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Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by subsubzero on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @03:25PM (#31672699)
You are right, you can't make people up, but this has happened throughout history by unscrupulous actors using either very old people or dead people and "casting votes" in their name for certain candidates. I remember seeing a few examples of this firsthand on twitter in MI where a candidate was over 100 years old(and was dead) and voted!
Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by wahern on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @03:35PM (#31672838)
"Firsthand" and "Twitter" seem more than a little incongruent. But in any event, these claims were likely false. See https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2020/11/05/did-a-dead-11... and https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54874120
Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by tptacek on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @04:50PM (#31673919)
I'm not sure how this attack even works. You can't make up dead people; you have to know who the dead people are. You can't cast votes for random dead people; they have to be dead people from the precinct you're EJ'ing. I buy that you could get 1-2 votes cast this way, but not how you could cast a material number of them. Meanwhile, getting caught just casting 1 such vote is a guaranteed prison sentence. You can't have a vast conspiracy across many dozens of precincts in order to rack up a material number of dead-person votes. It just doesn't make sense.
Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by theptip on Thursday June 09, 2022 @01:18AM (#31677802)
Not an expert here but my read is that they were looking at the electoral register, and falsifying votes from real registered voters that just didn’t show up on the day.

At least that’s what it sounds like in

> Beren and her accomplices from the Board of Elections would then falsify the polling books and the List of Voters and Party Enrollment for the 39th Ward, 2nd Division, by recording the names, party affiliation, and order of appearances for voters who had not physically appeared at the polling station to cast his or her ballot in the election. Beren took pains to ensure that the number of ballots cast on the machines was a reflection of the number of voters signed into the polling books and the List of Voters.

Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by soheil on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @11:44PM (#31677355)
Why are you so incredulous about this topic? The OP linked two sources showing that it did clearly happen:

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2020/11/05/did-a-dead-11...

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54874120

Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by Thorrez on Thursday June 09, 2022 @01:06AM (#31677742)
What clearly did happen? Both of those seem to be refuting the idea that votes were cast for dead people.
Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by kevinmchugh on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @04:22PM (#31673463)
You should expect some number of dead people to have voted in every election, totally aboveboard. There's always going to be someone who dies in a car accident on the way back from the polling place. Add early or by-mail voting and the attendant micromorts from a bigger gap between votes being cast and being counted, and you'll see more dead people having cast votes.

Older people are much more likely to vote and much more likely to die.

I'm aware that votes cast in the name of the long-deceased has been used for fraud in the past. But some of number of votes cast by dead people should be expected! Just way below the number needed to influence elections.

Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by WillPostForFood on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @04:37PM (#31673682)
Just way below the number needed to influence elections.

People say this like there are no close elections, or are only talking about Presidential elections (and ignoring Florida 2020), but pretty much every year there are razor thin votes in statewide and congressional races. Good example is Iowa 2nd district in 2020 which was decided by 6 votes:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/democrat-rita-hart-ends-elec...

GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks was certified the winner in November by a mere six votes out of 400,000 cast, marking one of the closest House races in modern history.

Given 400,000 votes, there is guaranteed more than 6 fraudulent, mistaken, or sabotages ballots. Maybe that affected the result, or just missed flipping the seat, who knows. But small time voting fraud can still be a big problem.

Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by tptacek on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @04:55PM (#31673978)
It makes sense when you write it that way, but not in reality. There is a risk/reward to doing this. Part of your premise is that you can know when an election is going to come down to 6 votes. But in fact Meeks vs. Hart was newsworthy because results like that are incredibly rare. 99 times out of 100, if you try to juke the election, you're putting yourself at pretty grave legal risk and accomplishing absolutely nothing.
Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by WillPostForFood on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @06:28PM (#31675227)
Part of your premise is that you can know when an election is going to come down to 6 votes.

Assuming that's true, you just need to know when it is going to be close, and that only requires polling, not prescience.

https://www.thegazette.com/article/polling-shows-iowa-2nd-di...

Slightly more than two months before Iowans begin voting, polling shows the open-seat race in the U.S. House 2nd District as a dead heat.

In a live poll of 406 likely voters by Harper Polling, Republican state Sen. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Democrat Rita Hart each had the support of 41 percent of the respondents

So this is exactly the kind of race where a smart cheater would cheat, not trying to get Trump to win California or Biden to win West Virginia. But I assume people who are corrupt and cheat are going to be corrupt and cheat even when it is not in their own interest. And just by chance that will affect other elections happening at the same time.

Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by tptacek on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @07:16PM (#31675696)
No, it's easy to know what the tight races are likely to be, and very difficult to predict which races are going to come down to a margin of just dozens of votes; it's much harder to predict those races than it is to predict the winners of races, since they're very uncommon, and lopsided polling is not.

No, this doesn't sound plausible.

Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by ricudis on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @07:53PM (#31675999)
In Greece, we've seen quite a lot of cases where polling failed spectacularly to detect even large vote swings. Given that those polls are usually being done by organizations closely tied to political parties, I guess they weren't just incompetent. So there's probably quite a lot of error margin there.
Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by mistermann on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @05:42PM (#31674696)
> Part of your premise is that you can know when an election is going to come down to 6 votes.

Not in reality, you appended that to your local model.

It's true that there is only so much fraud you can get away with, and if the legitimate votes outnumber your ballot stuffing then your plan failed.

Presumably fraudsters do not know what the final counts are going to be (unlike how many people in this thread "know" things they have no way of knowing), so this would not necessarily alter their plans on sites that are plausibly (in their estimation) swingable.

> But in fact Meeks vs. Hart was newsworthy because results like that are incredibly rare. 99 times out of 100, if you try to juke the election, you're putting yourself at pretty grave legal risk and accomplishing absolutely nothing.

This rests on the premise of omniscience, and while this is a fairly standard convention on the internet these days, there is no scientific evidence I've seen that substantiates the phenomenon.

Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by tptacek on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @06:10PM (#31675028)
I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Which part of the risk/reward equation I've presented do you disagree with? That the reward is higher than I think it is? Can you be specific as to how many votes you think you'd be able to swing with a scheme targeting e-day voting? Or is it that you think the risk is lower?
Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by mistermann on Thursday June 09, 2022 @08:40AM (#31680465)
I'm disputing the claim that a premise of the argument is necessarily knowing the final vote count prior to launching the scheme. This knowledge is not actually necessary, although having it would certainly be beneficial.
Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by LocalPCGuy on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @05:35PM (#31674613)
In addition to the other response, elections where there are razor thin margins like this garner a TON of attention, making the likelyhood of getting away with fraud much less likely.
Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by kevinmchugh on Thursday June 09, 2022 @12:33AM (#31677583)
I would just like to point out that my comment is about expecting legitimate votes cast by voters who are dead before election day.
Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by pyuser583 on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @08:37PM (#31676302)
A recent county wide election was dead even. They flipped a coin to determine the winner.
Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by kevinmchugh on Thursday June 09, 2022 @12:29AM (#31677561)
People _hate_ this but it's as fair as anything and probably okay whenever the vote tally is very tight. There are solutions to this, in rcv (or runoffs period) or proportional representation
Re:Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to elect... by pyuser583 on Thursday June 09, 2022 @09:14AM (#31680770)
The position was for county coroner. I don’t think proportional representation would have helped.

What is rcv? How would runoff’s help if there are only two candidates?