How would you even know? The fact that prosecutions for fraudulent voting are rare tells you nothing. Prosecutions for tax evasion are also rare. Does that mean nobody evades taxes? If you have a system that’s insecure, how would you even know when it’s been compromised?
Tax evasion is rarely prosecuted because nobody is looking very hard. People looked very, very, very hard for fraud in 2020 and found zilch.
If I've gotten any of my facts wrong, corrections (preferably with links) would be welcome — I don't have time right now to go dig up five-year-old news articles, I'm in the middle of a project.
But no, they didn't give up then and there.
> If I've gotten any of my facts wrong, corrections (preferably with links) would be welcome
See "Post-Election Cases Decided on the Merits" in [1].
How do you reconcile the idea that voter fraud is common with the existence of so many cases decided on the merits against the plaintiffs precisely due to sheer lack of evidence? You'd think these cases with people looking so hard would've uncovered nontrivial fraud if it was common, no?
[1] https://campaignlegal.org/results-lawsuits-regarding-2020-el...
As for your "How do you reconcile ..." question, I'll assume that the summaries of those ten cases are correct (I don't have time to read all ten of them for myself), and look through them one by one:
First one, Trump v. Biden (Wis. Dec. 14, 2020): three out of four claims tossed for not being filed in a timely manner. Fourth claim, "that voters wrongfully declared themselves indefinitely confined", ruled against Trump because "Trump challenged the status of all voters who claimed an indefinitely confined status, rather than individual voters". Not expert enough on relevant law to know what that means, but it looks to me like this one was "your claim is overbroad and you can't prove it" rather than "your claim is false", and I don't understand how that case relates to vote fraud. (Perhaps someone more informed about relevant law can explain this one to me).
Second one, Trump v. Wis. Elecs. Comm’n (E.D. Wis. Dec. 12, 2020): Trump claimed that "Wisconsin officials violated his rights under the Electors Clause because said officials allegedly issued guidance on state election statutes that deviated significantly from the requirements of Wisconsin’s election statutes." Court ruled that "interpretations of election administration rules do not fall under the meaning of “Manner” in the Electors Clause" and even if they did, the officials had "acted consistently with, and as expressly authorized by, the Wisconsin Legislature". Again, I don't understand how this one specifically relates to vote fraud, it looks like an argument about whether laws were followed. Perhaps the laws being followed were highly relevant to vote fraud, but someone will have to explain that one to me as well.
Third, King v. Whitmer (E.D. Mich. Dec. 7, 2020): First part was a decision about whether the law was followed. "Second, the district court found the plaintiffs’ Equal Protection claim to be too speculative, finding no evidence that physical ballots were altered." This one is a case where the court said "you haven't presented evidence of fraud".
Fourth, Ward v. Jackson (Ariz. Sup. Ct., Maricopa Cnty. Dec. 4, 2020): This was a decision that the plaintiff showed insufficient evidence of fraud.
Fifth, Law v. Whitmer (Nev. Dist. Ct., Carson City Dec. 4, 2020): Plaintiffs failed to prove "that there had been either a voting device malfunction or the counting of illegal/improper votes in a manner sufficient to raise reasonable doubt as to the election’s outcome." Actual decision on the merits saying "not enough evidence of fraud".
Sixth, Donald J. Trump for President v. Boockvar (M.D. Pa. Nov. 21, 2020): Court found that Trump lacked standing, but decided on the merits of his case. "The district court held that different counties implementing different types of notice-and-cure policies (many implementing none) did not violate the Equal Protection Clause because the clause does not require complete equality in all situations—“a classification resulting in ‘some inequality’ will be upheld unless it is based on an inherently suspect characteristic or ‘jeopardizes the exercise of a fundamental right.’”" Again, unless I'm misunderstanding the case, not a decision about "you didn't show evidence of fruad", but rather about whether election law was followed correctly. (If I understand right, "notice-and-cure" policies means a voter says "Hey, something's fishy here" and the election board has been put on notice and must "cure", resolve, the alleged problem. Which is relevant to fraud, but does not mean this was a decision where the judge said "you didn't provide enough evidence".)
Seventh, Wood v. Raffensperger (N.D. Ga. Nov. 20, 2020): first claim dismissed because "there was no disparate treatment among Georgia voters". Second claim dismissed because "Secretary Brad Raffensperger had not overridden or rewritten any state law". Third claim dismissed because "there is no individual constitutional right to observe the electoral process (i.e., monitor an audit or vote recount)". Again, maybe there's something I'm missing, but this doesn't look like a decision on whether there was evidence, or lack thereof, of fraud.
Eighth, Bower v. Ducey (D. Ariz. Dec. 9, 2020): Did address claims of fraud, saying plaintiffs had not presented evidence, merely speculation that fraud "could" have occurred or was statistically likely, which the court did not find to meet evidentiary standards. So this one was indeed a decision on the evidence.
Ninth, Costantino v. City of Detroit (3d Jud. Ct. Wayne Cnty. Nov. 13, 2020): Dismissed at preliminary injunction stage; "the court found that the plaintiffs’ claims of fraud would unlikely prevail on the merits" because "many plaintiffs failed to include crucial information in their allegations, such as locations of alleged misconduct, frequency of alleged misconduct, names of those involved in alleged misconduct, and so on." So in a rushed case filed a week or so after the election, plaintiffs didn't put together enough evidence, and the judge said "We don't need to proceed to fact-finding, I can tell your case is weak before I even look at the details".
Arizona Republican Party v. Fontes (Ariz. Sup. Ct., Maricopa Cty.): "The court noted that the relief plaintiff sought—an additional hand count of ballots—was not legally available due to the suit’s numerous procedural defects. The court found that plaintiff did not adequately assess the validity of their claims before filing the suit, and thus failed to prove that the county had inappropriately applied the statute in question." Decided on procedural grounds, not actually evidentiary grounds.
So of the ten cases in that list, five (cases 1, 2, 6, 7, and 10) were not actually cases where the judge ruled on evidence of fraud, as far as I can tell. (Again, corrections on specifics welcome if I misunderstood one of these). The other five were decided on "you don't show convincing evidence of fraud", though I question whether #9 should count in that list because it was a preliminary injunction rather than reaching the fact-finding stage.
So that's five, or possibly four if you discount number nine but let's count it for the sake of argument, cases out of the 62 where the court went as far as ruling on the evidence.
And I have no trouble reconciling the idea of widespread fraud with five court cases where plaintiffs couldn't prove it. Because in many cases, the kind of fraud people are claiming happened (note that I have not actually investigated those claims) are things that would be extremely hard to prove afterwards, such as people walking up to an unguarded ballot dropoff location and stuffing 50 ballots into it. We know that happened in some places, because a few times the person was caught on video. But how do you prove, to a court's satisfaction, that that was someone committing fraud, as opposed to someone helpfully collecting ballots for friends and family so they didn't have to drive downtown?
No, if fraud is happening then the way to prevent it is by putting rules in place to make it hard, rather than court cases afterwards. It's very very hard to prove certain kinds of election fraud (such as alleged ballot-stuffing) were fraudulent. But it's a lot easier (not easy, mind you) to put rules in place, like requiring some form of official photo ID for verification, that make fraud harder to commit.
I don’t know how you can say people looked hard for fraud in 2020 when the lawsuits happened long after the ballots were counted. How would a lawsuit even reconstruct what happened in an election that happened months before where nobody was keeping detailed records?
The people who have claimed for decades that there is rampant cheating have spent years and millions of dollars and have found so little that it actually proves the case against their claims. Further, it has been shown that what sounds like reasonable checking ends up preventing 100-200 legitimate votes for every one illegal vote prevented.
HN guidelines say not to get political, but it is hard to avoid in this case because it is one party which is claiming widespread voter fraud. Let's start with a simple case. Tell me which of these facts is not true:
* Donald Trump has claimed and continued to claim millions of illegal votes have been made against him, including millions by illegal aliens. The same claim, perhaps not using such large numbers, has been widely and frequently repeated by conservative media
* Donald Trump became president in 2017 and had the might and resources of the full federal government to root out voter fraud
* Donald Trump aggressively prosecutes his self-interests, and millions of illegal votes against him would be against his self-interest
* As president, it is not just in his personal interest but is part of his duty to ensure voting is fair
* Trump appointed Kris Kobach (more on him later), the AG of Kansas, to form a commission to get to the bottom of the rampant voter fraud
* Nothing of note was produced by the commission ... it just kind of petered out
(1) Trump was negligent in his duties by not investigating the issue
(2) Trump or his subordinates were incompetent in their investigation of the issue
(3) Voter fraud is not common. I'll leave it to speculation whether this was an honest mistake on the part of conservatives or if they were lying for political gain
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris_Kobach#Voter_fraud_claims
Quoting a bit of it:
> At that time, he "said he had identified more than 100 possible cases of double voting." Testifying during hearings on the bill, questioned by Rep. John Carmichael, Kobach was unable to cite a single other state that gives its secretary of state such authority.[153] By February 7, 2017, Kobach had filed nine cases and obtained six convictions. All were regarding cases of double voting; none would have been prevented by voter ID laws.[154][104][155] One case was dropped while two more remained pending. All six convictions involved older citizens, including four white Republican men and one woman, who were unaware that they had done anything wrong.
The rest of it is similar, and all confirmed only that voter fraud is rare. But worse than that is his tactics, which have been adopted by many states, disenfranchises 100x more legal voters than illegal voters it catches. And statistically, it disenfranchises Democrats in far greater proportion than Republican voters (35% vs 23% of the affected voters).
Here is another useful quote, along with a citation, on this topic from that same wikipedia entry:
> A Brennan Center for Justice report calculated that rates of actual voter fraud are between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent. The Center calculated that someone is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud.[156]
How would you even verify past elections? You can point to millions spent on commissions and lawyers, but those can’t go back and generate data that was never contemporaneously collected.
Think of it in terms of computer security. You had a telnet server exposed to the internet for years. You have no logs, and the machine got scrapped before you ever got access to it. How would you do a security audit to determine if anyone broke into the server? You could spend millions on a commission and have the commission declare there was no security breach, but that would be for show, right?
You say people don’t look too hard for tax evasion, but people don’t look very hard for voter fraud as the voting is happening. And by its nature it’s something that you can’t reliably look for after the election has happened.
If you show up to the polling place, you need to list the name and address of a registered voter in that district. How do you know this information?
If you use a relative or acquaintance whose name and address you know they're registered at, when they show up to vote it will be noted that they have already voted. They can then put in their preliminary ballot, and presumably their signature will more closely match the fraudulent one and the real one will be counted.
There are enough basic hurdles to this that I don't see how it can even be done at scale.
If you're trying to register in someone else's name, you have to pray that they don't register themselves or show up to the polls to vote. That's a gamble which prevents systematic individual voter fraud.
No. You register once and that applies to all future elections (at least until you update your registration for whatever reason, e.g. because you changed addresses).
> and the agency in charge has a backoffice is cross-checking this against... something?
Against the state's voter registration database, usually maintained by that state's Secretary of State or equivalent.
> What if my birth certificate or whatever is from a different place.
If the birth certificate is from somewhere within the US, then validating the birth certificate is usually just a matter of contacting the county clerk where you were born. If it's from somewhere outside the US, then you ain't eligible to vote anyway unless you've gone through the process of becoming a naturalized citizen — in which case you'd have more appropriate identifying documents that you'd use in place of your birth certificate.
It's nitpicking, but you can be a citizen by birth without either having a birth certificate from a country you are citizen of and without naturalizing, but you will have some other document in that case too.
>Against the state's voter registration database, usually maintained by that state's Secretary of State or equivalent.
Isn't it circular? To be in the database you are checked against the database?
It's turtles^Wdatabases all the way down.
(I was a bit concerned because the hospital I was born in had been razed and the whole area redeveloped 50 years ago, but there was no problem.)
A couple weeks ago I went to the nearest DMV and got a RealID. It took 15 minutes. (The RealID is proof of citizenship and residency.)
The DMV people and the people in the passport office are very helpful in how to get the necessary proof.
That's nice and matches my obviously-not-north-american experience. Have you considered that you are not the target audience of the voter suppression because of something ?
On the other hand, there are other ways for people to steal elections. For example, you can steal mail-in ballots from mailboxes, fill them, and covertly drop them in. It's particularly easy to do in states where all ballots are mail-in by default. The risk-reward calculation is different, because now one organized person can cast dozens, or hundreds of fraudulent votes, instead of just one.
In other states, you don't even need to steal them: you can just knock on the door, ask people for ballots (or buy them, many people will happily sell their right to vote for $20, because it's worthless to them), fill them in, and drop them off completely in the open. Of course, the stealing/buying and filling in the ballots is illegal, but since this happens in private, it's much harder to detect and prosecute. That's why most states disallow dropping off votes for third parties, but some states inexplicably allow it.
There are multiple recent cases, where people were convicted for schemes like that, e.g State of Arizona v. Guillermina Fuentes, Texas v. Monica Mendez, Michigan v. Trenae Rainey, U.S. v. Kim Phuong Taylor, and more. Since these are only the cases where conviction was secured, the true number is much higher.
The official website says they collect either a driver's license number, state ID number, or the last 4 digits of your Social Security number. With that it should be trivial to flag potentially fraudulent applications for further investigation.
Do you have a source that says they don't use that information for verification?
https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/voters/voter-registration/r...
https://www.thurstoncountywa.gov/departments/auditor/electio...
Yes, it does. But who and how is someone going to challenge 100,000 registrations? This issue was brought up in the paper, and people objected to it saying such was an invasion of privacy.
There's usually an immediate personal benefit from evading taxes and not getting caught. Fraudulent voting doesn't have that.
This is explicitly not required, at least last time I volunteered as a polling place worker. You should NEVER be required to show ID to vote, at least in CA.
I have to show ID to get into my local zoo, but not to vote someone onto the board in charge of the zoo. That doesn't make sense.
That prompts an investigation. The “right” person casts an affidavit ballot and the police and courts investigate. If the count is close, the loser usually sure to recount and verify, and any of these incidents then become political kindling. It doesn’t happen because it isn’t worth it individually and difficult to coördinate en masse.
[^] except for the case of felony disenfranchisement laws, which I personally believe are a travesty
This can be argued for any hindrance to bureaucracy. On the balance you get a much more robust system, with fewer centralized fail-safes.
If you're trying to fake it, you need to know what address and name someone else is registered at, what polling place they were assigned, and you have to hope they don't show up to vote too.
All of these uncertainties mean it's pretty difficult for an individual to do any serious (if any!) voter fraud.
Remember we had voting for a long time before magnetic strips and plastic.
- Enter queue
- A front of queue, show ID of some sort (various accepted) to volunteer
- They scratch you from the list and hand you a paper scantron sheet
- Go to private booth, fill out scantron
- Go to exit, scan ballot (it scans and then drops into a locked box for manual tally later, if necessary)
The "easy" ways to vote fraudulently are also easily caught... fake ID documents, voting twice, etc.
For people who forget their ID or have address changes that haven't propagated through the voter roll, there is provisional voting - you do the same as above, but they keep the ballot in a separate pile and validate your eligibility to vote at a later time. IIRC, the voter gets a ticket # so they can check the voter portal later to see if the ballot was accepted.
As noted, the number of fraudulent votes are astonishingly small, given the amount of money spent on proving otherwise. The current GOP has spent 100s of millions or billions on proving wide-spread fraud and so far, all they've managed to prove a few voters, most of whom were actually GOP-leaning, have committed fraud (and most of them were caught day-of already).