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In-person voter fraud isn't that difficult, and especially in Washington people get packets in the mail they can vote with by returning in the mail which would

In-person voter fraud isn't that difficult, and especially in Washington people get packets in the mail they can vote with by returning in the mail which would be pretty easy for someone to go swiping from mailboxes. Verifying identity online is not an impossible challenge and we can't just avoid improving anything forever.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago
> In-person voter fraud isn't that difficult It’s difficult to scale without getting caught.
bobthepanda 7y ago
It's a lot easier to hijack online voting infrastructure than it is to start digging through everyone's mailboxes at the correct time when they happen to actually be sending a ballot out. The voting period in Washington is 18 days. So someone would have to either be constantly looking through my mail for the better part of three weeks, or have the best luck when it comes to predicting when I would actually send it out, and that's if they got the correct mailbox and I didn't, say, go to a post office or the ballot dropoff boxes. It would be hard to do even for an individual, and much harder to scale up.
- alasdair_ 7y ago
  To corrupt the vote, just offer some money for every empty ballot that gets sent to you to fill in and mail. There are a lot of people who would trade their ballot for a $20 bill.
  - catalogia 7y ago
    Good luck scaling that far enough to make a difference, without at the same time broadcasting your intentions to everybody.
    - alasdair_ 7y ago
      Just give a website address that displays a rotating physical address in Russia or China. Rely on the free PR from all the news stories about how terrible it is to scale with minimal "marketing" costs. If you picked the right districts, it wouldn't even cost that much to tilt the votes in your favor. At $50/ballot you'd almost certainly get 11,000 extra votes in Michigan - enough to swing the state in the last election at a total cost of just over half a million dollars. This ease of abuse is one of the many, many reasons that I support a single, national vote for president over per-state winner-take-all electoral college voting.
  - fg6hr 7y ago
    Some of these $20 bills would get reported to FBI. The probability is tiny, but it grows exponentially with the number of participants.

JumpCrisscross 7y ago

> In-person voter fraud isn't that difficult It’s difficult to scale without getting caught.

bobthepanda 7y ago

It's a lot easier to hijack online voting infrastructure than it is to start digging through everyone's mailboxes at the correct time when they happen to actually be sending a ballot out. The voting period in Washington is 18 days. So someone would have to either be constantly looking through my mail for the better part of three weeks, or have the best luck when it comes to predicting when I would actually send it out, and that's if they got the correct mailbox and I didn't, say, go to a post office or the ballot dropoff boxes. It would be hard to do even for an individual, and much harder to scale up.

alasdair_ 7y ago
To corrupt the vote, just offer some money for every empty ballot that gets sent to you to fill in and mail. There are a lot of people who would trade their ballot for a $20 bill.
- catalogia 7y ago
  Good luck scaling that far enough to make a difference, without at the same time broadcasting your intentions to everybody.
  - alasdair_ 7y ago
    Just give a website address that displays a rotating physical address in Russia or China. Rely on the free PR from all the news stories about how terrible it is to scale with minimal "marketing" costs. If you picked the right districts, it wouldn't even cost that much to tilt the votes in your favor. At $50/ballot you'd almost certainly get 11,000 extra votes in Michigan - enough to swing the state in the last election at a total cost of just over half a million dollars. This ease of abuse is one of the many, many reasons that I support a single, national vote for president over per-state winner-take-all electoral college voting.
- fg6hr 7y ago
  Some of these $20 bills would get reported to FBI. The probability is tiny, but it grows exponentially with the number of participants.