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> The thing is inactive voters are just that, inactive. There is very small risk that some of their names might get used for voter fraud. But every time this is

> The thing is inactive voters are just that, inactive. There is very small risk that some of their names might get used for voter fraud. But every time this is researched, only a handful of incidents are discovered and it takes thousands to swing an election. You claim the risk is small, but I'm not aware of anything that actually supports this assessment. This form of manipulation is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way. All the studies I'm aware of [1] have used prosecutions for voter fraud as a measure of the extent of fraud, but that is obviously contingent on the fraud being discovered. I'm part of an apparently nonexistent group of people who both believe in Voter ID laws and believe very strongly in maximizing potential voter turnout. People have ID -- opponents of voter ID have deliberately exaggerated the number of people without ids [2]. [1] https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debunking-voter-fraud-myth https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debu... has a good set of articles attempting to debunk the notion that various types of voter fraud occur. They all rely on "credible allegations" [2] https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/download_file_39242.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/d/d... -- just look at the first footnote and the description of the methodology, and if you buy their results then you're a sucker.

crispyambulance 7y ago
> [Voter fraud] is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way. If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best). No one seems to do that kind of study, however, because it's a lot of work and it's more "fun" to just blow thousands of people (mostly democrats) off the rolls.
- andrewla 7y ago
  > If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best). To be clear -- what do you mean by "truly inactive"? Usually "truly inactive" means they haven't voted. So people who voted are by default not "truly inactive". You would have to take some sort of heuristic estimate of how likely it is that a voter is inactive, and cross that with the voting record, and then attempt to individually contact the voter to verify that they did vote. The quality of such a heuristic would fundamentally affect the results. In other words, the experiment would either confirm widespread voter fraud, or, way more likely, provide no evidence for or against voter fraud.
  - crispyambulance 7y ago
    By "truly inactive" I mean voters who can't vote because they're dead, no longer live in that voting district, never actually existed, or are ineligible to vote. If these names appear as having voted, those are invalid and might be an indication of fraud. There's the another type of fraud, of course, where people use the names of active voters. A lot of people don't vote, so yeah, it could happen that someone else just takes their place. Whatever the case, both of these "fraud" scenarios are insignificantly small compared to the ham-fisted improper purging of thousands of names, and other suppression tactics such as gerrymandering.
fencepost 7y ago
If your contention is that vote fraud is hard to detect and probably happens more than we know, look into statistics. The likelihood of detecting a single case of improper voting is low, but if there's a significant volume of it happening then the likelihood of detecting that it's happening at all is pretty high, at which point more detailed investigation can be done. Edit: this kind of ties back to the allegations of massive voting fraud in the 2016 elections. Lots of people looked into it and found no significant level of improperly cast votes. That leads to either a contention that it did not happen or a contention that all of the people investigating it were either corrupt or incompetent.
specialist 7y ago
I was an election integrity activist, poll judge, poll worker for ~10 years. No one I know opposes need for identifying voters when issuing ballots. Jurisdictions vary, IIRC North Dakota doesn't require ID, so YMMV. Voter ID is verified during registration. Generally, voter ID is then confirmed when a ballot is issued in person. In most jurisdictions, many forms of identification are accepted to be issued a ballot. The stricter voter ID laws reduce kinds of identification permitted. Further, they'll do stupid shit like insist on exact matches, so "Mike" vs "Michael" would be rejected. Generally, these laws insist on perfection while injecting errors into the system, for explicitly partisan reasons. Tellingly, postal ballots are issued without confirming identification. Which are a much greater source of errors. But there's no partisan food fight over postal ballots. The fix is simple. Eliminate data quality problems with universal automatic voter registration. Moot the ID confirmation kerfuffle by issuing government ID, such as the upcoming Real ID. Then voila, the USA just joined all the other mature democracies by adopting time proven reasonable best practices.

crispyambulance 7y ago

> [Voter fraud] is nearly impossible to detect in a meaningful way. If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best). No one seems to do that kind of study, however, because it's a lot of work and it's more "fun" to just blow thousands of people (mostly democrats) off the rolls.

andrewla 7y ago
> If the "victims" of voter fraud truly cared enough, they could audit the voter records for any election. Unless I am wrong, there exists a record of whether or not each person on the rolls actually voted. The intersection of the people who voted with those that are deemed truly inactive would be the extend of the voter fraud (at best). To be clear -- what do you mean by "truly inactive"? Usually "truly inactive" means they haven't voted. So people who voted are by default not "truly inactive". You would have to take some sort of heuristic estimate of how likely it is that a voter is inactive, and cross that with the voting record, and then attempt to individually contact the voter to verify that they did vote. The quality of such a heuristic would fundamentally affect the results. In other words, the experiment would either confirm widespread voter fraud, or, way more likely, provide no evidence for or against voter fraud.
- crispyambulance 7y ago
  By "truly inactive" I mean voters who can't vote because they're dead, no longer live in that voting district, never actually existed, or are ineligible to vote. If these names appear as having voted, those are invalid and might be an indication of fraud. There's the another type of fraud, of course, where people use the names of active voters. A lot of people don't vote, so yeah, it could happen that someone else just takes their place. Whatever the case, both of these "fraud" scenarios are insignificantly small compared to the ham-fisted improper purging of thousands of names, and other suppression tactics such as gerrymandering.

fencepost 7y ago

If your contention is that vote fraud is hard to detect and probably happens more than we know, look into statistics. The likelihood of detecting a single case of improper voting is low, but if there's a significant volume of it happening then the likelihood of detecting that it's happening at all is pretty high, at which point more detailed investigation can be done. Edit: this kind of ties back to the allegations of massive voting fraud in the 2016 elections. Lots of people looked into it and found no significant level of improperly cast votes. That leads to either a contention that it did not happen or a contention that all of the people investigating it were either corrupt or incompetent.

specialist 7y ago

I was an election integrity activist, poll judge, poll worker for ~10 years. No one I know opposes need for identifying voters when issuing ballots. Jurisdictions vary, IIRC North Dakota doesn't require ID, so YMMV. Voter ID is verified during registration. Generally, voter ID is then confirmed when a ballot is issued in person. In most jurisdictions, many forms of identification are accepted to be issued a ballot. The stricter voter ID laws reduce kinds of identification permitted. Further, they'll do stupid shit like insist on exact matches, so "Mike" vs "Michael" would be rejected. Generally, these laws insist on perfection while injecting errors into the system, for explicitly partisan reasons. Tellingly, postal ballots are issued without confirming identification. Which are a much greater source of errors. But there's no partisan food fight over postal ballots. The fix is simple. Eliminate data quality problems with universal automatic voter registration. Moot the ID confirmation kerfuffle by issuing government ID, such as the upcoming Real ID. Then voila, the USA just joined all the other mature democracies by adopting time proven reasonable best practices.