No, they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting.

You should carefully examine the evidence you have supporting that belief. Start by observing that this is a partisan issue in which the official positions of the two major parties disagree on a factual claim, not merely the policy. A disagreement on policy can (sometimes) be chalked up to a difference in values, even though those do sometimes arise downstream of factual incorrectness. But a disagreement on facts is one with in which someone is right and someone is wrong. (Or, more complicatedly, someone is closer to accurate and someone is cherry-picking.)

If what you believe to be true is in fact true, then you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. Either way, I hope that you desire to find the correct answer rather than the one that would be convenient for your political position, and that whatever hypothesis you have has not set itself up to be unfalsifiable.

The fun part about this is that it depends on facts that nobody actually knows.

If you don't check ID then anyone with a list of registered-but-unlikely voters (or who registers unlikely voters ahead of time without their knowledge) could be voting multiple times and there is nothing to detect it. If you check ID then that doesn't happen as easily, but you still have no way to know if it would have happened in the alternative.

The closest thing to knowing would be if apparent turnout declines in response to checking ID, but a) different elections have different turnout anyway and b) even if you could detect a significant change, one party would then argue that it's a reduction in fraud and the other would argue that checking ID is reducing legitimate turnout, and you still don't know which one it is -- it could even be both.

Not really. You can audit ballots and match their ballot signature to the registration signature.

In fact this is done regularly.

We know for a statistical fact that there is no meaningful amount of this type of fraud (unless you're also supposing that these people somehow also acquire a copy of each person's signature).

You are creating an unfalsifiable hypothesis, and not attempting to falsify it.

Why do you believe what you believe? What would be true if it were false? Is that a thinkable alternative? If not, do you really have a hypothesis, or do you have a political belief being presented in the guise of a claim of fact?

> they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting

Illegal voting is so rare that almost every time folks go looking for it they come up empty handed. Examples of voter suppression, on the other hand, are trivial to fine. (And both parties do it, particularly around primaries.)

In my state, we’re trying to enact a citizenship-proof requirement which penalizes women who change their name on getting married and those who can’t afford a passport. In effect, a marriage and poll tax. Ironically, this will disenfranchise the MAGA voters who are themselves pushing for it, but I’m not really going to point that out aggressively.

(That said, a legitimate fraction of American politics right now is in convincing the other side’s likely voters that elections are rigged, the oligarchs are in charge, why even bother calling your electeds or voting, eat an ice-cream sundae and talk to your AI girlfriend.)

If someone mails in my absentee ballot and I don’t complain, how do you detect that voter fraud?

Or if someone knows their friend is sick and votes without an id, how do you detect that?

It seems like there are currently many ways to vote illegally that don’t get detected.

Perhaps so, but you still have to show that it is happening, not merely that it is possible. Moreover, you have to show that whatever cures you propose are both 1/proportional to the harm and 2/minimize undesirable side effects. (One challenge with the latter is that for some people, those side effects are actually desirable.)

Can you describe specifically how someone finds enough complaint-free absentee ballots and sick friends to vote at any meaningful scale?

Doing this even 10 times seems unbelievably hard.

It seems less hard if you datamine the shit out of everything, exfiltrate the social security database, and feed it into a computer. Get the historical voting records. SELECT address FROM voters that haven't voted in 10 years. Send someone to follow the mailman and steal ballots from that address. Or simply don't mail them out in the first place. They're not likely to notice to complain in the first place.

Not that I think the election was rigged, but if you think it's "unbelievably hard", I think that's a failure of imagination.

You’re describing an attack that entails both hacking the SSN database, 1 to 50 of the state voter databases, then physically following mailmen around and stealing ballots…

I think he’s referencing the doge boys getting access to social security files and taking them

We already handle all of that, comrade. Every corner case floating around your brain was floating around someone else's brain a long time ago. Most of this is covered in high school in the US, and it's all enforced by volunteers from across the political spectrum.

Our documented examples of voter fraud come from a time when in-person voting was the only option, again something we teach in school, while the modern concerns from security professionals focus almost entirely on electronic voting machines.

You have sign the ballot, and it gets checked.

> If someone mails in my absentee ballot and I don’t complain, how do you detect that voter fraud?

You get followed up in an audit, if anyone asks. This happened like three million times in Arizona.

> there are currently many ways to vote illegally that don’t get detected

There are. None of the proposed plans limit them. (No county requires scanning and biometrically verifying passports. You could buy a wrapper on eBay and inkjet the pages in most counties.)

There are also lots of ways to blow up public buildings. We don’t require ID to enter DC because the frequency of the harm isn’t matched by the cost of enforcement.

Illegal voting is "rare" because the system is set up so that it is in most cases impossible to detect.

Can you describe the specific chain of events required to create a fraudulent vote that is "impossible" to detect?

Surely if you can confidently state the system not only is this way, but is purposely designed this way, you should have zero problem describing it exactly step by step.

Extra credit if you can describe a method that can produce 10, 100, or 1000 votes.

Feds made a nice write up for you, if you are actually curious: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-woman-federally-ch...

Okay so in this scenario, if this woman wanted to actually vote on behalf of these people, all she had to do was pay a bunch of people to register with her address, get 10, 30, 100, or 1000 ballots mailed to her address, then fill out all of those ballots and mail them in and hope no one noticed dozens or hundreds or thousands of ballots coming from an address that would clearly and directly implicate the person who lives at/otherwise controls that address?

And the trade off here is this person gets 10, 30, 100, or 1000 votes in a single county and at the minuscule risk of the rest of her life in prison?

(To be clear, this isn’t what DOJ is alleging, they alleged she was just collecting petition signatures, but I’m extrapolating out your proposed mechanism for actual voting)

>hope no one noticed dozens or hundreds or thousands of ballots coming from an address

So what? If it was illegal to register multiple voters at the same address then it could have been detected at the registration time.

>And the trade off here is this person gets 10, 30, 100, or 1000 votes in a single county and at the minuscule risk of the rest of her life in prison?

Did not you notice that this person has not been charged with voting with other people ballots (even though she was able and most likely did that) and only with paying to register? Such a charge would be very hard to stick.

> Did not you notice that this person has not been charged with voting with other people ballots (even though she was able and most likely did that) and only with paying to register? Such a charge would be very hard to stick.

Huh? There is literally no evidence or even allegation of that. The person was paid to collect petition signatures, so she fraudulently obtained petition signatures. Which obviously are way less closely tracked than actual votes.

> So what? If it was illegal to register multiple voters at the same address then it could have been detected at the registration time.

Well it's not illegal to register multiple voters at the same address, obviously. It's illegal to vote under someone else's name. A bunch of votes coming in from a single residence would be flagged. Should voter registrations from a single address get flagged? Sure! And they probably do! But as you say, that's not a crime. Voting fraudulently is, which is not even alleged here.

Not sure what you are doing now. You asked for a scheme, you got it and now are appearing to be saying that such a scheme would not work because people would get busted even though you admit yourself there would not be any evidence.

Here was my request:

> Can you describe the specific chain of events required to create a fraudulent vote that is "impossible" to detect?

You literally just described a scheme that is possible to detect in any meaningful amount. 10, 100, or 1000 ballots coming from a single address is, obviously, trivially detectable.

I see. It's possible to detect the scheme per se even though the detection would not lead to charges (ballots from the people registered at the same address are completely legal) and thus would not be conducted. The point your correspondent has initially made: it's impossible to detect illegal voting in such a scheme.

> even though the detection would not lead to charges

Didn't you cite a charging document upthread?

Yes I did, did you read what I cited upthread?

What...?

Virtually every type of fraud is first detected by detection of a nominally legal but abnormal behavior, then it's investigated to figure out whether fraud actually occurred. That would – obviously – be exactly how any voter fraud detection scheme works, but I guess you're saying that because the initially detected abnormality is not itself illegal, it wouldn't be investigated?

This is like saying "it's not illegal for all the numbers on your tax return to end in $xxxx.00 and $xxxx.50, so therefore tax fraud is undetectable by means of analyzing numerical patterns."

Now you are just saying "illegal voting can be detected in this scheme even though I don't know how". Very smart!

You seem very confused.

Here's how it's detected: "There are 1000 ballots from this one address that has never had more than 3 ballots sent from it. We should look it up in our GIS and tax records and see how many people reside there. We should also make sure that the affiliated registrations are fully documented as having individual residencies there from e.g. their drivers licenses or utility bills at time of registration."

Sorry but you are naive beyond words if you think voting systems don't flag even a dozen ballots sent to a single residential address, or you don't think there's any investigative capability to look further into flagged cases.

Which do you believe? There are only three options:

1. You believe that 1000 ballots sent to a single address will not be flagged

2. You believe that it would be flagged but not investigated

3. You believe it would be flagged and investigated, but not actually result in any prosecutable offense

"Sorry but you are naive beyond words" that made me actually chuckle, coming from you. I am really done with your fantasies, you obviously have no clue how voting registration works (you are not required to live at your registered address for example) and what "checks" are in place yet imagined yourself an authority on the subject. It's so ignorant that makes me think you have not voted in the US and project your home country system.

Pandaman, 9 days ago: "When I moved to the US..." (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48406788)

Talk about projection, lmfao! Not even here long enough to prevent your weird writing quirks from revealing that you're a foreigner, and yet comfortable implying some strange nationalist superiority to a native-born American. Beyond parody.

Are people from your country unable to answer simple multiple-choice questions like "which of these three options do you believe?"

Nice redditing. Now I am 100% sure you are an H1B Indian who cannot imagine people can naturalize because it never happens to them.

Lmfao you think naturalizing makes you no longer a foreigner?

How is it that you're immediately detectable as not-American on a messaging board then?

Hint: It's the low-trust third-worlder attitude, which unfortunately the legal process of naturalization doesn't always solve.

Hilariously, your allegation of me being a foreigner was the nail in the coffin, as any actual American would know they can have disagreements on stuff like this without accusing the other of being a foreigner. But, being what... Russian? Georgian? Israeli? Obviously everything must be infused with an (unearned) nationalistic superiority haha.

Sorry, I did not consider another explanation for your ignorance about voting. You are just under 18! This explains your behavior much better. Apologies to Indians.