8 ms·

A person can believe anything they want. If there were evidence of a stolen election, then Trump would have won a number of court cases from one of the MANY ju

by moosey 6y ago

A person can believe anything they want. If there were evidence of a stolen election, then Trump would have won a number of court cases from one of the MANY judges, mostly ... well, conservative, to use a label ... that he placed his cases in front of. Anyone can look at these cases and have an understanding of the actual evidence presented, and see, objectively, that there was not significant election or voter tampering, and definitely not significant enough to change the election. I'm far more concerned about attempts to make it harder to vote before the election - the one drop box per county in TX, for example, then I am that any election was stolen.

nostromo 6y ago
I don't believe the election was stolen. But I will say: it's almost impossible to prove an election has been stolen after the fact with mail-in ballots. Once the outer envelope is removed and destroyed, the ballot is irreversibly anonymous. It's impossible to tell if an anonymous ballot is fraudulent or not -- there's no ability to audit it by contacting the voter. Mail-in ballots are particularly vulnerable to fraud, something the New York Times correctly worried about back before Trump.[1]. And we just had more mail-in ballots than ever before thanks to Covid. HN has long been suspicious of voting systems; we all know how often systems are hacked by bad actors. I don't think it's a stretch to think that election tampering is possible, particularly in close elections. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...
- xpe 6y ago
  > Mail-in ballots are particularly prone to fraud, something the New York Times worried about back before Trump. This is mischaracterization of the article. 1. The title that shows up in the browser bar (the HTML <title>) is: "As More Vote by Mail, Faulty Ballots Could Impact Elections". 2. The title as shown on the page is "Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises". So, clearly, the article speaks about both fraudulent and faulty ballots. In my view, the article is not well organized. The two ideas are too fluidly mixed. So, with this context in mind, let's discuss two paragraphs from the article: In 2008, 18 percent of the votes in the nine states likely to decide this year’s presidential election were cast by mail. That number will almost certainly rise this year, and voters in two-thirds of the states have already begun casting absentee ballots. In four Western states, voting by mail is the exclusive or dominant way to cast a ballot. The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say. Yes, the article says "voting by mail [...] increases the potential for fraud". However, how often is this an important factor? How often does it affect election results? From what I understand, the overall fraud rate from in-person voting is so low, that even a doubling of that rate is negligible.* * Except, of course, in extremely close races.
- felipelemos 6y ago
  What is the difference from a in person casted ballot? Isn't it also anonymous?
  - rocqua 6y ago
    There are many more eyes on the custody of that ballot between it being cast, and it being counted.
- titzer 6y ago
  Would you care to provide evidence that mail-in vote fraud has ever been a significant issue in any US election anywhere, at any time, at any level, now or in the past? Because I have never seen any such evidence, and mail-in ballots have been used for over a century.
  - tubbyjr 6y ago
    I have never bothered to look for any specific evidence, therefore it is not true.
  - nostromo 6y ago
    You’re asking someone to prove something that can’t be proven by design. No identification requirements, same-day registration, no signature verification, no chain of custody requirements, completely irreversible and unauditable ballots... Partisans have created a system designed for abuse and now are incredulous that anyone question the results. You’ve effectively deleted the server logs, claimed your system is perfect and impenetrable, and are now asking anyone with questions to prove otherwise.
    - djbebs 6y ago
      This is the core issue at stake here, and why neither side will be able to ever rightfully claim their side won the election.
      - oezi 6y ago
        No, the GOP will continue to push the myth that the democrats didn't win. The democrats will rightfully claim that they won. Despite all talking it is just that easy.
      - zo1 6y ago
        Agreed - One can't look at the system from the outside and honestly say it's perfect and incorruptible. So instead it relies on us having "trust" in the institutions that facilitate them and the "election officials" with potentially ridiculous training, no audit, no recordings and no mandated certification, all topped with the real potential for bias because hey, we're humans. And we know that trust in governmental institutions and politicians is not universal. I'd go out on a limb and posit that a good chunk of the individuals here would advocate and insist on all sorts of various audit trails, cryptographic hashes, check-digits, security layers and "oversight" with privacy and security guarantees with certification and training and and and... if this were health data. But when it comes to something like the leadership of a nation, we suddenly revert to "it's okay, trust the election officials and pieces of paper with dubious transportation mechanisms and security", don't worry, there were official "processes" to ensure no irregularity.
- CogitoCogito 6y ago
  So what you're saying is that it's possible that there were fraudulent ballots in support of Trump?
- willis936 6y ago
  Mail-in ballots are sent out to people who request them. You would need such a massive identity fraud campaign to move the needle on an election that I can’t believe you would be unable to find any evidence of it anywhere in 50 states. There are no signs to indicate further investigation is needed. Also importantly, there are enough audits in place to catch the whiff of a foul election that can be litigated with evidence discovery.
  - baud147258 6y ago
    You don't need to do it in all 50 states, just in a few key swing states where the votes were close enough. But even then you still need a quite big identity fraud to pull this off.
    - 8note 6y ago
      The solution to that is different though. You need to make sure that swing states matter less
  - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    > You would need such a massive identity fraud campaign to move the needle on an election What was the final delta in GA? 11k votes or so? Are you sure it is impossible to move the needle when there are these razor thin margins? I don’t know so I’m asking.
    - willis936 6y ago
      You're going to collect sufficient private personal information about and successfully impersonate 12,000 citizens without anyone noticing? The burden of proof is not on me here. It's an absurd challenge. You can't just hand wave it away. That difficulty is by design. That's the system working.
    - hellotomyrars 6y ago
      Even if you throw out or flip Georgia, the math still doesn't work out for electoral votes. So now you have to move the goalposts to saying that there was massive voter fraud in every battleground state. Let's be clear, every state certified their votes. This includes states with republican leadership. And every court case brought against the election results has failed. Even if you accept the idea that in many ways it is difficult or impossible to audit the results (I don't agree), the only evidence that has been presented against the result are absurd conspiracy theories and patent falsehoods as well as testimony from people with an axe to grind. In other cases we have seen (Gore) there was an actually agreed upon issue. Hanging chads on the ballots were real and verifiable. This is not the case today. Also let us be clear that this has not happened before. It is not before the current administration that "massive voter fraud" has entered the conversation. It was presented in 2016 despite Trumps win (amusing). It is presented now for no other reason than to distract, raise money, and serve the fragile ego of the President.
- salawat 6y ago
  I'd still like to see the actual process behind that one county in Michigan that actually got looked. I can't find any information on the alleged "emergency patch" of GA voting systems either. Or an explanation of why several State's judiciaries chimed in on changing election timeframes when constitutionally, that is the perview of the Legislature. I'm still on the lack of evidence fence but I'm seriously leaning toward the side of "Thou dost protest too much" when the response isn't the most gruelingly painful enumeration of every detail of the process to the rest of the country. You can throw all your numerical arguments about why it shouldn't matter at me that you want. I'm not buying it. This is the simplest god blessed process to automate. It's literally a counter. There should not be anywhere near as much opportunity for controversy or hell, even something to hide! The tech behind it should be absolutely boring, and yet, no reckoning. No public release of auditable source code, or machine images. I don't give a damn who won. I give a damn that someone questioned it, and heaven and hell were not moved in an attempt to answer the question. Not trying to Gish Gallop mind, I just think the integrity of the system is important enough to warrant keeping the process transparent and dirt simple enough, your State should be able to account for it to the rest of the nation. Voting is not a joke, and I don't even like entertaining the possibility that some irregularities could even exist to explain.
  - frankydp 6y ago
    Fucking great comment. The appearance of impropriety is assumed to be impropriety by half the viewers. Unless proven otherwise.
    - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
      So why did everyone fight like hell to prevent this transparency? Shouldn’t all of these states been eager to use federal money to do signature audits and hand recounts?
  - YZF 6y ago
    What does "that actually got looked" mean? Can you elaborate on this Michigan county? Isn't it the case that when votes are hand counted they match pretty darn close the "machine without auditable source code" results? As someone from outside the US the entire US election process seems like a sad joke but I guess those machines were bought under some sort of commercial contract from some sort of private company and presumably as part of that deal the source code isn't available to the public. But it seems that when the machine says X won and you like X then it's great and when it says Y won and you don't like Y then it's a faulty/irregular process? Is "someone questioned it" really a bar? Isn't there always someone who will question everything? I'm sure the tech behind the machines that count the votes is actually quite boring. Next time you vote for someone I guess make sure you vote for someone who is going to stipulate in the contract that the source code is available to the public? Is that gonna shut up the people yelling conspiracy?
- 8note 6y ago
  The same thing applies for an in person vote. Once they've voted and left, you can't tell anymore. One person could have submitted all of the votes for the day, and you couldn't te the difference. This must mean that no in person votes should count at all!
h2odragon 6y ago
Many people look at these cases and see they were not allowed to be heard. How many of Gore's supporting court cases were tossed for lack of standing etc?
- dragonwriter 6y ago
  > How many of Gore’s supporting court cases were tossed for lack of standing etc? Fewer (and similarly with Bush’s — both filed a number of lawsuits in the 2000 election), but then, the legal basis of the cases was different. Its not really anyone outside of the Trump campaign’s (and their legal team’s) fault that the Trump campaign filed an unusually large number of lawsuits making claims that were not justiciable, independently of whether the claimed facts were true.
- jcranmer 6y ago
  The difference between 2000 and 2020 election cases is that most of the latter are based on wild, speculative legal theories. The last few filed really start to look crazier than sovereign citizen bullshit theories. The Trump campaign filed several lawsuits prior to the election challenging various election procedures--which is how it's supposed to be done--and found mixed success, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. After an election, there is very little legal recourse--even Bush v Gore made it clear that challenging election procedures should be done before an election without very good reason. In the case of 2000, those challenges were largely about various recount provisions, and even then, these were filed very quickly. But in 2020, a lot of the cases weren't filed until previous ones had failed (laches! laches!), and even tried the novel legal theory of arguing the entire election should be thrown out because of a challenge to long-enacted laws (laches! laches!). The lawyers involved changed too--the competent conservative lawyers didn't want to sign on to Trump's crazy legal theories, but Trump apparently decided to not listen to anyone who told him he had no remaining viable recourse. It is worth pointing out that the defendants in one of the suits have filed a motion to impose sanctions on Trump's lawyers. Amusingly, they ask for a fine of all the money raised for the legal suits, although they are unlikely to get it.

by moosey 6y ago

nostromo 6y ago

I don't believe the election was stolen. But I will say: it's almost impossible to prove an election has been stolen after the fact with mail-in ballots. Once the outer envelope is removed and destroyed, the ballot is irreversibly anonymous. It's impossible to tell if an anonymous ballot is fraudulent or not -- there's no ability to audit it by contacting the voter. Mail-in ballots are particularly vulnerable to fraud, something the New York Times correctly worried about back before Trump.[1]. And we just had more mail-in ballots than ever before thanks to Covid. HN has long been suspicious of voting systems; we all know how often systems are hacked by bad actors. I don't think it's a stretch to think that election tampering is possible, particularly in close elections. 1. https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...

xpe 6y ago
> Mail-in ballots are particularly prone to fraud, something the New York Times worried about back before Trump. This is mischaracterization of the article. 1. The title that shows up in the browser bar (the HTML <title>) is: "As More Vote by Mail, Faulty Ballots Could Impact Elections". 2. The title as shown on the page is "Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises". So, clearly, the article speaks about both fraudulent and faulty ballots. In my view, the article is not well organized. The two ideas are too fluidly mixed. So, with this context in mind, let's discuss two paragraphs from the article: In 2008, 18 percent of the votes in the nine states likely to decide this year’s presidential election were cast by mail. That number will almost certainly rise this year, and voters in two-thirds of the states have already begun casting absentee ballots. In four Western states, voting by mail is the exclusive or dominant way to cast a ballot. The trend will probably result in more uncounted votes, and it increases the potential for fraud. While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say. Yes, the article says "voting by mail [...] increases the potential for fraud". However, how often is this an important factor? How often does it affect election results? From what I understand, the overall fraud rate from in-person voting is so low, that even a doubling of that rate is negligible.* * Except, of course, in extremely close races.
felipelemos 6y ago
What is the difference from a in person casted ballot? Isn't it also anonymous?
- rocqua 6y ago
  There are many more eyes on the custody of that ballot between it being cast, and it being counted.
titzer 6y ago
Would you care to provide evidence that mail-in vote fraud has ever been a significant issue in any US election anywhere, at any time, at any level, now or in the past? Because I have never seen any such evidence, and mail-in ballots have been used for over a century.
- tubbyjr 6y ago
  I have never bothered to look for any specific evidence, therefore it is not true.
- nostromo 6y ago
  You’re asking someone to prove something that can’t be proven by design. No identification requirements, same-day registration, no signature verification, no chain of custody requirements, completely irreversible and unauditable ballots... Partisans have created a system designed for abuse and now are incredulous that anyone question the results. You’ve effectively deleted the server logs, claimed your system is perfect and impenetrable, and are now asking anyone with questions to prove otherwise.
  - djbebs 6y ago
    This is the core issue at stake here, and why neither side will be able to ever rightfully claim their side won the election.
    - oezi 6y ago
      No, the GOP will continue to push the myth that the democrats didn't win. The democrats will rightfully claim that they won. Despite all talking it is just that easy.
    - zo1 6y ago
      Agreed - One can't look at the system from the outside and honestly say it's perfect and incorruptible. So instead it relies on us having "trust" in the institutions that facilitate them and the "election officials" with potentially ridiculous training, no audit, no recordings and no mandated certification, all topped with the real potential for bias because hey, we're humans. And we know that trust in governmental institutions and politicians is not universal. I'd go out on a limb and posit that a good chunk of the individuals here would advocate and insist on all sorts of various audit trails, cryptographic hashes, check-digits, security layers and "oversight" with privacy and security guarantees with certification and training and and and... if this were health data. But when it comes to something like the leadership of a nation, we suddenly revert to "it's okay, trust the election officials and pieces of paper with dubious transportation mechanisms and security", don't worry, there were official "processes" to ensure no irregularity.
CogitoCogito 6y ago
So what you're saying is that it's possible that there were fraudulent ballots in support of Trump?
willis936 6y ago
Mail-in ballots are sent out to people who request them. You would need such a massive identity fraud campaign to move the needle on an election that I can’t believe you would be unable to find any evidence of it anywhere in 50 states. There are no signs to indicate further investigation is needed. Also importantly, there are enough audits in place to catch the whiff of a foul election that can be litigated with evidence discovery.
- baud147258 6y ago
  You don't need to do it in all 50 states, just in a few key swing states where the votes were close enough. But even then you still need a quite big identity fraud to pull this off.
  - 8note 6y ago
    The solution to that is different though. You need to make sure that swing states matter less
- SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
  > You would need such a massive identity fraud campaign to move the needle on an election What was the final delta in GA? 11k votes or so? Are you sure it is impossible to move the needle when there are these razor thin margins? I don’t know so I’m asking.
  - willis936 6y ago
    You're going to collect sufficient private personal information about and successfully impersonate 12,000 citizens without anyone noticing? The burden of proof is not on me here. It's an absurd challenge. You can't just hand wave it away. That difficulty is by design. That's the system working.
  - hellotomyrars 6y ago
    Even if you throw out or flip Georgia, the math still doesn't work out for electoral votes. So now you have to move the goalposts to saying that there was massive voter fraud in every battleground state. Let's be clear, every state certified their votes. This includes states with republican leadership. And every court case brought against the election results has failed. Even if you accept the idea that in many ways it is difficult or impossible to audit the results (I don't agree), the only evidence that has been presented against the result are absurd conspiracy theories and patent falsehoods as well as testimony from people with an axe to grind. In other cases we have seen (Gore) there was an actually agreed upon issue. Hanging chads on the ballots were real and verifiable. This is not the case today. Also let us be clear that this has not happened before. It is not before the current administration that "massive voter fraud" has entered the conversation. It was presented in 2016 despite Trumps win (amusing). It is presented now for no other reason than to distract, raise money, and serve the fragile ego of the President.
salawat 6y ago
I'd still like to see the actual process behind that one county in Michigan that actually got looked. I can't find any information on the alleged "emergency patch" of GA voting systems either. Or an explanation of why several State's judiciaries chimed in on changing election timeframes when constitutionally, that is the perview of the Legislature. I'm still on the lack of evidence fence but I'm seriously leaning toward the side of "Thou dost protest too much" when the response isn't the most gruelingly painful enumeration of every detail of the process to the rest of the country. You can throw all your numerical arguments about why it shouldn't matter at me that you want. I'm not buying it. This is the simplest god blessed process to automate. It's literally a counter. There should not be anywhere near as much opportunity for controversy or hell, even something to hide! The tech behind it should be absolutely boring, and yet, no reckoning. No public release of auditable source code, or machine images. I don't give a damn who won. I give a damn that someone questioned it, and heaven and hell were not moved in an attempt to answer the question. Not trying to Gish Gallop mind, I just think the integrity of the system is important enough to warrant keeping the process transparent and dirt simple enough, your State should be able to account for it to the rest of the nation. Voting is not a joke, and I don't even like entertaining the possibility that some irregularities could even exist to explain.
- frankydp 6y ago
  Fucking great comment. The appearance of impropriety is assumed to be impropriety by half the viewers. Unless proven otherwise.
  - SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    So why did everyone fight like hell to prevent this transparency? Shouldn’t all of these states been eager to use federal money to do signature audits and hand recounts?
- YZF 6y ago
  What does "that actually got looked" mean? Can you elaborate on this Michigan county? Isn't it the case that when votes are hand counted they match pretty darn close the "machine without auditable source code" results? As someone from outside the US the entire US election process seems like a sad joke but I guess those machines were bought under some sort of commercial contract from some sort of private company and presumably as part of that deal the source code isn't available to the public. But it seems that when the machine says X won and you like X then it's great and when it says Y won and you don't like Y then it's a faulty/irregular process? Is "someone questioned it" really a bar? Isn't there always someone who will question everything? I'm sure the tech behind the machines that count the votes is actually quite boring. Next time you vote for someone I guess make sure you vote for someone who is going to stipulate in the contract that the source code is available to the public? Is that gonna shut up the people yelling conspiracy?
8note 6y ago
The same thing applies for an in person vote. Once they've voted and left, you can't tell anymore. One person could have submitted all of the votes for the day, and you couldn't te the difference. This must mean that no in person votes should count at all!

h2odragon 6y ago

Many people look at these cases and see they were not allowed to be heard. How many of Gore's supporting court cases were tossed for lack of standing etc?

dragonwriter 6y ago
> How many of Gore’s supporting court cases were tossed for lack of standing etc? Fewer (and similarly with Bush’s — both filed a number of lawsuits in the 2000 election), but then, the legal basis of the cases was different. Its not really anyone outside of the Trump campaign’s (and their legal team’s) fault that the Trump campaign filed an unusually large number of lawsuits making claims that were not justiciable, independently of whether the claimed facts were true.
jcranmer 6y ago
The difference between 2000 and 2020 election cases is that most of the latter are based on wild, speculative legal theories. The last few filed really start to look crazier than sovereign citizen bullshit theories. The Trump campaign filed several lawsuits prior to the election challenging various election procedures--which is how it's supposed to be done--and found mixed success, sometimes winning, sometimes losing. After an election, there is very little legal recourse--even Bush v Gore made it clear that challenging election procedures should be done before an election without very good reason. In the case of 2000, those challenges were largely about various recount provisions, and even then, these were filed very quickly. But in 2020, a lot of the cases weren't filed until previous ones had failed (laches! laches!), and even tried the novel legal theory of arguing the entire election should be thrown out because of a challenge to long-enacted laws (laches! laches!). The lawyers involved changed too--the competent conservative lawyers didn't want to sign on to Trump's crazy legal theories, but Trump apparently decided to not listen to anyone who told him he had no remaining viable recourse. It is worth pointing out that the defendants in one of the suits have filed a motion to impose sanctions on Trump's lawyers. Amusingly, they ask for a fine of all the money raised for the legal suits, although they are unlikely to get it.