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We should trust but verify the results. The basis of facts should be settled in the following: 1. Select all ballots that were sent to the same address - or se

We should trust but verify the results. The basis of facts should be settled in the following: 1. Select all ballots that were sent to the same address - or sent to the same Post Office (grouping all PO Boxes by post office). ^ Here you are trying to see if there is systemic voting behaviors out of the ordinary -- i.e. did 10+ ballots go to one address. 2. Select all ballots that were sent to an alternate address than the voter registration. ^ This is a general query -- select a sample set of these and confirm with the registered voter that they did indeed receive a mail in ballot. 3. If above is inconclusive, select all registered voters that requested a mail in ballot against the 2017-2018 Equifax Data to determine if correlations occur. 4. Select all ballots that were the voter did not vote in the last X elections (there are political consultancies that provide information on who NOT to waste your time on because they do not vote), did these people request a mail in ballot? Were these ballots sent to an alternate address? For clarification [1], if one were armed with a SSN or DL and a previous address, one could request a ballot on behalf of another person AND have that ballot redirected to a location of their choosing... including a PO Box. The form is included here for reference. [1] https://www.votespa.com/Register-to-Vote/Documents/PADOS_MailInApplication.pdf https://www.votespa.com/Register-to-Vote/Documents/PADOS_Mai... EDIT: just so you know, I think both of them did things like this. I want my d%mn democracy back.

einpoklum 6y ago
This was not done after the 2016 elections. Why should such a procedure be adopted now? Are there any indications of widespread fraud / miscounting / etc. ?
- anonymouse008 6y ago
  There was never any “cover” to hide behind — we never really did much mail in voting as a people (absentee mostly). Now the pandemic is cover enough to hide a few thousand with ease.
  - willis936 6y ago
    I’m confused. People who count ballots only count ballots they issue. Sending in 50k ballots they didn’t issue would result in 50k ballots they didn’t issue getting thrown out. Where is there room for concern for fraud?
  - joshuamorton 6y ago
    A few states have been all mail-in for years. 10s of millions of votes were cast by mail in 2016 and 2018. There were certainly more this year, but only like 4-5x. (It helps that the most populous state is mostly mail-in). HN is throttling me, so here's some more info: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/absentee-and-mail-voting-policies-in-effect-for-the-2020-election.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/absent... and https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html have most of the info you want. CO, DC, HI, OR, UT, and WA are vote by mail for all elections. CA was sort of doing VBM in 2016, but it's more committed to it now. This year, NJ, VT, and NV were also vote by mail as one time things. So in prior years there were more than 30 million mail ballots, and AZ, CA, CO, FL, MI, OH, OR, and WA had more than a million mail votes cast (though some of those were likely classified as absentee in MI and OH).
    - charliemil4 6y ago
      Can you please cite the states that are all-mail in please? I've been checking SOS websites and have not run across this in the states I've checked... Edit: Thank you both (below, too) for the info. Yeah, so for the states that default mail ballots (WA, OR, CO), I don't see an issue as these states have used this method previously. What I'm focusing on are states that moved from 'vote by mail optional' -- to 'vote by mail, nearly default because of a recent pandemic.' Which changes the nature and security of the Ballot Request System in each of these states. Normal implicit controls around ballot requests are out of the window in this new 'mail-in majority' culture. Refer to my 'bussing' example above.
      - theplague42 6y ago
op00to 6y ago
Do you realize how fucking hard it is to influence elections by ballot shenanigans?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- minerjoe 6y ago
  Do you realize how much fucking power is at play here?
  - butbutemails2 6y ago
    Exactly! I mean if you look at the reports in 2019 the issues were not addressed yet with mayo: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
willis936 6y ago
The actual scale of the audit of 100 million ballots is an insane cost with extensive time. The verification is built into the system. Key features include: states conducting their own elections, paper ballots being required, ballots need to have a chain of custody to be valid, and counting is done in a transparent and continuously audited manner. Making lists and centralized techniques are a Bad Idea and exactly what authoritarian regimes go about doing.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
lettergram 6y ago
In Michigan there were ballots sent by dead voters: https://austingwalters.com/the-dead-vote-in-michigan/ https://austingwalters.com/the-dead-vote-in-michigan/ I found probably 10 of these, some invalidated, some supposedly had the wrong birthdate in the system (which probably should be validated anyway)... Gov of Michigan apparently took the site down, but feel free to see the video
dodobirdlord 6y ago
Voting fraud on the scale required to influence a US election is not possible due to voting registration requirements. Registering any significant amount of fake people is not feasible, and if you are trying to cast the votes of any significant number of real people you will quickly have a collision with someone who actually does intend on voting, leading to an investigation and the whole scheme unraveling. Voter registration + signature checks + investigating duplicate ballots is a robust system for ensuring that systematic voting fraud can only achieve a small result without being overwhelmingly likely to be caught. If the election had actually come down to a margin of a few thousand votes in a single state it might have been worth the resources to do a deep-dive, but with the margins that occurred we can be certain that voting fraud did not influence the result.
- blub 6y ago
  The claims I've seen were: * dead people "voted" in the election * late votes by mail were stamped with a fictive past date Anyway, I don't see why you're so comfortable with election fraud as long as it doesn't influence the result. There is no way to know if fraud happened and what scale this happened at without doing this so-called "deep-dive" you mention.
  - nemothekid 6y ago
    No one is comfortable with election fraud. Election Fraud is a well researched problem (by republicans too), and it's been shown again and again that it is an incredibly small problem. You are talking about a couple thousand confirmed cases [1] in elections where tens of millions of votes were cast. Claims of election fraud are not new. A bigger problem is voter suppression, through ever growing extraneous requirements (such as Harris County, a population of 5 million, only have 1 ballot drop off, due to a law to prevent more than one drop off per county). Voter supression however does not get anywhere near the same amount of attention. [1] https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    The election boards of each of the 50 States and the District of Columbia do in fact conduct regular audits, and frequently purge voter rolls of registered voters that have been sufficiently inactive as to be suspected of having died or moved out of the state. You may have read about such events in previous months in the national news. I don’t see why I would care much if there is voting fraud if I can be certain that it did not influence the result. What does it harm me if an election decided by a margin of tens of thousands of votes had some few hundreds or even thousands of illegitimate ballots cast? It’s a tiny amount of noise in a very strong signal. It’s easy for a state to estimate what percentage of the vote could possibly have been fraudulent, and when the signal seems to be at risk of being lost in the noise there is a robust process of signal recovery. But recounts are expensive and a waste of time and resources when they are not needed.
throwaway5752 6y ago
This just doesn't happen. This has been a cause celebre of one party in the use for more than a decade and they have found on the order of a dozen proven examples of voter fraud. https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/Briefing_Memo_Debunking_Voter_Fraud_Myth.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/B... has hard data. The problem, which doesn't require citation as it has been in the news for weeks, is partisan voter suppression, disenfranchisement (DC, Puerto Rico, Guam), and gerrymandering. Every single thing you have suggested has been investigated and have found something on the order of 1* 10^-4 % rates of occurrence. To remind everyone, there was a lawsuit to disenfranchise over 100,000 voters in Texas because of disagreement in how their ballots were submitted. Not recounted, not rechecked. Summarily tossed out. > 1000 times more people would have been effected by this one incident than there were provable instances of voter fraud (most of which was based on confusion by elderly). Limited voting hours, closures of voting stations so common they are accepted now but they are outrageous. This is leaving aside the well documented actions of DeJoy during his time with the USPS. I would also like to see an investigation with subpoena of communications of of the company that caused delays in the printing/mailing of PA absentee ballots https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/politics/elections/cleveland-company-midwest-direct-called-out-by-the-new-york-times-after-delays-in-printing-of-absentee-ballots-and-questions-of-bias/95-4799e934-3bb1-4021-9e65-76725faeabb4 https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/politics/elections/clevela... and tracing the threatening robocall campaign in swing states: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/03/robocall-election-day/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/03/robocal... The US doesn't have a voting integrity issue, it has a voting suppression issue. edit: just another example of the egregious attempts at disenfranchising voters: https://ktar.com/story/3681236/elections-officials-lawyer-calls-arizona-sharpie-lawsuit-remedies-unworkable/ https://ktar.com/story/3681236/elections-officials-lawyer-ca...
- deleted 6y ago
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- charliemil4 6y ago
  > The US doesn't have a voting integrity issue, it has a voting suppression issue. While I whole heartedly agree, I’m concerned how we arrived here. There have been no new additional controls put in place to ensure a dramatic shift in the voter culture (from majority in person to mail in), did not expose vulnerabilities previously unused.
baby 6y ago
There's no way to have a safe voting system without trust in the government and how states operate. There's just no way that, as a citizen, you can verify your vote. It's all in sybil attacks: how do you identify one person in the first place? You need strong cryptography tied to each citizen, and you need to trust the government that they are not creating fictive citizens.
drewbug01 6y ago
> Select all ballots that were the voter did not vote in the last X elections I don’t think there’s anything inherently suspicious about voting for the first time in a long time (or ever). This election was incredibly charged, so you would expect to see more people voting than usual. I just want to push back strongly on the idea that a vote is suspicious just because that voter doesn’t typically vote. It’s a soft form of voter suppression, in a way - and we should be conscious to encourage everyone to vote, regardless of how long it’s been. — As an anecdote - I encouraged my family to vote, and some of them did: some of them for the first time in a very long time. I also served as an election judge and registered more than one person to vote on Election Day, including one person who told me they’d never bothered to vote before. But their votes were valid, and don’t deserve to be treated as suspicious.
- charliemil4 6y ago
  So yeah, totally agree there will be outliers, but it’s definitely a focused sample set that tests the hypothesis well. It’s complex, with a ton of fractaled placed to hide (day of registrations, first time voters etc)
sg47 6y ago
Did you ask for this in 2016, 2012 or 2008 too? Just curious. Shouldn't we also make sure that certain Republican voters did not vote in multiple states or counties?
- charliemil4 6y ago
  I don’t think your question is serious, right? Were we in a pandemic that statistically shifted the voter habits of a large amount of Americans from in person, physically gated process to a highly leveragable, mail in ballot process in those years? As for 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 (there is much power outside of a presidential election) — the bus example is the current status quo and has been used for ages and accepted as the norm — that’s been the “worst/best (whatever your virtue signal tells you) way to influence an election. If you’d like to have an honest discussion about it - I’d love to, I’m very seriously in the camp that votes are votes and every single one should be counted no matter how they arrived to the polls.
  - thomastjeffery 6y ago
    > highly leveragable, mail in ballot process It isn't. Mail in ballots have been the status quo in many states for decades. The most common problem with mail in ballots has been rejection from unverified signatures, which in some cases is arguably an instance of voter suppression.
    - charliemil4 6y ago
      > Mail in ballots have been the status quo in many states for decades. Let’s focus on the battle ground states - not all states - and let’s specifically look at PA for a moment. Because of the electoral college, the statement that nationwide and some states we have used mail in ballots before is irrelevant. So in 2018 PA had 200k absentee ballots - the mail-in ballot process [0]. In 2016 PA, and specifically Philly, had fewer absentee ballots requested than 2008 or 2012 [1] with around 18k for that metro. In 2020, 2.6 million mail in ballots were requested 3 weeks before the election [2]. So you tell me, what really looks like the status quo? 2.6m ballots or around 200k. Physics would call this an order or magnitude difference, no? That would directly contradict that mail in ballots for PA are a status quo... and if you looked at the rest of the battle ground states, you will find similar evidence that mail in was never the preferred or dominate form of voting in the metros and battle ground counties. [0]https://whyy.org/articles/pa-rejected-twice-as-many-absentee-ballots-in-2018/ https://whyy.org/articles/pa-rejected-twice-as-many-absentee... [1] https://www.phillymag.com/news/2016/11/02/absentee-ballot-requests-clinton-trump-election/ https://www.phillymag.com/news/2016/11/02/absentee-ballot-re... [2] https://www.post-gazette.com/local/2020/10/13/Pennsylvania-mail-in-ballot-requests-2-6-million-registered-voters-PA-2020/stories/202010130153 https://www.post-gazette.com/local/2020/10/13/Pennsylvania-m...

einpoklum 6y ago

This was not done after the 2016 elections. Why should such a procedure be adopted now? Are there any indications of widespread fraud / miscounting / etc. ?

anonymouse008 6y ago
There was never any “cover” to hide behind — we never really did much mail in voting as a people (absentee mostly). Now the pandemic is cover enough to hide a few thousand with ease.
- willis936 6y ago
  I’m confused. People who count ballots only count ballots they issue. Sending in 50k ballots they didn’t issue would result in 50k ballots they didn’t issue getting thrown out. Where is there room for concern for fraud?
- joshuamorton 6y ago
  A few states have been all mail-in for years. 10s of millions of votes were cast by mail in 2016 and 2018. There were certainly more this year, but only like 4-5x. (It helps that the most populous state is mostly mail-in). HN is throttling me, so here's some more info: https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/absentee-and-mail-voting-policies-in-effect-for-the-2020-election.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/absent... and https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html https://electproject.github.io/Early-Vote-2020G/index.html have most of the info you want. CO, DC, HI, OR, UT, and WA are vote by mail for all elections. CA was sort of doing VBM in 2016, but it's more committed to it now. This year, NJ, VT, and NV were also vote by mail as one time things. So in prior years there were more than 30 million mail ballots, and AZ, CA, CO, FL, MI, OH, OR, and WA had more than a million mail votes cast (though some of those were likely classified as absentee in MI and OH).
  - charliemil4 6y ago
    Can you please cite the states that are all-mail in please? I've been checking SOS websites and have not run across this in the states I've checked... Edit: Thank you both (below, too) for the info. Yeah, so for the states that default mail ballots (WA, OR, CO), I don't see an issue as these states have used this method previously. What I'm focusing on are states that moved from 'vote by mail optional' -- to 'vote by mail, nearly default because of a recent pandemic.' Which changes the nature and security of the Ballot Request System in each of these states. Normal implicit controls around ballot requests are out of the window in this new 'mail-in majority' culture. Refer to my 'bussing' example above.
    - theplague42 6y ago

op00to 6y ago

Do you realize how fucking hard it is to influence elections by ballot shenanigans?

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
minerjoe 6y ago
Do you realize how much fucking power is at play here?
- butbutemails2 6y ago
  Exactly! I mean if you look at the reports in 2019 the issues were not addressed yet with mayo: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

willis936 6y ago

The actual scale of the audit of 100 million ballots is an insane cost with extensive time. The verification is built into the system. Key features include: states conducting their own elections, paper ballots being required, ballots need to have a chain of custody to be valid, and counting is done in a transparent and continuously audited manner. Making lists and centralized techniques are a Bad Idea and exactly what authoritarian regimes go about doing.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

lettergram 6y ago

In Michigan there were ballots sent by dead voters: https://austingwalters.com/the-dead-vote-in-michigan/ https://austingwalters.com/the-dead-vote-in-michigan/ I found probably 10 of these, some invalidated, some supposedly had the wrong birthdate in the system (which probably should be validated anyway)... Gov of Michigan apparently took the site down, but feel free to see the video

dodobirdlord 6y ago

Voting fraud on the scale required to influence a US election is not possible due to voting registration requirements. Registering any significant amount of fake people is not feasible, and if you are trying to cast the votes of any significant number of real people you will quickly have a collision with someone who actually does intend on voting, leading to an investigation and the whole scheme unraveling. Voter registration + signature checks + investigating duplicate ballots is a robust system for ensuring that systematic voting fraud can only achieve a small result without being overwhelmingly likely to be caught. If the election had actually come down to a margin of a few thousand votes in a single state it might have been worth the resources to do a deep-dive, but with the margins that occurred we can be certain that voting fraud did not influence the result.

blub 6y ago
The claims I've seen were: * dead people "voted" in the election * late votes by mail were stamped with a fictive past date Anyway, I don't see why you're so comfortable with election fraud as long as it doesn't influence the result. There is no way to know if fraud happened and what scale this happened at without doing this so-called "deep-dive" you mention.
- nemothekid 6y ago
  No one is comfortable with election fraud. Election Fraud is a well researched problem (by republicans too), and it's been shown again and again that it is an incredibly small problem. You are talking about a couple thousand confirmed cases [1] in elections where tens of millions of votes were cast. Claims of election fraud are not new. A bigger problem is voter suppression, through ever growing extraneous requirements (such as Harris County, a population of 5 million, only have 1 ballot drop off, due to a law to prevent more than one drop off per county). Voter supression however does not get anywhere near the same amount of attention. [1] https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  The election boards of each of the 50 States and the District of Columbia do in fact conduct regular audits, and frequently purge voter rolls of registered voters that have been sufficiently inactive as to be suspected of having died or moved out of the state. You may have read about such events in previous months in the national news. I don’t see why I would care much if there is voting fraud if I can be certain that it did not influence the result. What does it harm me if an election decided by a margin of tens of thousands of votes had some few hundreds or even thousands of illegitimate ballots cast? It’s a tiny amount of noise in a very strong signal. It’s easy for a state to estimate what percentage of the vote could possibly have been fraudulent, and when the signal seems to be at risk of being lost in the noise there is a robust process of signal recovery. But recounts are expensive and a waste of time and resources when they are not needed.

throwaway5752 6y ago

This just doesn't happen. This has been a cause celebre of one party in the use for more than a decade and they have found on the order of a dozen proven examples of voter fraud. https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/Briefing_Memo_Debunking_Voter_Fraud_Myth.pdf https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/B... has hard data. The problem, which doesn't require citation as it has been in the news for weeks, is partisan voter suppression, disenfranchisement (DC, Puerto Rico, Guam), and gerrymandering. Every single thing you have suggested has been investigated and have found something on the order of 1* 10^-4 % rates of occurrence. To remind everyone, there was a lawsuit to disenfranchise over 100,000 voters in Texas because of disagreement in how their ballots were submitted. Not recounted, not rechecked. Summarily tossed out. > 1000 times more people would have been effected by this one incident than there were provable instances of voter fraud (most of which was based on confusion by elderly). Limited voting hours, closures of voting stations so common they are accepted now but they are outrageous. This is leaving aside the well documented actions of DeJoy during his time with the USPS. I would also like to see an investigation with subpoena of communications of of the company that caused delays in the printing/mailing of PA absentee ballots https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/politics/elections/cleveland-company-midwest-direct-called-out-by-the-new-york-times-after-delays-in-printing-of-absentee-ballots-and-questions-of-bias/95-4799e934-3bb1-4021-9e65-76725faeabb4 https://www.wkyc.com/article/news/politics/elections/clevela... and tracing the threatening robocall campaign in swing states: https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/03/robocall-election-day/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2020/11/03/robocal... The US doesn't have a voting integrity issue, it has a voting suppression issue. edit: just another example of the egregious attempts at disenfranchising voters: https://ktar.com/story/3681236/elections-officials-lawyer-calls-arizona-sharpie-lawsuit-remedies-unworkable/ https://ktar.com/story/3681236/elections-officials-lawyer-ca...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
charliemil4 6y ago
> The US doesn't have a voting integrity issue, it has a voting suppression issue. While I whole heartedly agree, I’m concerned how we arrived here. There have been no new additional controls put in place to ensure a dramatic shift in the voter culture (from majority in person to mail in), did not expose vulnerabilities previously unused.

baby 6y ago

There's no way to have a safe voting system without trust in the government and how states operate. There's just no way that, as a citizen, you can verify your vote. It's all in sybil attacks: how do you identify one person in the first place? You need strong cryptography tied to each citizen, and you need to trust the government that they are not creating fictive citizens.

drewbug01 6y ago

> Select all ballots that were the voter did not vote in the last X elections I don’t think there’s anything inherently suspicious about voting for the first time in a long time (or ever). This election was incredibly charged, so you would expect to see more people voting than usual. I just want to push back strongly on the idea that a vote is suspicious just because that voter doesn’t typically vote. It’s a soft form of voter suppression, in a way - and we should be conscious to encourage everyone to vote, regardless of how long it’s been. — As an anecdote - I encouraged my family to vote, and some of them did: some of them for the first time in a very long time. I also served as an election judge and registered more than one person to vote on Election Day, including one person who told me they’d never bothered to vote before. But their votes were valid, and don’t deserve to be treated as suspicious.

charliemil4 6y ago
So yeah, totally agree there will be outliers, but it’s definitely a focused sample set that tests the hypothesis well. It’s complex, with a ton of fractaled placed to hide (day of registrations, first time voters etc)

sg47 6y ago

Did you ask for this in 2016, 2012 or 2008 too? Just curious. Shouldn't we also make sure that certain Republican voters did not vote in multiple states or counties?

charliemil4 6y ago
I don’t think your question is serious, right? Were we in a pandemic that statistically shifted the voter habits of a large amount of Americans from in person, physically gated process to a highly leveragable, mail in ballot process in those years? As for 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2018, and 2020 (there is much power outside of a presidential election) — the bus example is the current status quo and has been used for ages and accepted as the norm — that’s been the “worst/best (whatever your virtue signal tells you) way to influence an election. If you’d like to have an honest discussion about it - I’d love to, I’m very seriously in the camp that votes are votes and every single one should be counted no matter how they arrived to the polls.
- thomastjeffery 6y ago
  > highly leveragable, mail in ballot process It isn't. Mail in ballots have been the status quo in many states for decades. The most common problem with mail in ballots has been rejection from unverified signatures, which in some cases is arguably an instance of voter suppression.
  - charliemil4 6y ago
    > Mail in ballots have been the status quo in many states for decades. Let’s focus on the battle ground states - not all states - and let’s specifically look at PA for a moment. Because of the electoral college, the statement that nationwide and some states we have used mail in ballots before is irrelevant. So in 2018 PA had 200k absentee ballots - the mail-in ballot process [0]. In 2016 PA, and specifically Philly, had fewer absentee ballots requested than 2008 or 2012 [1] with around 18k for that metro. In 2020, 2.6 million mail in ballots were requested 3 weeks before the election [2]. So you tell me, what really looks like the status quo? 2.6m ballots or around 200k. Physics would call this an order or magnitude difference, no? That would directly contradict that mail in ballots for PA are a status quo... and if you looked at the rest of the battle ground states, you will find similar evidence that mail in was never the preferred or dominate form of voting in the metros and battle ground counties. [0]https://whyy.org/articles/pa-rejected-twice-as-many-absentee-ballots-in-2018/ https://whyy.org/articles/pa-rejected-twice-as-many-absentee... [1] https://www.phillymag.com/news/2016/11/02/absentee-ballot-requests-clinton-trump-election/ https://www.phillymag.com/news/2016/11/02/absentee-ballot-re... [2] https://www.post-gazette.com/local/2020/10/13/Pennsylvania-mail-in-ballot-requests-2-6-million-registered-voters-PA-2020/stories/202010130153 https://www.post-gazette.com/local/2020/10/13/Pennsylvania-m...