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This account expresses the idea that voter fraud would be very difficult to carry out in Pennsylvania - at least with respect to in-person election day voting (

This account expresses the idea that voter fraud would be very difficult to carry out in Pennsylvania - at least with respect to in-person election day voting (it doesn't seem relevant to claims of fraud with mail-in voting). However, this link describes a guilty plea of someone convicted of doing just that: https://www.justice.gov/usao-edpa/pr/us-attorney-william-m-mcswain-announces-charges-and-guilty-plea-former-philadelphia?fbclid=IwAR01GMlz_570Tmd0h74JlxTxsSnooIeZ84f1RpuHqScYV5DiFwhGM1xvTf8 https://www.justice.gov/usao-edpa/pr/us-attorney-william-m-m... So it would be interesting to reconcile this. One possibility is that procedures vary across the state, as some other comments here might indicate. Another is that the system the author participated in isn't actually as immune to fraud as he thinks.

nemothekid 6y ago
I think it’s incredibly difficult to design a system what’s 100% immune to voter fraud. Despite it being difficult, I think voter fraud is still very hard to do on a systemic scale that would swing an election. Prior studies have only shown minor instances of voter fraud, I think something like 1000 documented instances of voter fraud amount 10s of millions of votes cast. With all the available information I have, I think it would be very difficult to fradulently product ballots on the order of 10s of thousands to actually swing an election. Secondly, I think if we did have a widespread voter fraud problem I think it would also call into question past elections as well.
aw1621107 6y ago
> One possibility is that procedures vary across the state, as some other comments here might indicate. Another is that the system the author participated in isn't actually as immune to fraud as he thinks. Some other possibilities might be that primary elections use a different process and/or undergo less scrutiny than general elections, or that procedures have changed since 2016. As you said, it'd be an interesting exercise to go through exactly what DeMuro did and figure out whether what happened then would or would not work now. Incidentally, it seems the author might have had to deal with a similar situation: > The other event came when a discrepancy developed between the number of votes recorded by the machine and the number of voters tallied in the books: one vote was recorded in the books that was not recorded by the machines. We ultimately concluded that someone had just walked out of the polling place after they were handed their ballot, never casting their vote on the machine. Other possibilities which we ultimately ruled out were election board error, or that the voter voted in the wrong division after receiving their ballot. The redundant records — the index card, the registration book, the list of voters — helped to narrow down the possible causes. In the end, there was nothing we could do about it. So there's an argument to be made that what DeMuro did (ringing up votes on the machine) could have been caught.

nemothekid 6y ago

I think it’s incredibly difficult to design a system what’s 100% immune to voter fraud. Despite it being difficult, I think voter fraud is still very hard to do on a systemic scale that would swing an election. Prior studies have only shown minor instances of voter fraud, I think something like 1000 documented instances of voter fraud amount 10s of millions of votes cast. With all the available information I have, I think it would be very difficult to fradulently product ballots on the order of 10s of thousands to actually swing an election. Secondly, I think if we did have a widespread voter fraud problem I think it would also call into question past elections as well.

aw1621107 6y ago

> One possibility is that procedures vary across the state, as some other comments here might indicate. Another is that the system the author participated in isn't actually as immune to fraud as he thinks. Some other possibilities might be that primary elections use a different process and/or undergo less scrutiny than general elections, or that procedures have changed since 2016. As you said, it'd be an interesting exercise to go through exactly what DeMuro did and figure out whether what happened then would or would not work now. Incidentally, it seems the author might have had to deal with a similar situation: > The other event came when a discrepancy developed between the number of votes recorded by the machine and the number of voters tallied in the books: one vote was recorded in the books that was not recorded by the machines. We ultimately concluded that someone had just walked out of the polling place after they were handed their ballot, never casting their vote on the machine. Other possibilities which we ultimately ruled out were election board error, or that the voter voted in the wrong division after receiving their ballot. The redundant records — the index card, the registration book, the list of voters — helped to narrow down the possible causes. In the end, there was nothing we could do about it. So there's an argument to be made that what DeMuro did (ringing up votes on the machine) could have been caught.