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> No, it doesn’t happen often enough to undermine the integrity of elections in the aggregate. Ridiculous to just throw this out as if it's a concrete fact. Ev

> No, it doesn’t happen often enough to undermine the integrity of elections in the aggregate. Ridiculous to just throw this out as if it's a concrete fact. Even changing the outcome of a Presidential election doesn't require any kind of sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign. Just enough well-placed ones where the vote will be close enough that the fraud doesn't have to be too large. I'm not saying it has or hasn't happened, but it's certainly possible.

javagram 4y ago
> Even changing the outcome of a Presidential election doesn't require any kind of sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign. Just enough well-placed ones Were that to have happened, analysis of the voting results would show a divergence in results in those “well placed” areas. For a presidential race, there are a lot of eyes on this comparing demographic data with vote totals. For instance, in 2020 there were some allegations that cities were faking votes for a specific political party, but analysts found the same voting trends against the incumbent president occurred in suburbs and in states controlled by the other party that were not decisive to the outcome. For the fraud to not be obvious, it would have needed to be committed in every major city and state.
- stefantalpalaru 4y ago
- willcipriano 4y ago
  > Were that to have happened, analysis of the voting results would show a divergence in results in those “well placed” areas. Why didn't that sort of analysis find fraud in Philadelphia in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018? How are you so certain of its infallibility given it's apparent inability to find fraud like this?
  - the_snooze 4y ago
    The analysis never found fraud? Or there was no analysis at all? According to the DOJ, the fraud centered on Democratic primary elections [1], which don't receive anywhere near as much scrunity or participation as Presidential general elections. [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-elections-convicted-conspiring-violate-civil-rights-and-bribery https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-ele...
    - willcipriano 4y ago
      Let me put this in different terms. What algorithm should they have ran to detect this? If we have such a infallible algorithm why isn't it always used? If it's not a algorithm but instead more of a handy wavy "analysis" by "experts" how do you know for an empirical certainty they didn't just actually fill a room full of monkeys, waited a week and said the results are good?
      - the_snooze 4y ago
        You asked "Why didn't that sort of analysis find fraud in Philadelphia in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018?" And I answered it. Is that a sufficient answer or not? To your new questions, yes, there are well-established ways to detect monkey business from machine-maniputation or ballot-stuffing. Basically, you make sure that the results line up between the paper ballots and the machine counts, and that the number of paper ballots you have matches the number of voters who checked in at the precinct. https://www.vote.pa.gov/About-Elections/Pages/Post-Election-Audits.aspx https://www.vote.pa.gov/About-Elections/Pages/Post-Election-... By law, elections generate a lot of data across independent sources. Rigging an election undetected is hard because you need to make sure those data sources remain consistent. If you're skeptical of elections, I encourage you to volunteer to be a poll worker. Learn your state's procedures and carry them out more faithfully than how you think they're otherwise done today.
        willcipriano 4y ago
        That doesn't really solve for all the ways you can rig an election. For example in '2000 Mules' they propose that democratically aligned charities like homeless shelters and elder care homes would gather ballots from their vulnerable populations, fill them out for their preferred candidates, and then have mules distribute those ballots to publicly accessible ballot boxes 3 to 5 at a time. They have some interesting footage of those boxes, and a lot of the footage is apparently conspicuously missing. However nothing concrete, so take this as a thought experiment. How do you prove they didn't do that from the raw ballot counts and voter roles in a way that I don't have to take someone else's word for it?
  - camgunz 4y ago
    It looks like this was pretty small-time voter fraud in local and low-level elections, where there weren't teams of data operatives scouring returns for any inconsistency. When people talk about "there is no voter fraud", mostly what they mean are federal elections. The US has great gobs of elections, there's no reasonable way to analyze them all, and we simply don't have the data in most of the cases.
  - javagram 4y ago
    > Why didn't that sort of analysis find fraud in Philadelphia in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018? You can’t look at votes a local candidate for city office received in Massachusetts or Iowa because those candidates are only on the ballot in Philadelphia. The type of national vote trend analysis I’m describing only exists for national elections.
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  Wasn’t 2020 election was decided by 5 states and within them no more than a dozen counties?
  - javagram 4y ago
    No. It was decided by votes in the swing states. There wasn’t a swing in votes in “a dozen counties”. Votes trended toward the democratic candidate across demographically similar counties in all 5 states , and also trended the same way in states that were not critical to the election (for instance, in Texas: “Biden improved on Hillary Clinton's 2016 vote share by 3.24%, giving him the largest percentage in the state by a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter carried the state in 1976. Trump's 5.58-point margin of victory was also the narrowest for a Republican since 1996.” - Wikipedia )
    - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
      >Votes trended toward the democratic candidate across demographically similar counties in all 5 states , Categorically false. Increased and majority number of Republican governors were elected. Republicans increased house seats. Trump out performed himself in all counties he won in 2016. Democrats did not trend upwards.
      - javagram 4y ago
        Sorry for the imprecision, I thought it was clear we were discussing the Presidential candidate voting specifically. Yes, Republican congressmen improved their performance compared to 2018. some voters ticket split and voted for Biden for president and republicans for congress. Although I guess some would say the election hackers just forgot to update the other database columns or something.
- MrPatan 4y ago
  Whose analysts?
slg 4y ago
>Even changing the outcome of a Presidential election doesn't require any kind of sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign. Just enough well-placed ones where the vote will be close enough that the fraud doesn't have to be too large. This only looks true when viewed retroactively. It would have taken roughly 80k votes to switch the 2016 election from Trump to Clinton. However people had no idea of that beforehand. That 80k vote number accomplishes the goal only if one knows exactly where to place them. Someone would need to add hundreds of thousands if not millions of votes across numerous battleground states in order to be convinced that their changes would have the desired impact. That certainly sounds like a "sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign".
- maerF0x0 4y ago
  unsure the exact math here, but certainty isn't the required bar for an investment, just positive EROI .
  - slg 4y ago
    I wasn't addressing a question of whether election fraud happens or the motivation for it. I was specifically criticizing the idea that "changing the outcome of a Presidential election" is possible without a "sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign". The EROI doesn't matter in that context because the goal is a singular binary event. It either was enough to sway the election and it qualifies for this discussion or it wasn't enough and therefore doesn't support OPs original point.
    - maerF0x0 4y ago
      If the EROI is high enough you try it prior to knowing the outcome. Because there is a curve of investment that eats into the Return portion of the equation, they should push up the number of votes (cost) until they hit their desired (cost of capital + profit margin). That is the rational way to act at least. If someone says to you pay $1 to have a 75% chance at $2. you definitely should take it. It's the same with millions of dollars or billions of dollars.
pvg 4y ago
Ridiculous to just throw this out as if it's a concrete fact. It appears to be a concrete fact this fraud did not change the outcome in any election. The scrutiny also goes way up as you move up hierarchy of election importance.
- anonymouse008 4y ago
  I wonder if Watergate's operations continued uninterrupted by 'you pesky kids (reporters)' what kind of innovations would be expected in that market?
  - pvg 4y ago
    I don't understand what this means, sorry.
- mod 4y ago
  I don't think concrete facts are generally arrived upon by appearances. I consider your first sentence self-contradicting.
rootusrootus 4y ago
For all the conspiracy theorists out there who still think there were more than seven million fraudulent votes cast in 2020, I wish I could give them the opportunity to try and vote fraudulently, with no legal consequences. You can do whatever it takes (caveat: no violence) to get those fake votes in. Document everything you did, record it all, present it when you're done and there will be no legal repercussions. We'll thank you for pointing out how easy the system is to game. Give it your best shot, talk is cheap.
- tomcatfish 4y ago
  All you've done is add insult to a hypothetical and pretend it's a point of argument. I shouldn't be surprised though, because "talk is cheap"
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    That's not an insult, it is a challenge. Put up, or shut up. Calling into question our fundamental democratic systems just to score points in identity politics is low brow, we should challenge anyone who makes those accusations to back them up with facts.

javagram 4y ago

> Even changing the outcome of a Presidential election doesn't require any kind of sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign. Just enough well-placed ones Were that to have happened, analysis of the voting results would show a divergence in results in those “well placed” areas. For a presidential race, there are a lot of eyes on this comparing demographic data with vote totals. For instance, in 2020 there were some allegations that cities were faking votes for a specific political party, but analysts found the same voting trends against the incumbent president occurred in suburbs and in states controlled by the other party that were not decisive to the outcome. For the fraud to not be obvious, it would have needed to be committed in every major city and state.

stefantalpalaru 4y ago
willcipriano 4y ago
> Were that to have happened, analysis of the voting results would show a divergence in results in those “well placed” areas. Why didn't that sort of analysis find fraud in Philadelphia in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018? How are you so certain of its infallibility given it's apparent inability to find fraud like this?
- the_snooze 4y ago
  The analysis never found fraud? Or there was no analysis at all? According to the DOJ, the fraud centered on Democratic primary elections [1], which don't receive anywhere near as much scrunity or participation as Presidential general elections. [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-elections-convicted-conspiring-violate-civil-rights-and-bribery https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-ele...
  - willcipriano 4y ago
    Let me put this in different terms. What algorithm should they have ran to detect this? If we have such a infallible algorithm why isn't it always used? If it's not a algorithm but instead more of a handy wavy "analysis" by "experts" how do you know for an empirical certainty they didn't just actually fill a room full of monkeys, waited a week and said the results are good?
    - the_snooze 4y ago
      You asked "Why didn't that sort of analysis find fraud in Philadelphia in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018?" And I answered it. Is that a sufficient answer or not? To your new questions, yes, there are well-established ways to detect monkey business from machine-maniputation or ballot-stuffing. Basically, you make sure that the results line up between the paper ballots and the machine counts, and that the number of paper ballots you have matches the number of voters who checked in at the precinct. https://www.vote.pa.gov/About-Elections/Pages/Post-Election-Audits.aspx https://www.vote.pa.gov/About-Elections/Pages/Post-Election-... By law, elections generate a lot of data across independent sources. Rigging an election undetected is hard because you need to make sure those data sources remain consistent. If you're skeptical of elections, I encourage you to volunteer to be a poll worker. Learn your state's procedures and carry them out more faithfully than how you think they're otherwise done today.
      - willcipriano 4y ago
        That doesn't really solve for all the ways you can rig an election. For example in '2000 Mules' they propose that democratically aligned charities like homeless shelters and elder care homes would gather ballots from their vulnerable populations, fill them out for their preferred candidates, and then have mules distribute those ballots to publicly accessible ballot boxes 3 to 5 at a time. They have some interesting footage of those boxes, and a lot of the footage is apparently conspicuously missing. However nothing concrete, so take this as a thought experiment. How do you prove they didn't do that from the raw ballot counts and voter roles in a way that I don't have to take someone else's word for it?
- camgunz 4y ago
  It looks like this was pretty small-time voter fraud in local and low-level elections, where there weren't teams of data operatives scouring returns for any inconsistency. When people talk about "there is no voter fraud", mostly what they mean are federal elections. The US has great gobs of elections, there's no reasonable way to analyze them all, and we simply don't have the data in most of the cases.
- javagram 4y ago
  > Why didn't that sort of analysis find fraud in Philadelphia in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018? You can’t look at votes a local candidate for city office received in Massachusetts or Iowa because those candidates are only on the ballot in Philadelphia. The type of national vote trend analysis I’m describing only exists for national elections.
SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
Wasn’t 2020 election was decided by 5 states and within them no more than a dozen counties?
- javagram 4y ago
  No. It was decided by votes in the swing states. There wasn’t a swing in votes in “a dozen counties”. Votes trended toward the democratic candidate across demographically similar counties in all 5 states , and also trended the same way in states that were not critical to the election (for instance, in Texas: “Biden improved on Hillary Clinton's 2016 vote share by 3.24%, giving him the largest percentage in the state by a Democratic presidential candidate since Jimmy Carter carried the state in 1976. Trump's 5.58-point margin of victory was also the narrowest for a Republican since 1996.” - Wikipedia )
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    >Votes trended toward the democratic candidate across demographically similar counties in all 5 states , Categorically false. Increased and majority number of Republican governors were elected. Republicans increased house seats. Trump out performed himself in all counties he won in 2016. Democrats did not trend upwards.
    - javagram 4y ago
      Sorry for the imprecision, I thought it was clear we were discussing the Presidential candidate voting specifically. Yes, Republican congressmen improved their performance compared to 2018. some voters ticket split and voted for Biden for president and republicans for congress. Although I guess some would say the election hackers just forgot to update the other database columns or something.
MrPatan 4y ago
Whose analysts?

slg 4y ago

>Even changing the outcome of a Presidential election doesn't require any kind of sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign. Just enough well-placed ones where the vote will be close enough that the fraud doesn't have to be too large. This only looks true when viewed retroactively. It would have taken roughly 80k votes to switch the 2016 election from Trump to Clinton. However people had no idea of that beforehand. That 80k vote number accomplishes the goal only if one knows exactly where to place them. Someone would need to add hundreds of thousands if not millions of votes across numerous battleground states in order to be convinced that their changes would have the desired impact. That certainly sounds like a "sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign".

maerF0x0 4y ago
unsure the exact math here, but certainty isn't the required bar for an investment, just positive EROI .
- slg 4y ago
  I wasn't addressing a question of whether election fraud happens or the motivation for it. I was specifically criticizing the idea that "changing the outcome of a Presidential election" is possible without a "sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign". The EROI doesn't matter in that context because the goal is a singular binary event. It either was enough to sway the election and it qualifies for this discussion or it wasn't enough and therefore doesn't support OPs original point.
  - maerF0x0 4y ago
    If the EROI is high enough you try it prior to knowing the outcome. Because there is a curve of investment that eats into the Return portion of the equation, they should push up the number of votes (cost) until they hit their desired (cost of capital + profit margin). That is the rational way to act at least. If someone says to you pay $1 to have a 75% chance at $2. you definitely should take it. It's the same with millions of dollars or billions of dollars.

pvg 4y ago

Ridiculous to just throw this out as if it's a concrete fact. It appears to be a concrete fact this fraud did not change the outcome in any election. The scrutiny also goes way up as you move up hierarchy of election importance.

anonymouse008 4y ago
I wonder if Watergate's operations continued uninterrupted by 'you pesky kids (reporters)' what kind of innovations would be expected in that market?
- pvg 4y ago
  I don't understand what this means, sorry.
mod 4y ago
I don't think concrete facts are generally arrived upon by appearances. I consider your first sentence self-contradicting.

rootusrootus 4y ago

For all the conspiracy theorists out there who still think there were more than seven million fraudulent votes cast in 2020, I wish I could give them the opportunity to try and vote fraudulently, with no legal consequences. You can do whatever it takes (caveat: no violence) to get those fake votes in. Document everything you did, record it all, present it when you're done and there will be no legal repercussions. We'll thank you for pointing out how easy the system is to game. Give it your best shot, talk is cheap.

tomcatfish 4y ago
All you've done is add insult to a hypothetical and pretend it's a point of argument. I shouldn't be surprised though, because "talk is cheap"
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  That's not an insult, it is a challenge. Put up, or shut up. Calling into question our fundamental democratic systems just to score points in identity politics is low brow, we should challenge anyone who makes those accusations to back them up with facts.