But of course. There’s the small risk that they get finecombed but the risk/reward ratio is too good not to do it. The system seems to be designed for this.

I don't think the system is intentionally designed this way. That's just the reality of life with limited resources.

When benefit of action > risk of action, it becomes competitively advantageous to do the action, even if illegal. You could miscalculate the inputs of that equation, but sometimes it's hard to tell if someone who blew up miscalculated or if they are simply one of the 0.1% that lose the bet while 99.9% got away with it and reaped the reward.

Human law doesn't change this natural law. You could say that the only way to become absurdly rich is to fundamentally understand this natural law, even if you never end up breaking human law. You have to take risks others aren't willing to take. But this intimate understanding of the importance of risk also means it's likely that the ultra wealthy engage in explicit, well informed, and deeply intentional law breaking at much greater rates than the average person.

Congratulations! You're now a conspiracy theorist.

One of my conspiracy theories is that the saying "two people can keep a secret if one of them is dead" is itself a psyop to make the masses believe that widespread conspiracies involving hundreds or thousands of people aren't practical to pull off.

Large groups of people absolutely can actively or passively conspire and all remain quiet about it if their incentives strongly align. And if one of them breaks rank, then we can just pay off the news media to ignore them or paint them as a quack.

See: operation snow white.

It may have utilized up to 5000 covert agents, and was only detected perhaps due to an observant librarian.

See also COINTELPRO

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

Yeah, maybe it's just that I'm a decent liar, but the way that people so readily dismiss the possibility that groups of people can lie together and get away with it is just so confusing to me. There are people with secret families! The federal government lied about iraq having weapons and used it to justify invading another country! Believing that wealthy/powerful people aren't able to work together in secret to make themselves richer/more powerful is just so naive to me.

I think everyone knows it's not that no one can lie, its just that number-of-people * odds-someone-breaks-the-lie * time conspiracy would have to be held means that conspiracies that have a lot of people in the loop for a long time are unlikely to go unexposed. A conspiracy requiring a significant footprint of people, money, resources, and generated artifacts can hold for only so long. E.g wartime atrocities involving hundreds of people might hold for a few years, or until the end of a war, but not longer. The lies of the Bush administration could hold long enough to get into war, but not for say 30 years.

Usually this argument is super solid against the kinds of "long running super conspiracies" that people argue for. E.g: - The earth is flat and the fact it is a sphere is a lie told by generation of scientists and elites. 1000s (or more?) of people * hundreds of years. Ya right. - The moon landing was faked and everyone at NASA at the times knew it. 60 years * hundreds or thousands of people * massive resource spend and physical footprint: ya right.

> its just that number-of-people * odds-someone-breaks-the-lie * time conspiracy would have to be held means that conspiracies that have a lot of people in the loop for a long time are unlikely to go unexposed

It's also very easy to overestimate the likelihood of discovery, since it turns out all of these factors are correlated.

Remember, the conspiracies you find out about are, by definition, the ones that didn't stay secret. Now consider how many secrets you keep, and how many secrets of comparable magnitude you know about arbitrary other people.

This doesn't seem different from the idea that accusations of Conspiracy Theorist! are used to discredit legitimate concerns. It's hard to dismiss after thinking about it. I think about how little a worker drone will even know about the business strategies employed by management and how they personally could be "conspiring" and doing bad things in practice without even knowing.

It's worth it to be wary whenever someone accuses another of being a conspiracy theorist. Admittedly, some might be the actual disconnected-from-reality conspiracy theorist but one should always use a discerning eye when the claim is thrown around.

You wouldn't want all participants having the same level of knowledge, so you compartmentalize and change the information. The juicy stuff that indicts you is kept at a higher level, while the lower ranks are given different versions to make it seem legal. Companies do this routinely by controlling information within the company that might have illegal underpinnings for their actions.

However much of the annoying noise from conspiracy theorists involve people who all know they are doing illegal stuff and choose to do it anyway and keep quiet about it and they make it out to be some massive, evil, covert conspiracy party.

That is a variation of a Benjamin Franklin quote about three people being able to keep a secret if two are dead.

There are similar principles in military science about limited sizes of surprise attacks because logistically at some point it becomes completely obvious to anybody with working eyes or ears if say, the PRC relocated the entirety of their army off the shore of Hong Kong. Let alone the cumulative probabilities of human failures including in blackmail and bribery or how quickly the finances would add up in paying off people noticing you paying them off, and then people who notice the abnormal flow of currency.

There is no guarantee in these principles in the same way there is no guarantee that WWI wouldn't happen due to the interconnectedness of the European countries and how much they would have to lose. They were still right about the latter being an unmitigated disaster, as the unprestigious "backwater hicks who barely count as civilized", the US and the USSR became two world leading superpowers instead of the other leading empires. But that same "Unlikely because would be incredibly stupid and lead to losing a lot." level of guarantee applies to nuclear deterrence.

privilege is literally a conspiracy

Illegal political donations by the wealthy is not a dramatic or ridiculous concept. The implication you're making is uncharitable. You're pointing to a conspiracy theory within the realm of reason and asserting that it will surely receive the same quality and quantity of opposition that more absurd-sounding conspiracy theories do. This style of dramatically jumping to conclusions and casting all disagreement as coming from some kind of brainwashed enemy is exactly the attitude that makes many conspiracy theorists look unreasonable.

> This style of dramatically jumping to conclusions and casting all disagreement as coming from some kind of brainwashed enemy is exactly the attitude that makes many conspiracy theorists look unreasonable.

And this style of claiming that anyone who takes issue with top down declaration that all conspiracy theories are as ridiculous as frogs being turned gay is why so many people have lost faith in our institutions.

Anyone could fake donations like that, without any sort of massive coordination. If you notice a pickpocket, in an crowded area where there aren't many police, it's not a conspiracy theory to suggest that maybe that's not the only pickpocket in the area.

I think the real reason is that the political donation system operates on trust that the donors are who they say they are just like the voting system in most states just trusts that you are who you claim to be when you show up to vote (i.e. no requirement to show ID) and the mail-in voting system trusts that the voter filled out their ballot in secret without any coercion or intimidation.

The entire US election system is comically insecure and the thing that's surprising is how rare evidence of large scale fraud is. This is probably because it is much easier (and legal!) for rich people to just funnel money into super PACs, buy their own media outlet and/or use political activist "non-profit charities" as tax dodges and jobs programs for their kids.

Why make illegal donations to politicians or outright steal an election when you can just spend an unlimited amount of money on propaganda to brainwash people into supporting your agenda that is completely contrary to their own interests, the interests of their friends and family and their interests of their community? Why would you break the law when you could accomplish the exact same goal legally and get out of paying your fair share of taxes at the same time?

> Why make illegal donations to politicians or outright steal an election when you can just spend an unlimited amount of money on propaganda to brainwash people into supporting your agenda

Exactly. Election fraud and vote manipulation at the ballot box makes no sense. It's cheaper, much easier, more reliable, more scalable, less risky, and perfectly legal to just use propaganda and media saturation to control/influence voter behavior.

Well, there's always the possibility that you don't want to spend an unlimited amount of money. Hence the illegal donations by SBF.

An extortion racket for voting is only going to work in a small locality I think, it wouldn't scale to a large scale conspiracy without getting out. That guy in the Carolinas who tried it a few years ago was turned in by his family iirc.

Yet this is the only argument people have against something like digital voting with anonymized-open results. When voting you select, or are assigned, a secret random key. That key is tied to your ballot which is then published. You can verify your vote was counted, and counted accurately. Observers can verify that exactly the number of people who vote were counted, and it can all be done near instantly and completely openly/transparently.

It creates a system of electronic voting that's even more secure than paper trail audited traditional elections since there's no possibility of ballot stuffing, no possibility of changing votes, no possibility of discarding votes. The only argument against it is that you being able to verify your vote was counted accurately means you could also let somebody else verify how you voted. But the conspiracies where this could be a factor would be too small to matter, or near immediately end up getting busted. Even more so if you add a large 'finders fee' to anybody who exposes such a conspiracy.

You can do all that (except in a way that allows you to verify your vote was counted without being able to prove it to others) without a digital electronic voting system.

All you need is the ordinary "fill in the bubbles" optical scan system with two changes:

1. Special ink is used to print the ballots,

2. A special marker is used to mark them.

See "Scantegrity II: End-to-End Verifiability for Optical Scan Election Systems using Invisible Ink Confirmation Codes" [1] (in HTML [2]) and "Proving Coercion-Resistance of Scantegrity II" [3].

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...

[2] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...

[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf

The problem with electoral systems is that one of the key threat actors you need to protect against from are the people running the election. And so any sort of a "special" requirement goes out the window, because it's not really special when you have arbitrary access to it.

This is why public/transparent systems can be so powerful. They are literally impossible to cheat, even if a bad actor has complete unmoderated read/write access to every single system.

Here's Tom Scott's second video explaining why electronic voting is a terrible idea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LkH2r-sNjQs

Electronic voting machines and companies that manufacture them should both be illegal. Yet their use is widespread in America. The primary reason they're a bad idea is they make widespread election fraud easy. There is no good faith reason to use them.

> The primary reason they're a bad idea is they make widespread election fraud easy.

They make fraud easier. They do not make it easy. Lots of election data is public and analyzed by all sorts of people. Any big jump in turnout or shifts in the voting pattern of specific communities will be noticed and investigated even if it is just by hobbyist and journalists. Therefore the fraud would need to be incredibly widespread and only change the results subtly. Since elections are run at the local and state levels, at least in the US, it would need to be a huge operation in order to make enough small changes to accumulate to a result changing level of fraud.

The 2020 presidential election was decided by as few as 45,050 votes with no more than 20,565 votes in any given state. The 2016 election was decided by 77,000. [1] Targeted manipulation, done well, would not be detectable given how close elections tend to run.

It's also noteworthy that if one has the technical capacity to change a vote, then you'd only need to edit half those numbers. Changing a vote from A to a vote for B is a net effect of +2 since A loses 1 and B gains 1.

[1] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/11/18/how-2020-...

It is true that it is a lot easier to get away with fraud if you can time travel.

You can't just look at the numbers needed to change an election after the fact because whoever committed the fraud wouldn't have perfect knowledge on how much fraud to commit. The votes also can't just be dumped into a single machine, voting center, precinct, or even county because that shift in behavior would be noticed. Therefore this malicious actor would need to be able to add hundreds of thousands of votes state wide across several states in order to change things. Each state will have its own equipment and procedures and those can even vary within states. Once again, this would need to be a very widespread fraud that likely requires dozens of different attack vectors all executed in coordination. It is possible, but very difficult to pull off successfully.

It's not like the results all just come instantly. They come incrementally, and over unacceptably long periods of time. All you'd need to do is to look at which of the handful of competitive states you need to give yourself a little boost.

And the tech side's even easier. For instance those 3 states, making up the 45,050 vote margin from 2020, all had districts using the exact same hardware/software: Dominion.

>our elections are unacceptably slow

That is funny considering the primary benefit of electronic voting machines is speeding up the gathering of results. I'm not sure how you expect us to manually count 150 million ballots quicker without using any hackable electronics.

Otherwise, you are still falling into the same trap. You say we can just use "insider knowledge" to know where to commit the fraud, but that requires both insiders and the ability to actually execute the fraud in all those potentially close places. We are back to needing a widespread conspiracy that operates in several states and can attack in a variety of different ways.

>I'm not sure how you expect us to manually count 150 million ballots quicker without using any hackable electronics.

The solution to vote counting scales right along side the problem. You use more human counters. If it takes 2% of the population to count votes, then you just...keep using the same percentage, just more people.

I reiterate: There is no good faith reason to use electronic voting machines. It injects an ability to scale up election fraud, and that is all it does.

>If it takes 2% of the population to count votes, then you just...keep using the same percentage, just more people.

And if we build a team of 9 women, I bet they can produce a baby in a single month.

False analogy. You can split stacks of ballots to be counted and hand them to different people. I don't know why you're arguing so hard in favor of electronic voting when it's good for no one but voting machine companies and election thieves.

You don't actually need insider knowledge. Results trickle in, and you can adjust dynamically as needed. It's not especially hard at all, which is why this is so dangerous.

As for alternatives, the answer for a secure electronic system seems self evident. When you vote, you either choose or assigned a secret key. Your ballot and key are publicly posted. Suddenly you have a system where that is 100% confirmable at every single level. Observers can verify exactly the number of voters voted. Voters can verify their vote was counted and was for whom they chose.

The only downside is that you could also prove to another third party that you voted some way or another. Yet this feels largely academic. Coercion/bribing schemes are already illegal and at any meaningful scale they would collapse instantly because this would actually require your "widespread conspiracy." Add in a large "finders fee" for outing said conspiracies and the entire notion of them as a threat becomes silly.

>Results trickle in, and you can adjust dynamically as needed.

But you are still missing the point. You can't just act immediately. You need to lay the groundwork for acting. This group needs the ability to act in numerous states before they know which states to actually attack. That means even if they don't end up needing to change any votes in a given state, they still need the capability to change the votes. They can't just start the attack on election day. These systems have to already be compromised or at least have a confirmed way to compromise them. The hard work needs to be done before election day and any results are known.

>Coercion/bribing schemes are already illegal

And so is hacking a voting machine so I guess we don't have to worry about that either.

> at any meaningful scale they would collapse instantly because this would actually require your "widespread conspiracy."

But we aren't just worried about centralized conspiracies. A third party knowing how you vote creates new problems that we want to avoid. For example, now you have abusive partners demanding their significant other votes a certain way or an unethical boss demanding their employees vote for a specific candidate. The importance of individual ballots being secret goes beyond who wins the election.

>Add in a large "finders fee" for outing said conspiracies and the entire notion of them as a threat becomes silly.

Always smart to incentivize people to make stuff up for money. If this actually worked, why not just institute it for any election manipulation?

>But you are still missing the point. You can't just act immediately. You need to lay the groundwork for acting. This group needs the ability to act in numerous states before they know which states to actually attack.

You are the one missing the point.

This is exactly why people find allegations of 2am ballet dumps and the like highly suspect and worthy of looking into.

On some level it doesn't matter whether there's the possibility of fraud or not because the appearance of that possibility delegitimatizes the system and the system only works because people think it's legitimate.

How is this comment related to anything I have said? Saying it is difficult to get away with a crime is not the same thing as saying that accusations of that crime should not be investigated.

My point is that if the crime is difficult to get away with for the reasons you say it is then stuff like dragging the process out and injecting false ballets where and when you need them so you don't do "more" than you need to and risk blowing the cover of the system you've set up is the obvious way to go about it and people rightfully want it looked into when they see stuff that matches that patterns.

And it needs to actually be looked into even when frivolous because failing to do that has very bad optics

I don't think the 2-4 hours or whatever difference you think makes those 2am dumps not suspicious really has any impact on the difficulty of this task. Those 2am dumps still have to meet all the other criteria I outlined before like matching close enough to expected turnout and result numbers for those precincts.

Are you familiar with the phrase "even the appearance of impropriety"?

Societies run on faith. Anything that causes people to question the legitimacy of the system we use to transfer power gives others an opportunity to seize it (incrementally of course). Points where one could game the voting system are dangerous to us the same way having a bunch of bastard children is bad for a king.

To expand upon a peer comment, there are 4 broad outcomes in a democratic election:

1) fair, and the people think its fair

2) fair, but the people think its rigged

3) rigged, but the people think its fair

4) rigged, and the people think its rigged

In most people's minds, it's 1/2 and 3/4 are, more or less, the same. After all, all that really matters is what really happened. But in terms of a democracy, it's 1/3 and 2/4. The reason is that the whole point of a democracy is to help create a peaceful and stable system because people believe they can change their political future with a ballot instead of a pitchfork and torch.

But when that belief fades it doesn't really matter if faded because of reality or just perception. And when this happens, you lose the benefits of a democracy and the peace starts to disappear. There is literally nothing more important for the stability and security of a democracy than perception of its integrity. Elections that linger on for days with odd looking events abounds destroy this perception, regardless of whether or not everything is actually completely on the up and up.

You are being actively disingenuous. In the case of the 2020 election all you would have needed is one single exploit against Dominion machines, which by nature of being the one conducting an election means you'll have near limited time/access to - including local access, and you're done. Before 2020 even outlets such as the NYTimes were raising warning flags about the extreme insecurity of these voting systems, including Dominion. [1]

The point about voter coercion being illegal is not that it will stop it, but that things like e.g. "an unethical boss demanding employees vote for a specific candidate [and then prove it]" is not just unethical, it's illegal. And a finder's fee means you not only get to give your boss the finger, and send him on to meet Bubba, but also get a nice 'golden parachute' on your way out.

This isn't the type of scenario where a government is paying money for guns, incentivizing people to print guns. This requires another individual committing a crime.

[1] - https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/21/magazine/the-myth-of-the-...

But I'm glad we've mostly moved away from paperless voting machines. If you don't have that backup, you can be as suspicious as you want but there's nothing you can do about it.

And it's not like an attack is infeasible. According to a professor who specializes in this, testifying to Congress:

> “We’ve created attacks that can spread from machine to machine like a computer virus and silently change election outcomes."

https://alumni.umich.edu/michigan-alum/hacking-the-vote/

100%, voting machines should at the very least spit out a paper copy that the voter can verify and can be manually recounted if there are any questions about the electronic total. Once we meet that baseline, I don't think it makes sense to worry too much about the voting machines. Our election process is much more vulnerable to manipulation through some of the other means mentioned in this thread.

Is the fact that there’s no evidence of widespread voting fraud being a real problem not a good faith reason?

Voting fraud is generally a statistically insignificant issue. It's election fraud that is the issue.

More here: https://www.findlaw.com/voting/how-u-s--elections-work/what-...

So say you are right and that you’ve convinced me that I should be against electronic voting machines, my prior opinion on the matter was still formed in good faith, no?

edit: on a side note, that website’s description of electoral fraud is pretty sloppy. In their bullet points of what constitutes electoral fraud they include ballot harvesting. Their description of ballot harvesting is not illegal everywhere.

> The entire US election system is comically insecure and the thing that's surprising is how rare evidence of large scale fraud is.

The question that bothers me most is this: how would we know? What safeguards do we have, and how do we detect when they're overcome? Especially as a regular citizen.

The one instance I'm familiar with when some safeguards were actually red teamed was a huge success--for the red team. https://www.wsj.com/articles/voter-fraud-a-myth-thats-not-wh...

> what safeguards to we have

We have the government and mainstream media and big tech all telling us that it's totally impossible for anything like this to happen and penalizing us for talking about it.

It's not that it's impossible, but that it's just not cost-effective, and even if it does happen, it's not happening at a scale that would affect even a statewide election let alone a national election. Why go through all the effort (and risk) to modify Joe Smith's vote from Team A to Team B when Team B can just buy advertisements, write newspaper op-eds, spam social media, saturate the news cycle, take over talk shows, and otherwise propaganda thousands of Joe Smiths across the whole region into voluntarily voting for Team B?

We need evidence of security or evidence of insecurity. No evidence is not conclusive either way, that's the problem.

Bullshit. You’ll know when your election is routinely rigged and there’s rampant fraud. Been there and it’s difficult to hide even if you don’t have an independent media.

Doesn’t mean I agree with the election system in the US. You need both real and perceived trust in the election system. You also need very high participation. Both are essential. You can’t just keep throwing hurdles and then let only those who’re willing to pass the test to vote. You need more booths - way more - if you want to get rid of mail-in ballots so people can walk to their center and not stand in line for long hours. You have to go issue voter id cards door to door, if you want to enforce id restrictions. You can’t just do one and not the other. That’s just exclusionary. Similarly, if you want faster results you need electronic voting but you also need paper trails for validation. The way results stay unknown and media organisations “call” the elections is absurd. You need official results to come out in under a few hours after all elections are closed. It’s just not right to announce Florida while California is still voting - that’s undue influencing IMHO. The US can fix it all. I do admire how it all seem to mostly work in spite of all these issues.

You're straw-manning the comment you're replying to. They're talking about a lack of "safeguards", and you're replying by denying "rampant fraud".

tralene's comment is talking about safeguards. Their comment was substantive, linked to a WSJ article about deficiencies in elections.

The comment 8ytecoder is replying to is the comment by colpabar. Their comment alleges ... some shadowy conspiracy by government, mainstream media and big tech.

Right. I agree that the US has a lot of blatant deficiencies that they can resolve. Countries all over the world learnt how to do democracy from the US. Many have surpassed them in conducting free and fair elections. US is far behind there. But, like I said, it’s still mostly democratic and that amazes me.

The main safeguard of the American election system is thousands of seniors who donate their time and patriotism and enthusiasm for the process into making sure things go well. They typically take things very seriously and are rather robust, as the system is designed to bring in party representatives as well as these wise watchdogs. Most important actions have eyes and consent from every involved stakeholder. In some states, is a genuinely impressive example of distributed processing and consensus.

The same folks that need 1/4 inch thick glasses to read 18 point font on a piece if A4 paper?

Yeah, there's never been any conspiracy between those three entities. Whatever you say!

The safeguard is the enormous scale of the U.S. election.

Flipping the 2020 election would’ve required 44,000 votes to have been different, and that’s with perfect knowledge of all the other votes that would be coming in.

> The US can fix it all.

Well I think part of the issue is that the US (as in the federal government of the United States) cannot fix it all, because each state makes its own election rules. So for instance the federal government can't say "All election results will be released only after the very last ballot in Hawaii is cast", each state has to independently agree to only release their state's election results after a certain time that all states agree upon.

The full investigation that op-ed is referencing is at https://www.nyc.gov/assets/doi/reports/pdf/2013/2013-12-30-B..., starting at page 12.

The undercover agents doing this investigation have a significant advantage; they're immune to consequences if they get caught. Malicious actors have to weigh significant criminal charges against the benefit of a single extra vote per visit to a polling place. Doing it at any scale means enormous numbers of involved persons, any one of which could be a law enforcement informant or whistleblower.

Do individual cases of this nature occur? Yes; we catch them regularly.

Do tens of thousands of cases of this nature occur all at once? Almost certainly not.

What prevents the US from having a Voter ID card like India does? A unique ID that is required to vote. That way, you only qualify to vote if you have a Voter ID, and once you turn the age of voting, you must get a Voter ID, like you got your SSN. For those who vote by mail, include a copy of your Voter ID with the ballot.

That will significantly reduce, if not eliminate, most of the fraud and put this argument to rest.

> What prevents the US from having a Voter ID card like India does?

Religious conspiracy theories ("Mark of the Beast"), the uniquely American concept of "freedom", etc.

And a worry from progressives that any "Voter ID" system is being manipulated to disenfranchise black people and poor people, as has happened in the past.

I agree, and the only fix to those concerns would be a free, universally issued ID from the Federal government rather than letting states set up a mismash of confusing and difficult to access systems. No one complains much about drivers' licenses, but national ID tends to bring out the crazies.

It still wouldn't work. People will complain that either they are not properly checking people are who they say they are or they will say it is too difficult to get an id and it will disenfranchise the poor/minorities.

Ive never met a poor or ‘minority’ person that didn’t have an ID unless they were homeless. The later argument of progressives is extremely demeaning to minorities to the point where it borders on explicit racism.

> Ive never met a poor or ‘minority’ person that didn’t have an ID unless they were homeless.

It's a good thing we don't have to depend on your limited experience to make policy decisions. There are millions of Americans without any ID. One survey in 2006 put the number at 21 million.

> the later argument of progressives is extremely demeaning to minorities to the point where it borders on explicit racism.

You should probably tell that to the minorities themselves, like the Congressional Black Caucus (https://www.ibtimes.com/alabama-voting-rights-congressional-...) for example, since they don't seem to have any issue with making that same argument or speaking out against voter suppression.

It can absolutely be a burden to get a state ID or drivers license and it can cost money that people don't have to spend. There's nothing "demeaning" about acknowledging that fact. The problems are real, and they don't even only impact minorities anyway.

> conspiracy theories

No, it is none of those. Show me the money. A voter id card required to vote is akin to a poll tax. If we have a voter id requirement, we have to have all voters have a place to go get this ID. Seven days a week, at least ten hours a day. Who will pay for this?

Wealthy people refuse to pay their fair share of the tax. I can't afford to pay any more tax. Something has to give. What government services will you cut to fund this noise?

There is almost no adult who can navigate adulthood and responsibilities without some form of identification. Tertiary School, Alcohol, Dispensaries, Job, Phone, CC card, Military Draft, etc.

Irrelevant. What is relevant is if they have a form of ID that is acceptable for voter ID in their state. Around 10% of eligible voters in the US do not.

Yes it is. It means that adults have a state issued ID. What eligible voters do not have IDs, where are you getting 10%. If it's the elderly, I'm sure they can organize to have an ID drive. It's not a problem. There may be a lack of desire, but if even actual poor countries can accomplish this modest feat, surely the US can.

The lack of desire is intentional.

The politicians pushing voter ID are well aware of the demographics of that 10%, and have little interest in addressing their access challenges because of them.

> where are you getting 10%

https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/oppose-voter-id-legislation-...

They should proofread their docs. They have multiple values for the same thing.

How many of those people want to vote?

Plenty.

> A recent voter-ID study by political scientists at the University of California at San Diego analyzed turnout in elections between 2008 and 2012 and found “substantial drops in turnout for minorities under strict voter ID laws.”

> Myrtle Delahuerta, 85, who lives across town from Randall, has tried unsuccessfully for two years to get her ID. She has the same problem of her birth certificate not matching her pile of other legal documents that she carts from one government office to the next. The disabled woman, who has difficulty walking, is applying to have her name legally changed, a process that will cost her more than $300 and has required a background check and several trips to government offices.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/courts_law/getting-a...

And Republicans are very aware of that.

> Last week, during the federal trial on Wisconsin’s voter-ID law, a former Republican staffer testified that GOP senators were “giddy” about the idea that the state’s 2011 voter-ID law might keep Democrats, particularly minorities in Milwaukee, from voting and help them win at the polls. “They were politically frothing at the mouth,” said the aide, Todd Allbaugh.

How many absolute voters?

This isn't so much of a problem since almost every other developed and even most still developing countries have a form of national ID which every citizen is encouraged and/or required to have.

It isn't a unique problem that the USA has and has been solved by almost every minimally organised country in the world.

American exceptionalism can go quite far sometimes.

Americans are weird about paying for a lot of things with taxes that other countries manage to do just fine and to their benefit. It would benefit the US to do the same and make sure that everyone can easily and without cost get a federal or state ID that they could use when voting.

Unfortunately, some Americans want the exact opposite of that and are actively working to make it harder and more expensive for the "wrong kind" of American people to get the ID they need to vote. If we all wanted more secure elections in America we'd have it already, but instead half the country just wants to prevent people who have every right to vote from being able to.

> If we have a voter id requirement, we have to have all voters have a place to go get this ID. Seven days a week, at least ten hours a day. Who will pay for this?

I agree that this is necessary; it must be Federal, free and readily obtainable.

That largely makes it unworkable; not for cost reasons (we do plenty in government that we don't pay for, including the existing free issuance of Social Security cards to everyone) but political ones.

The folks who want voter ID largely don't want this setup. They want a patchwork of confusing state-level requirements that are tough to navigate.

It can also be used to disenfranchise minority voters.

Despite being repeated ad nauseum, this has been patently false for the better part of a century and has no relationship with reality.

What? Millions of Americans don’t have any government ID, and that group is disproportionately racial minorities and poor folks.

Make IDs universally available (I.e. free federal IDs handed out proactively by driving offices out to rural areas and workplaces) and I don’t think you’d see much resistance to this.

The problem is that the “you need to have ID to vote” folks would never support such an idea. Complete mystery as to why!

How many millions? What % of the voting age population?

According to the Brennan Center for Justice, “up to 11% of the eligible voting population.”

Is your position that it’s alright if we just disenfranchise a few people?

I am cautiously pro-id but I disagree with you. The ACLU opposes voter IDs because they have been used to restrict access:

https://www.aclu.org/fact-sheet/oppose-voter-id-legislation-...

The problem with that in the US is that we have no form of ID that almost anyone who is eligible can obtain for free or very low cost.

We mostly use driver's licenses, and for people who don't drive states also offer IDs that look a lot like driver's licenses but are only for ID and are issued by the same agency that issues driver's licenses.

In many states they have closed many of the licensing offices, and cut back the hours licenses are issued at others. The closures happen disproportionately in poorer areas with a higher percentage of non-drivers. The reduced hours often leave office issuing licenses and IDs on weekdays in the middle of the day.

This can result in having to take a long trip on public transit to reach an office, and a long trip back, taking up much of your day. For many poor working people that can mean a day's wages lost.

The lost wages, transportation costs, and fees for the license or ID can come to over $100 which is a lot for many poorer people.

If we introduced an ID that is given to every citizen when they become old enough to vote, at no cost to them, and that can be obtained easily locally there would be little objection to requiring that to vote.

But most of the politicians pushing for voter ID are the ones that most benefit when poorer people cannot vote, and so tend to also be opposed to making the ID cheap and easy for eligible voters to obtain (and are also the ones closing license offices and reducing hours).

> The problem with that in the US is that we have no form of ID that almost anyone who is eligible can obtain for free or very low cost.

We do in every state where a ID is required to vote.

Maybe in the sense that you do not have to give any money to the agency that issues the ID.

Not free if you have to take a day of unpaid leave from work to go to that agency, or travel a great distance to get to their nearest office, or have to pay to get supporting documents (e.g., a certified copy of your birth certificate) to get the ID.

Now you've moved the goal post. What you said is often repeated and is totally incorrect.

How is that moving the goal post!?

Source?

It looks like at least a few states that require an ID like Oklahoma and Michigan charge fees (initial and reoccurring) for a state ID at least. What form of accepted ID is free?

Oklahoma: https://oklahoma.gov/elections/voters/proof-of-identity.html

> In addition, voters may use the free voter identification card they received by mail from the County Election Board when they registered to vote. The law allows use of the voter identification card even though it does not include a photograph.

Michigan: https://www.michigan.gov/sos/elections/upcoming-election-inf...

> If you do not have photo ID, you can still cast a ballot simply by signing an affidavit

> The problem with that in the US is that we have no form of ID that almost anyone who is eligible can obtain for free or very low cost.

Wrong. Every American citizen has Social Security Card as well as Birth Certificate or Naturalization Certificate. If you make a law that diverts 20% of election funds (and PACs) towards Social Security Administration they can make Social Security Card into a proper ID. Added benefit would be reduction in identity theft.

Functioning democracy is not cheap. But if a poor county like India with population 5x of the US could manage the voter IDs, we have no excuse for dragging our feet.

> I think the real reason is that the political donation system operates on trust

If what you say is only remote true, then every member of US political system is utterly corrupt.

CIA can give money to politicians and say it's from Google or TikTok or EU.

They can't.

1. Corporations aren't allowed to donate to politicians at all.

2. Foreign entities aren't allowed to donate, either.

Donations "from a corporation" are really donations from employees of the corporation. That is commonly misrepresented in news reports. You're required to cite your employer so that it can be spotted if the employer is filtering corporate donations through individual employees -- as was the case here.

American Corporations can create political action committees that are allowed drastically limited political donations. More importantly they can spend unlimited money on "issues" as long as they're not directly coordinating with a political campaign -- a fig leaf that can be less than a single atom thick at times.

“American corporations” is also less than an atom thick, as there are many fewer requirements than citizenship, for instance. There is no requirement for an American company to be owned by an American.

The FEC has 6 commissioners, and requires 4 for a quorum. In 2019, the FEC was down to 3 members, leaving the FEC without the ability to do any business.

In May 2020, a 4th member was finally added but then another one retired, leaving the commission out of operation again until December 2020.

Once they were operational again, they were probably backlogged and not fully operational. It could be that they were busy doing oversight of the 2020 election when they were out of commission, leaving the 2022 election vulnerable.

They are both horrendously backlogged and paralyzed on important issues by partisan polarization (the FEC, unlike most “independent” executige agencies, has an even partisan split with no tiebreaker.)

> The real question is, why weren’t these illegal donations found and red flagged well before he blew up so publicly and the feds started picking through his financial life with a fine toothed comb?

Because what was illegal was (1) that the money was stolen from firms SBF had essentially absolute control over, and (2) that the money was channeled through straw donors to maintain SBFs desired political image. Neither of those are obvious without tracing money flows.

And even with the investigation it may not have been obvious as soon, except that SBF personally bragged about doing straw donations to Republicans to maintain his preferred image in his post-bankruptcy “fire your attorneys and tweet out a litany of crimes no one has even accused you of yet” phase, which kind of pointed investigators at what to look for.

> The real question is, why weren't these illegal donations found and red flagged well before he blew up so publicly and the feds started picking through his financial life with a fine toothed comb?

Flagged by who - the donor or the recipients? It's obvious why neither would. Political donations in the US pretty much works on an honor system, this specific issue is only coming to light because someone is closely looking into a donor's books. By design, there is no strong oversight over donations by the SEC; I'm not sure it is structurally possible even if the will was there. Would the SEC provide oversight on election donations, and congress have oversight over the SEC? congress is made up of current-office holders and frequent candidates, the regulatory capture would be almost immediate (as early as the confirmation stage).

Politicians will not facilitate the sort of proactive financial surveillance on themselves you think ought to have caught this issue earlier.

The FEC is the branch that should be flagging it if anyone.

I’m less concerned about the wealth class than foreign citizens and governments though. Seems like we have a wide open gate that is intentionally being left open.

> The FEC is the branch that should be flagging it if anyone.

Thanks - I corrected my comment. I was thinking FEC, but writing "SEC", probably because FTX is involved.

More to your point - the FEC does not have a 30,000-foot view of finance flows into political campaigns and mostly relies on self-reporting. Contrast this to the breadth and depth of data vacuumed up by the Treasury department for Counter Terrorist Financing enforcement.

> I’m less concerned about the wealth class than foreign citizens and governments though

This has already happened on the record with the NRA, charges were filed, but it seems people collectively shrugged shoulders and moved on. Will it happen again? Absolutely.

> Seems like we have a wide open gate that is intentionally being left open.

Agreed, and the people in charge are ensuring the sound-proofed guardhouse next to the gate has no windows, and guests have to announce their arrival by shouting loudly. As Upton Sinclair observed: It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it

I’m curious what, if any, effects might the FEC still be dealing with from their 3 year period of being de-existed