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Voting fraud on the scale required to influence a US election is not possible due to voting registration requirements. Registering any significant amount of fak

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.
  - totony 6y ago
    Ten thousand votes does not seem to me like a strong signal. If you look at popular vote, there is a 4m discrepency. Asuming all the results are legitimate, that's maybe 2-4% of the voters that agree more with one than the other. It is grotesque to call 2% a strong signal. As for voter fraud, I'm curious how you think it is insignificant without an audit. And even if it was, shouldn't the fraudsters be prosecuted?
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      > It is grotesque to call 2% a strong signal. It's a pretty strong signal of who won the election, given that we know that submission of fraudulent ballots doesn't work at scale. > As for voter fraud, I'm curious how you think it is insignificant without an audit. In is audited, continuously, by the fact that voters have to be registered and can't vote twice. Voter rolls are regularly audited by state election commissions to remove people who have died and/or moved out of the state, and there's no evidence of a non-negligible number of fake people making their way onto voter registration rolls. When two ballots are returned for the same person, or if a ballot is returned for someone who is known to be dead, etc, it prompts an investigation into how that happened. Not every registered voter votes, but by and large people register to vote because they intend to vote, so it's infeasible for a systematic effort to submit fraudulent ballots to avoid colliding with the real votes of the people being impersonated. > And even if it was, shouldn't the fraudsters be prosecuted? They are prosecuted. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/0-000002-percent-of-all-the-ballots-cast-in-the-2016-election-were-fraudulent/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/0-... And really, "grotesque"? That seems pretty rude.
- nogglet 6y ago
  Both of those claims are likely based on this Steve Bannon funded study of voter fraud: http://g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-Final-with-Appendix-1.pdf http://g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-Fina... Data analysis would indicate that the DOB for many voters are over a 100 years old. Even as mentioned in this very report, that's because of a technical bug. DOB wasn't required, and when it was, the system used something like 0000 as the birthdate. The report dismissed these findings, but it seems either the media or general public has still been running with it. Finally, it's worth noting the study itself is highly inaccurate: https://electionupdates.caltech.edu/2017/09/11/report-on-voter-fraud-rife-with-inaccuracies/ https://electionupdates.caltech.edu/2017/09/11/report-on-vot... (edit: updated original link of study to g-a-i, this study is also mirrored on whitehouse.gov)
charliemil4 6y ago
Great — so let’s just run the queries so I can go to sleep
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  It’ll happen, but nobody’s going to hold up on calling the election, certifying results, and choosing electors in the meantime.
  - charliemil4 6y ago
    Yep. That's what scares me a bit - you don't want to find this out after all the endorphins and emotions solidify sides.
    - dodobirdlord 6y ago
      Well, there aren’t going to be any surprises. It’s not like voter fraud is an actual problem in the United States.
      - hosteur 6y ago
        Because you say so?
        scsilver 6y ago
        Because it only seemed to effect the person incapable of handling a loss. Why arent losing congress people claiming their races were defrauded aswell?
        anonymouse008 6y ago
        Actually if you look at the counties and Representative races there’s much to cheer about on the side I believe you are implying — it’s just a few locations they are calling into question that swing states, not rep races. . [0] https://www.270towin.com/2020-election-results-live/house/dqOgNZq https://www.270towin.com/2020-election-results-live/house/dq...
sparkling 6y ago
> Voting fraud on the scale required to influence a US election is not possible due to voting registration requirements. Im not from the US, but my understanding of the alleged fraud is that due to coronavirus many states sent every registered voter a blank ballot (where in the past they explicitely had to request a ballot) and that, again allegedly, some people would habe been able to obtain such blank ballots and vote for their prefered candidate?
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  I’ll lead off by mentioning that some states already voted by mail and have for many years. So if there were a problem with this approach that enabled mass voter fraud we would be well aware by now. The “blank ballots” are not blank in the sense that they are interchangeable. Each ballot sent out is the specific ballot of a specific person. It’s certainly possible that some ballots were stolen from their intended recipients and mailed back with forged signatures, but what’s important is whether this could have been done on a mass scale to influence the election result. And the answer to that is no. A coordinated effort to fraudulently return enough ballots to matter would require large-scale raiding of mailboxes to steal ballots, or stealing ballots in mass quantity soon after they were put into the postal system by each state’s election commission. The former is impossible, as it would require an organization comparable in size to the postal service to be able to go house by house stealing ballots as they were delivered, and it would be obvious that it was occurring. The latter is easy to detect and trivial to rectify. In both cases, the fraud would be detected as soon as anyone who hadn’t received their ballot went to their state’s election website and requested another ballot and were informed that their ballot had been delivered and returned.
  - charliemil4 6y ago
    I'll post this scenario here again just to get your opinion on it -- you have good thoughts. Here's the scenario as it plays now: many 'grassroots' movements are reified when a bus comes to pick a group of people up, hands them a template ballot of who to vote for, then brings them to the polls to vote, and finally ends the ride with a dinner and party back at the place. First, this is legal, at least where I'm from, and is a common way to 'get out the vote.' Second, this implicitly has a built in rate-limiter because I need the physical voter to be present and to go into the booth alone. However! This time, I don't have to bus you to the polls... I can host a party at my house to request all of your ballots come to me, where I fill them out and copy your signature from the party / event. OR I do this over the course of a few months, and still have all the ballots directed to me, still copy your signature from the form we filled out together. Or even worse, I use hacked data to request a ballot on your behalf because you never show up to the polls anyway. To me, that's an extreme vulnerability -- that means beyond it not being rate limited, the physical person is no longer needed to fill out their own ballot. Not only this... there was always the chance someone could go 'off script' and vote for who they wanted for and just get the free meal. Now, they are guaranteed to be the way you wanted because you filled them out. ^ I've known people go on buses to get meals and vote 'off script' And finally, the reason 'this hasn't happened until now' is because most mail in voting was for absentee voting (in the battle ground states) and never done at this scale where you could have a whole community request ballots to one address almost undetected. (yes this is detectable post-fact, but damage is done and intent is there on both sides.)
tiziniano 6y ago
Voting in the USA is such a joke for it being a first world country. One would expect blockchain based systems or at least a cryptographically based system to exist. The fact that they don't even have a national voter ID. Like seriously how much does it cost to have one and give it for free to every person? Poorer countries have done so with more success. The calls arguing voter suppression are the dumbest, if you are not smart enough to get a card and vote, then maybe that vote should not count.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  It is certainly true that the US is frequently behind the curve of other first world nations on government deployment of new technology. This is largely because of 2 reasons. Reason #1, the US historically is frequently the first place technologies are deployed on a wide scale, and as a result the US generally has the earliest and thus the worst version of everything. Reason #2, the US system of federated States introduces great friction into any system requiring a central authority. The absence of a national voter ID program perfectly exemplifies this. The US has an election system that works sufficiently well, so there’s no major impetus to overhaul how voters vote. And the US Federal government doesn’t even have a list of all US citizens. In fact, no such list even exists. Moreover, a lack of any existing documentation that a person is a citizen does not necessarily mean that they are not a citizen due to birthright citizenship or citizenship automatically inherited from parents. Concerns about voter suppression induced by the introduction of a national voter ID are completely legitimate. The US Federal government lacks the capacity to ensure that every eligible voter is delivered an ID (lacking a list of all citizens), so the burden to acquire one falls on the individual. If this costs money, then it constitutes an unconstitutional poll tax. And in any case, since the Federal government is incapable of handling such a responsibility it would fall to the individual states, some of which have demonstrated historically that they will act to make the process arbitrarily difficult for individuals that the sitting state legislature would prefer do not vote.
- willis936 6y ago
  Schoefield’s third law of computing. Elections need to be long, painful, effortful processes. Automating it is a bad idea. An optimal robot-slave humanity would minmax to humans’ only jobs being checking ballots and saying hello.
ed25519FUUU 6y ago
This election came down basically to three counties in two states. It would also explain irregularities with those counties when compared to other counties with very similar demographics.
thingsgoup 6y ago
Your answer shows a lack of imagination in regards to how fraud might be perpetuated in this situation. As our election systems come to depend on electronic solutions the attack surface increases significantly.
- dodobirdlord 6y ago
  Sure, sure, but that's a completely separate topic from voter fraud. And it's also not something I've heard anyone alleging happened in the 2020 election.
- butbutemails2 6y ago
  > As our election systems come to depend on electronic solutions the attack surface increases significantly. Totally! You should see this 30 second clip on election fraud attack vectors: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

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.
- totony 6y ago
  Ten thousand votes does not seem to me like a strong signal. If you look at popular vote, there is a 4m discrepency. Asuming all the results are legitimate, that's maybe 2-4% of the voters that agree more with one than the other. It is grotesque to call 2% a strong signal. As for voter fraud, I'm curious how you think it is insignificant without an audit. And even if it was, shouldn't the fraudsters be prosecuted?
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    > It is grotesque to call 2% a strong signal. It's a pretty strong signal of who won the election, given that we know that submission of fraudulent ballots doesn't work at scale. > As for voter fraud, I'm curious how you think it is insignificant without an audit. In is audited, continuously, by the fact that voters have to be registered and can't vote twice. Voter rolls are regularly audited by state election commissions to remove people who have died and/or moved out of the state, and there's no evidence of a non-negligible number of fake people making their way onto voter registration rolls. When two ballots are returned for the same person, or if a ballot is returned for someone who is known to be dead, etc, it prompts an investigation into how that happened. Not every registered voter votes, but by and large people register to vote because they intend to vote, so it's infeasible for a systematic effort to submit fraudulent ballots to avoid colliding with the real votes of the people being impersonated. > And even if it was, shouldn't the fraudsters be prosecuted? They are prosecuted. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/0-000002-percent-of-all-the-ballots-cast-in-the-2016-election-were-fraudulent/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/0-... And really, "grotesque"? That seems pretty rude.
nogglet 6y ago
Both of those claims are likely based on this Steve Bannon funded study of voter fraud: http://g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-Final-with-Appendix-1.pdf http://g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-Fina... Data analysis would indicate that the DOB for many voters are over a 100 years old. Even as mentioned in this very report, that's because of a technical bug. DOB wasn't required, and when it was, the system used something like 0000 as the birthdate. The report dismissed these findings, but it seems either the media or general public has still been running with it. Finally, it's worth noting the study itself is highly inaccurate: https://electionupdates.caltech.edu/2017/09/11/report-on-voter-fraud-rife-with-inaccuracies/ https://electionupdates.caltech.edu/2017/09/11/report-on-vot... (edit: updated original link of study to g-a-i, this study is also mirrored on whitehouse.gov)

charliemil4 6y ago

Great — so let’s just run the queries so I can go to sleep

dodobirdlord 6y ago
It’ll happen, but nobody’s going to hold up on calling the election, certifying results, and choosing electors in the meantime.
- charliemil4 6y ago
  Yep. That's what scares me a bit - you don't want to find this out after all the endorphins and emotions solidify sides.
  - dodobirdlord 6y ago
    Well, there aren’t going to be any surprises. It’s not like voter fraud is an actual problem in the United States.
    - hosteur 6y ago
      Because you say so?
      - scsilver 6y ago
        Because it only seemed to effect the person incapable of handling a loss. Why arent losing congress people claiming their races were defrauded aswell?
        anonymouse008 6y ago
        Actually if you look at the counties and Representative races there’s much to cheer about on the side I believe you are implying — it’s just a few locations they are calling into question that swing states, not rep races. . [0] https://www.270towin.com/2020-election-results-live/house/dqOgNZq https://www.270towin.com/2020-election-results-live/house/dq...

sparkling 6y ago

> Voting fraud on the scale required to influence a US election is not possible due to voting registration requirements. Im not from the US, but my understanding of the alleged fraud is that due to coronavirus many states sent every registered voter a blank ballot (where in the past they explicitely had to request a ballot) and that, again allegedly, some people would habe been able to obtain such blank ballots and vote for their prefered candidate?

dodobirdlord 6y ago
I’ll lead off by mentioning that some states already voted by mail and have for many years. So if there were a problem with this approach that enabled mass voter fraud we would be well aware by now. The “blank ballots” are not blank in the sense that they are interchangeable. Each ballot sent out is the specific ballot of a specific person. It’s certainly possible that some ballots were stolen from their intended recipients and mailed back with forged signatures, but what’s important is whether this could have been done on a mass scale to influence the election result. And the answer to that is no. A coordinated effort to fraudulently return enough ballots to matter would require large-scale raiding of mailboxes to steal ballots, or stealing ballots in mass quantity soon after they were put into the postal system by each state’s election commission. The former is impossible, as it would require an organization comparable in size to the postal service to be able to go house by house stealing ballots as they were delivered, and it would be obvious that it was occurring. The latter is easy to detect and trivial to rectify. In both cases, the fraud would be detected as soon as anyone who hadn’t received their ballot went to their state’s election website and requested another ballot and were informed that their ballot had been delivered and returned.
- charliemil4 6y ago
  I'll post this scenario here again just to get your opinion on it -- you have good thoughts. Here's the scenario as it plays now: many 'grassroots' movements are reified when a bus comes to pick a group of people up, hands them a template ballot of who to vote for, then brings them to the polls to vote, and finally ends the ride with a dinner and party back at the place. First, this is legal, at least where I'm from, and is a common way to 'get out the vote.' Second, this implicitly has a built in rate-limiter because I need the physical voter to be present and to go into the booth alone. However! This time, I don't have to bus you to the polls... I can host a party at my house to request all of your ballots come to me, where I fill them out and copy your signature from the party / event. OR I do this over the course of a few months, and still have all the ballots directed to me, still copy your signature from the form we filled out together. Or even worse, I use hacked data to request a ballot on your behalf because you never show up to the polls anyway. To me, that's an extreme vulnerability -- that means beyond it not being rate limited, the physical person is no longer needed to fill out their own ballot. Not only this... there was always the chance someone could go 'off script' and vote for who they wanted for and just get the free meal. Now, they are guaranteed to be the way you wanted because you filled them out. ^ I've known people go on buses to get meals and vote 'off script' And finally, the reason 'this hasn't happened until now' is because most mail in voting was for absentee voting (in the battle ground states) and never done at this scale where you could have a whole community request ballots to one address almost undetected. (yes this is detectable post-fact, but damage is done and intent is there on both sides.)

tiziniano 6y ago

Voting in the USA is such a joke for it being a first world country. One would expect blockchain based systems or at least a cryptographically based system to exist. The fact that they don't even have a national voter ID. Like seriously how much does it cost to have one and give it for free to every person? Poorer countries have done so with more success. The calls arguing voter suppression are the dumbest, if you are not smart enough to get a card and vote, then maybe that vote should not count.

dodobirdlord 6y ago
It is certainly true that the US is frequently behind the curve of other first world nations on government deployment of new technology. This is largely because of 2 reasons. Reason #1, the US historically is frequently the first place technologies are deployed on a wide scale, and as a result the US generally has the earliest and thus the worst version of everything. Reason #2, the US system of federated States introduces great friction into any system requiring a central authority. The absence of a national voter ID program perfectly exemplifies this. The US has an election system that works sufficiently well, so there’s no major impetus to overhaul how voters vote. And the US Federal government doesn’t even have a list of all US citizens. In fact, no such list even exists. Moreover, a lack of any existing documentation that a person is a citizen does not necessarily mean that they are not a citizen due to birthright citizenship or citizenship automatically inherited from parents. Concerns about voter suppression induced by the introduction of a national voter ID are completely legitimate. The US Federal government lacks the capacity to ensure that every eligible voter is delivered an ID (lacking a list of all citizens), so the burden to acquire one falls on the individual. If this costs money, then it constitutes an unconstitutional poll tax. And in any case, since the Federal government is incapable of handling such a responsibility it would fall to the individual states, some of which have demonstrated historically that they will act to make the process arbitrarily difficult for individuals that the sitting state legislature would prefer do not vote.
willis936 6y ago
Schoefield’s third law of computing. Elections need to be long, painful, effortful processes. Automating it is a bad idea. An optimal robot-slave humanity would minmax to humans’ only jobs being checking ballots and saying hello.

ed25519FUUU 6y ago

This election came down basically to three counties in two states. It would also explain irregularities with those counties when compared to other counties with very similar demographics.

thingsgoup 6y ago

Your answer shows a lack of imagination in regards to how fraud might be perpetuated in this situation. As our election systems come to depend on electronic solutions the attack surface increases significantly.

dodobirdlord 6y ago
Sure, sure, but that's a completely separate topic from voter fraud. And it's also not something I've heard anyone alleging happened in the 2020 election.
butbutemails2 6y ago
> As our election systems come to depend on electronic solutions the attack surface increases significantly. Totally! You should see this 30 second clip on election fraud attack vectors: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ