longer, perhaps from the beginning of the 5th republic.

Straight FPTP as implemented in many places in the US allows plurality winners (ie, winners that don't get 50% of the votes), France's system does not.

>For the vast majority of it's existence, the 5th republic has had proportional representation in the legislature (only changed with Sarkozy, who instituted 2-round elections - IIRC).

Uh, no. The Fifth has has two round legislative elections since its beginning. The entire reason for it was that the Fourth and Third showed what an overly powerful parliament caused, as well as the relative instability of having only a single round to elect députés.

Hence, the Fifth was started by a former general who thought that putting immense amounts of power in the president was a good idea. Because clearly counter powers are overrated.

Additionally, french legislative elections can have a very peculiar situation where the second round has three candidates, but that requires a specific amount of votes and to all be extremely close. I believe there's 10 of them planned this year according to polls, over 577 circonscriptions.

I stand corrected. Apparently proportional representation only happened in the 1986 elections when Mitterrand made that change for that single election [1]. Amusing reading back on what happened vs. what I heard about from others.

Regarding the 3 candidates in 2nd round - yes that's only possible because France allows 3 & 4 candidates to go into 2nd round if they have over 12.5%. This is usually not the case, so 3-rounds are very limited but as you indicate they do present a plurality win possibility.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1986_French_legislative_electi...

You are correct.

>Other than speeding up voting calculations

Hilarious to read that as the US presidential elections take over a week to tally results, when french elections have 90% of the results at 10PM on the same evening (most voting places close at 7PM)

> Voting has been solved centuries ago.

Yes, but then we threw in a huge wrench when we decided that votes needed to be secret, too.

No. Voting has been secret also for centuries. Paper ballots allow secrecy of the vote _and_ verification of voters. Something that electronic ballots will never be able to do.

As has been stated repeatedly in this thread, paper ballots wouldn’t have prevented this case

You can never be sure that people running the precinct, or any office, are not corrupt. The rules should be such that it doesn't matter who is in office. Violation of the rules must be met with stiff penalty or the rules are not really a deterrent.

It's not about actual vulnerabilities (although it may also be), it is about the general public's confidence in the legitimacy of the election. Voting machines do not instill confidence, and that is a bad thing for a democracy. I don't care about the microcosm of improved efficiency. That's not the thing to try to make ultra efficient at the cost of legitimacy.

> This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so easy?

Apparently this demonstrates the power of the invisible hand of the marketplace.

Very true.

And that's why we should decentralise power to the most local entity we can (somewhere between a central government and the individual affected by a choice) and have as few elected officials as possible.

The US tried this with their first constitution which lasted barely a decade. And the the macro scale issues these days are significantly larger than what they had to deal with back then.

I was going to say, with the increase in mobility today it could be a nightmare having a patchwork of laws at the municipal level.

Coase’s theory doesn’t only apply to firms but to other organizations as well.

Imagine if San Diego wanted water from the Colorado River (what nerve!). They’d have to negotiate with every little town next to the river. And if one town doesn’t want to negotiate, well, they can attract business with offers of “take as much water as you want” and “emit as much toxic waste as you want”, and we’ll fuck the people downstream.

Indeed, confederations of liquid democracies. The only people to make a decision should be the ones effected by it.

Now try to define "affected" and that's where the war will be fought.

Definitely. That's where the conversation needs to shift. Those are the kinds of questions we should be debating on a case by case or inductive basis, not these asinine and useless popularity contests.

A joke, I'll bet, but that is not what Adam Smith meant.

Most of the contemporary zealous acolytes of Adam Smith would be shocked and angered by what he actually wrote, were they to try reading it.

I am inclined to agree.

Many know of "The Wealth of Nations", but how many have read Smith's "Theory of Moral Sentiments"? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adam_Smith#The_Theory_of_Moral...

> Although The Wealth of Nations is widely regarded as Smith's most influential work, Smith himself is believed to have considered The Theory of Moral Sentiments to be a superior work.[79]

> Rae, John (1895). Life of Adam Smith. London & New York: Macmillan. ISBN 0-7222-2658-6. Retrieved 14 May 2018 – via Internet Archive.

> This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so easy?

Easy and cheap! TFA says it was only $300 to $5k per election total... Which was then split _at least_ two ways?? I mean, sure, the average politician hasn't been accused of having integrity in a long time, but this is just ridiculous.

Easy to do? Probably, they only pay judge of elections about minimum wage. Not exactly positions of high standing. Easy to get away with? Not really, that's why he's been caught and pleading guilty.

Your ideology allows you to lie and cheat because you know that outcome is what's best

Could it be widespread?

As a skeptic by natural, I first go to wondering how we would ever know if it wasn’t.

And for so little money! $300 to $5000.

It certainly would not be difficult if the judges themselves shared the desire to see votes cast a specific way, I expect.

>This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so easy?

Why does a conspiracy involving only 3 people seem so impossible to you?

At least they were caught.

> Why is it so easy?

Because nobody was watching when they meddled with voting machines. If there was someone oberving or at least a camera, this would be easy to discover.

>This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so easy?

You don't just cold call a judge. Presumably he knew enough about what his options for judges were that he could pick the ones who would be amenable to the idea and approach them.

The bribe at that point is just payment for risk (because the judge presumably doesn't have plausible deniability)

"Judge of Elections" in PA is an elected position for running the polling place for a precinct on election day. It's an extremely low-level position that only involves work on 2 days of the year.

It's not a "judge" in the sense someone who oversees a criminal or civil trial.

I'm surprised it is even elected. I was an election judge when I was 18 in Illinois as part of high school project. You just sign up and attend a 2 hour class.

It was fun. The other judge at my poll location was a guy who served in the Wehrmacht during WWII (was conscripted at age 14).

But I easily could have stuffed the box. Most people don't vote. At 7:45pm, you could just vote for people who didn't show up. Nobody but the other judge would have the chance of stopping you.

The voter list should contain canaries and honeypots. Known dead people or fake people, and if they vote then fraud has been detected.

Clever idea. The problem, of course, is that this was never an issue that could be solved with more facts. Conspiracy theories are immune to that.

> But I easily could have stuffed the box.

...

> Nobody but the other judge would have the chance of stopping you.

Those ought to contradict each other. We have multiple judges for exactly this reason. It is a sincerely tall order to get even one other judge, especially when it's required to be from the opposing party, to agree to your ballot stuffing. You're likely to end up prosecuted the moment you pose the question, before you get anywhere near stuffing a box.

There should be something stopping you; the voter rolls, and list of names that voted and not, are public. The press could absolutely contact a sample of the voter rolls and verify - "I voted", "I didn't". Any discrepancy (well, any time there's more than one or two, because people do lie or simply forget) should be a scandal.

There are people who did this for the 2020 elections. They found voters registered to empty lots all over Arizona. Steven Crowder, I think the guys name was.

Not sure on that specific claim, but every one of those type of "fraud claims" I've looked into turn out to be false and full of errors in how they used the information they had to try to prove their claims. An example from Arizona - not sure if the same one as Crowder, not going to watch YT videos on this topic - if it's important enough, write it up and publish it with references and proper proof that can be replicated.

https://www.azmirror.com/2021/09/10/voter-canvass-features-b...

And get rejected from publications that didn't bother to do the research themselves but "know" that Voter Fraud is a myth? No thanks.

Then you correctly get identified as a conspiracy theorist, the system is working.

The risk clearly doesn't fit the crime. A risk of being hung for treason is harder to recruit for.

"Treason" is one of the few crimes which is defined in the US constitution. It has a fairly narrow definition which does not include election fraud:

>Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying War against them, or in adhering to their Enemies, giving them Aid and Comfort. No Person shall be convicted of Treason unless on the Testimony of two Witnesses to the same overt Act, or on Confession in open Court.

The person you are responding to is clearly suggesting their personal belief that election crimes are so antithetical to American values that it constitutes a crime on par with treason.

Fine, but the system that they're claiming to speak in service of directly contradicts that belief in its foundational charter.

The people commiting this type of fraud make similar mental leaps about the definitions of words like "treason" and "patriotism" to justify their actions. It's not a good road to follow.

So if the US Republic is thrown over like the Weimar Republic the only question for you is:

Did they not break any laws as defined by the forefathers who wrote the constitution?

I don't really understand this bizarre worshipping of the creation of the US as if it must have been done too well to question. Eternal vigilance is identifying the bugs, talking about them in public and proposing appropriate size patches. Failure to do so is being overthrown by a risk not accounted for by the forefathers, or that they assumed we weren't too stupid to handle.

My suggestion that election fraud by a sworn judge should be dealt with as seriously as treason is in no way the same as someone's secret dialog with co-conspirators to justify undermining all trust in the republic being democratic for their own goals.

Yes, though more generally I am interested in the criteria and thought process that takes place in discussions leading to constitutional conventions to build a republic that is self maintaining despite various threats. The US is not Cannon to me, it is one template and we are poking at a flaw in it.

The list of people actually convicted of treason in the US is very short, and a subsequent execution hasn't happened since the mid 1800s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_people_convicted_of_tr...

The Rosenbergs espionage didn’t count as treason?

No, they were tried for conspiracy to commit espionage (50 U.S.C. § 32). Although espionage is a morally treasonous act, treason was not the legal crime for which they were prosecuted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Julius_and_Ethel_Rosenberg#Ros...

This is the best argument that there is not widespread fraud. The odds of getting caught are pretty high, the penalties stiff, and the value of a single vote practically zero. Sure, some races are that close, but most are not, so any kind of systemic effort has vastly more risk than it's worth just to get one lowly elected position flipped from an opposing party.