6 ms·

> If we don't have a meaningful signature match, than we don't have a meaningful way to prevent fraud with mail in ballots. Period. We can check for duplicate

> If we don't have a meaningful signature match, than we don't have a meaningful way to prevent fraud with mail in ballots. Period. We can check for duplicate votes. Submitting fraudulent ballots in quantities necessary to change the results while avoiding submitting duplicate ballots (which would be caught, as we saw with the Jill Stokke) would require either: 1. Extremely good data about who had voted and who had not. OR 2. Some faction in the ballot-processing chain with the ability to secretly discard the legitimate ballots. Is there evidence that either of these things happened?

dilap 6y ago
I don't think it's that hard if you harvest ballots from places unlikely to vote, e.g., nursing homes. My understanding is the following two facts are true - Georgia has a historically low mail-in ballot rejection rate - Georgia is not allowing an independent review of the signatures on the envelopes That alone in my mind is an extremely strong reason to be suspicious of the results. Not to even mention the very-strange goings-on in the State Farm Arena in Atlanta...
- VikingCoder 6y ago
  There were 22,894 nursing facility residents in Georgia in 2019. [1] How many of them do you think had their ballots harvested? I think it's far harder to harvest ballots without getting caught than you seem to think it is. [1] : https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-nursing-facility-residents/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-nursing-...
  - dilap 6y ago
    Sure, you might be right. I wouldn't say I'm confident it would be easy or confident it would be hard.
    - VikingCoder 6y ago
      Let's say that you brought in signature experts to look for fraudulent ballots, based on detecting forged signatures. What do you think their false positive / false negative rates would look like?
      - dilap 6y ago
        Beats me; given the historically low rate & the allegations of fraud, it seems to be you should do the review so that everyone can be confident in the results (in the event there was not significant fraud) or so that the fraud can be exposed (in the event there was). One data point is in Arizona where the judge allowed 100 randomly-sampled envelopes to be reviewed for a signature, the democratic expert witness said 16 of them were inconclusive. However, the Judge ruled that that was not evidence of fraud. I'm not really sure how exactly you can conclude that, and the fact that we are apprently counting votes in AZ with signatures that don't match certainly doesn't make me particularly confident in the results. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/12/04/arizona-judge-rejects-republican-effort-overturn-state-election-results/3821578001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020...
        nl 6y ago
        The whole point is that signature verification isn't a reliable indicator of fraud or anything. It never has been, and should never have been relied on. The ballots and the envelopes and the protection of them is the key.
        dilap 6y ago
        In that case, what protects against fraud? Anything? I personally know of two ballots, not mine, that I could have filled and out returned, if I'd been so inclined. (People in apartment buildings I have access to who have moved out of state, but still got sent ballots, which were just setting in the foyer; I'm sure there are gazillions of other ways to get ballots.) If you're not even going to require the signatures to match, it seems like committing vote fraud would be ridiculously easy. (Of course, if you really want to have a secure election, make people vote in person and have a continuous chain of custody of those votes; use the ink-on-your-finger trick to prevent double-voting.)
rightbyte 6y ago
You can vote on election day even though you sent a mail in ballot earlier right? They just destroy the mailed in one.
- graywh 6y ago
  I think in most cases, your in-person vote in that situation is provisional -- meaning it will only count if your mail-in vote doesn't arrive
  - jaccarmac 6y ago
    Jill Stokke was explicitly given the option to have her mail-in vote invalidated so she could vote in person. That was in Nevada; Procedures elsewhere may be different.
- jaccarmac 6y ago
  That is correct, and is precisely what happened with Stokke. Stokke came to the polling place was told that her mail-in ballot had already been received. She was given the choice to sign an affadavit claiming that she had not voted by mail, which would allow her to vote in person. She refused to sign the affadavit and then began to peddle her story as evidence of fraud. Really makes you think...
- codys 6y ago
  This is state dependent. In some states, voting in person after sending a mail in ballot is a felony.
dukeofdoom 6y ago
>Some faction in the ballot-processing chain with the >ability to secretly discard the legitimate ballots. This video does not instil confidence that 2 did not happen. Dominion Voting Machine Flaws -- 2020 Election Coffee County, Georgia Video 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46CAKyyObls&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46CAKyyObls&feature=emb_titl...
- jaccarmac 6y ago
  Didn't Georgia do a hand recount? The video seems to show the process of scanning the ballots, not a way that massive numbers of physical ballots could be discarded.
- jaccarmac 6y ago
  After watching the video more closely, I have no idea what the point is. Overvoting causes the ballot to go to adjudication. At that point the person adjudicating gets to choose which results are submitted and tabulated. Is that supposed to be evidence of fraud? That's exactly what I expect from adjudication: A human has to read the ballot and choose whether to disambiguate it or remove it from the tabulation. Not to mention the physical ballots are not changed. Unless the same person adjudicates the same ballots the same way, this kind of tampering is incredibly easy to catch.

dilap 6y ago

I don't think it's that hard if you harvest ballots from places unlikely to vote, e.g., nursing homes. My understanding is the following two facts are true - Georgia has a historically low mail-in ballot rejection rate - Georgia is not allowing an independent review of the signatures on the envelopes That alone in my mind is an extremely strong reason to be suspicious of the results. Not to even mention the very-strange goings-on in the State Farm Arena in Atlanta...

VikingCoder 6y ago
There were 22,894 nursing facility residents in Georgia in 2019. [1] How many of them do you think had their ballots harvested? I think it's far harder to harvest ballots without getting caught than you seem to think it is. [1] : https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-nursing-facility-residents/?currentTimeframe=0&sortModel=%7B%22colId%22:%22Location%22,%22sort%22:%22asc%22%7D https://www.kff.org/other/state-indicator/number-of-nursing-...
- dilap 6y ago
  Sure, you might be right. I wouldn't say I'm confident it would be easy or confident it would be hard.
  - VikingCoder 6y ago
    Let's say that you brought in signature experts to look for fraudulent ballots, based on detecting forged signatures. What do you think their false positive / false negative rates would look like?
    - dilap 6y ago
      Beats me; given the historically low rate & the allegations of fraud, it seems to be you should do the review so that everyone can be confident in the results (in the event there was not significant fraud) or so that the fraud can be exposed (in the event there was). One data point is in Arizona where the judge allowed 100 randomly-sampled envelopes to be reviewed for a signature, the democratic expert witness said 16 of them were inconclusive. However, the Judge ruled that that was not evidence of fraud. I'm not really sure how exactly you can conclude that, and the fact that we are apprently counting votes in AZ with signatures that don't match certainly doesn't make me particularly confident in the results. https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020/12/04/arizona-judge-rejects-republican-effort-overturn-state-election-results/3821578001/ https://www.azcentral.com/story/news/politics/elections/2020...
      - nl 6y ago
        The whole point is that signature verification isn't a reliable indicator of fraud or anything. It never has been, and should never have been relied on. The ballots and the envelopes and the protection of them is the key.
        dilap 6y ago
        In that case, what protects against fraud? Anything? I personally know of two ballots, not mine, that I could have filled and out returned, if I'd been so inclined. (People in apartment buildings I have access to who have moved out of state, but still got sent ballots, which were just setting in the foyer; I'm sure there are gazillions of other ways to get ballots.) If you're not even going to require the signatures to match, it seems like committing vote fraud would be ridiculously easy. (Of course, if you really want to have a secure election, make people vote in person and have a continuous chain of custody of those votes; use the ink-on-your-finger trick to prevent double-voting.)

rightbyte 6y ago

You can vote on election day even though you sent a mail in ballot earlier right? They just destroy the mailed in one.

graywh 6y ago
I think in most cases, your in-person vote in that situation is provisional -- meaning it will only count if your mail-in vote doesn't arrive
- jaccarmac 6y ago
  Jill Stokke was explicitly given the option to have her mail-in vote invalidated so she could vote in person. That was in Nevada; Procedures elsewhere may be different.
jaccarmac 6y ago
That is correct, and is precisely what happened with Stokke. Stokke came to the polling place was told that her mail-in ballot had already been received. She was given the choice to sign an affadavit claiming that she had not voted by mail, which would allow her to vote in person. She refused to sign the affadavit and then began to peddle her story as evidence of fraud. Really makes you think...
codys 6y ago
This is state dependent. In some states, voting in person after sending a mail in ballot is a felony.

dukeofdoom 6y ago

>Some faction in the ballot-processing chain with the >ability to secretly discard the legitimate ballots. This video does not instil confidence that 2 did not happen. Dominion Voting Machine Flaws -- 2020 Election Coffee County, Georgia Video 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46CAKyyObls&feature=emb_title https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46CAKyyObls&feature=emb_titl...

jaccarmac 6y ago
Didn't Georgia do a hand recount? The video seems to show the process of scanning the ballots, not a way that massive numbers of physical ballots could be discarded.
jaccarmac 6y ago
After watching the video more closely, I have no idea what the point is. Overvoting causes the ballot to go to adjudication. At that point the person adjudicating gets to choose which results are submitted and tabulated. Is that supposed to be evidence of fraud? That's exactly what I expect from adjudication: A human has to read the ballot and choose whether to disambiguate it or remove it from the tabulation. Not to mention the physical ballots are not changed. Unless the same person adjudicates the same ballots the same way, this kind of tampering is incredibly easy to catch.