8 ms·

They didn't hack the machine. They actually voted on the machines multiple times. The same scheme would have worked with mechanical machines or paper ballots.

hef19898 4y ago
I know for a fact that where I vote it is impossible to vote more than once (or close to, Berlin managed to fuck up voting last year for some reason). How is it impossible? Everyone is centrally registered with their primary residence. Based on these records, invitations are sent out prior to elections. With that invitation, or passport or ID, you show up at your voting local (of which there are plenty, the school just across the street has three of those and it is far from the only place in our town). There volunteers check you invitation or ID, hand you your ballot, verify you drop in the ballot box and strike from the voting list for this election. Not on the list? No ballot. No documents? No ballot. Since there are thousands of those locales, preliminary results are available in the first two hours after voting closes. We have no waiting lines (most of the time, Berlin is the exception that proofs the rule but then we talk about Berlin...). Mail-in voting works just fine and without any constraints. ballots are archived (for a very long time, I'm too lazy to check the exact duration), so if there are any doubts everything can be rechecked. No idea how the US just fails at the most simple thing in a democracy, voting. Or rather I have an idea, with gerrymandering and such shenanigans it seems to be by design to keep certain demographics from voting too much.
- rootusrootus 4y ago
  > No idea how the US just fails at the most simple thing in a democracy, voting. You're generalizing too far. Much of the US works just like you described for your local voting. The US has tens of thousands of voting precincts with their own rules. For better or worse.
  - Blahah 4y ago
    > The US has tens of thousands of voting precincts with their own rules Surely that's the failure being described. There are always parts of the US where corruption is winning, and those places ultimately have enough political or other capital that they are worth corrupting, and that puts the system of the entire country at continuous risk.
- xienze 4y ago
  > With that invitation, or passport or ID Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US. It’s OK if you didn’t know that, lots of people from other countries are dumbfounded to learn that all you have to do in the US is show up and give the poll workers the name of a registered voter in order to vote.* * Well, in some states you have to show ID. But one political party in particular fights very hard against this requirement.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    I followed this discussion in the US quite close actually. Simply because we need to have government ID. It is racist to require it if access to those IDs is, in praxis, limited for the demographics that should have limited access to voting. It is not if you are required to have government ID, and it is very easy to get one. getting a provisional passport for travel, with a validity of 6 months, takes all of one hour tops over here in Germany.
    - hamburglar 4y ago
      Precisely. You can’t make something a prerequisite to voting if every voter doesn’t have it. And the US is very much against the concept of a national ID. So you can’t have a national ID requirement. And as another commenter points out, it’s not that an ID requirement is racist, it’s that the motivations for it, knowing its impact, are racist.
      - hef19898 4y ago
        Man, the US is such a strange place. It is also the only country I know of, top of my head, that doesn't have national ID requirements. No idea why this can be seen as bad thing.
        hamburglar 4y ago
        Yeah, I don’t completely get this one either, but the way we are raised is that national ID is somehow a slippery slope towards federal agents wandering the street demanding “papers, please.” Interestingly enough, the intersection between those who would advocate for national voter ID requirements and those who would fundamentally oppose a national ID is very large.
- jaywalk 4y ago
  How would it be "impossible" to vote more than once when the volunteers who are enforcing that have been paid off to allow it to happen? That's exactly what happened in this case.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    Sure, and with hundreds of those places, and at least 4 volunteers per place, just how many votes do you think you can stuff? Plus any statistically significant deviation will be spotted. But besides theory we never had more then the odd case affecting a handful of votes every handful of elections for almost 80 years, so history proofs that for all practical reasons it is 1) not happening 2) impossible to do at a scale that would impact results and 3) easy to spot.
    - rootusrootus 4y ago
      You're rehashing literally the same exact argument we're having about US voting, it's not different. Some people think fraud is easy, some people say what you just did, that statistically it's very unlikely.
- dismantlethesun 4y ago
  In this case it looks like you could bribe the volunteers to simply give ballots without checking for ID, then bribe the overseers to validate the fraud. So long as the people who’s votes you are stealing don’t come in, then you are safe. There are no systems safe from fraud if you allow human judgment to be a part of the system.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    elections are as fraud save as they are because you have humans in the loop. Hundreds of them, all over the place. And it is not judgement, but decentralized supervision that solves this problem for you. Not some flimsy electronic system without auditable paper trail.
    - dismantlethesun 4y ago
      Hundreds of humans who can all work for a single individual or organization. Without any additional rules, adding more people to supervise is simply security theater. Note, I am not a general proponent of electronic voting machines either. They can easily make fraud easier by reducing the number of people to bribe to the few engineers with access to the blackbox code and the few officials who certify that the code is valid and was used on Election Day.
  - Izkata 4y ago
    > So long as the people who’s votes you are stealing don’t come in, then you are safe. There's a pretty good chance of being safe even if they do come in: https://nypost.com/2020/11/03/houston-woman-turned-away-from-polls-after-being-told-she-already-voted/ https://nypost.com/2020/11/03/houston-woman-turned-away-from...
- dahfizz 4y ago
  - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
    I can’t tell if this is a joke. Is that really a Democrat position? I feel like there must be a “quiet part” no one is saying out loud, because it makes no sense to me.
    - krapp 4y ago
      The "quiet part" is the US' long history of using ID requirements and other tactics to suppress and disenfranchise black and other minority voting[0,1], especially in the South, for example in North Carolina[1] and Texas[2], going all the way back to poll taxes[3]. If considered in a vacuum, completely absent the context of historical precedent, voter IDs seem like a simple common sense solution to the (practically nonexistent) problem of voter fraud. Unfortunately, we are talking about the US, and it's simply not possible to assume good faith. [0]https://time.com/5855885/voter-registration-history-race/ https://time.com/5855885/voter-registration-history-race/ [1]https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/new-voter-suppression https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/new-... [2]https://www.npr.org/2021/09/17/1038354159/n-c-judges-strike-down-a-voter-id-law-they-say-discriminates-against-black-voter https://www.npr.org/2021/09/17/1038354159/n-c-judges-strike-... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_State... [4]https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/22/politics/ted-cruz-texas-voter-id-professor-hearing/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/22/politics/ted-cruz-texas-voter...
      - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
        So, are you saying Europe’s voter ID laws exist to solve no problem? Because from where I sit, confidence in the electoral process seems to be a larger problem preventing than imaginary racism using real racism of low expectations.
    - makomk 4y ago
      Yes, that is really a Democrat position, along with opposing signature checks on postal votes, supporting sending out unsolicited mass postal voting forms, opposing removing people who've moved states from the electoral register on the state they left, dismantling any system for identifying people recorded as having voted in more than one state, and fighting even the most basic checks on their programs for literally paying workers to fill out voters' ballots for them. The stated justification for all of these is the same: not doing so is an evil attempt to suppress the black vote and disenfranchise black voters. The ACLU and the non-Fox News media generally support them on this. American politics is wild by European standards.

hef19898 4y ago

I know for a fact that where I vote it is impossible to vote more than once (or close to, Berlin managed to fuck up voting last year for some reason). How is it impossible? Everyone is centrally registered with their primary residence. Based on these records, invitations are sent out prior to elections. With that invitation, or passport or ID, you show up at your voting local (of which there are plenty, the school just across the street has three of those and it is far from the only place in our town). There volunteers check you invitation or ID, hand you your ballot, verify you drop in the ballot box and strike from the voting list for this election. Not on the list? No ballot. No documents? No ballot. Since there are thousands of those locales, preliminary results are available in the first two hours after voting closes. We have no waiting lines (most of the time, Berlin is the exception that proofs the rule but then we talk about Berlin...). Mail-in voting works just fine and without any constraints. ballots are archived (for a very long time, I'm too lazy to check the exact duration), so if there are any doubts everything can be rechecked. No idea how the US just fails at the most simple thing in a democracy, voting. Or rather I have an idea, with gerrymandering and such shenanigans it seems to be by design to keep certain demographics from voting too much.

rootusrootus 4y ago
> No idea how the US just fails at the most simple thing in a democracy, voting. You're generalizing too far. Much of the US works just like you described for your local voting. The US has tens of thousands of voting precincts with their own rules. For better or worse.
- Blahah 4y ago
  > The US has tens of thousands of voting precincts with their own rules Surely that's the failure being described. There are always parts of the US where corruption is winning, and those places ultimately have enough political or other capital that they are worth corrupting, and that puts the system of the entire country at continuous risk.
xienze 4y ago
> With that invitation, or passport or ID Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US. It’s OK if you didn’t know that, lots of people from other countries are dumbfounded to learn that all you have to do in the US is show up and give the poll workers the name of a registered voter in order to vote.* * Well, in some states you have to show ID. But one political party in particular fights very hard against this requirement.
- hef19898 4y ago
  I followed this discussion in the US quite close actually. Simply because we need to have government ID. It is racist to require it if access to those IDs is, in praxis, limited for the demographics that should have limited access to voting. It is not if you are required to have government ID, and it is very easy to get one. getting a provisional passport for travel, with a validity of 6 months, takes all of one hour tops over here in Germany.
  - hamburglar 4y ago
    Precisely. You can’t make something a prerequisite to voting if every voter doesn’t have it. And the US is very much against the concept of a national ID. So you can’t have a national ID requirement. And as another commenter points out, it’s not that an ID requirement is racist, it’s that the motivations for it, knowing its impact, are racist.
    - hef19898 4y ago
      Man, the US is such a strange place. It is also the only country I know of, top of my head, that doesn't have national ID requirements. No idea why this can be seen as bad thing.
      - hamburglar 4y ago
        Yeah, I don’t completely get this one either, but the way we are raised is that national ID is somehow a slippery slope towards federal agents wandering the street demanding “papers, please.” Interestingly enough, the intersection between those who would advocate for national voter ID requirements and those who would fundamentally oppose a national ID is very large.
jaywalk 4y ago
How would it be "impossible" to vote more than once when the volunteers who are enforcing that have been paid off to allow it to happen? That's exactly what happened in this case.
- hef19898 4y ago
  Sure, and with hundreds of those places, and at least 4 volunteers per place, just how many votes do you think you can stuff? Plus any statistically significant deviation will be spotted. But besides theory we never had more then the odd case affecting a handful of votes every handful of elections for almost 80 years, so history proofs that for all practical reasons it is 1) not happening 2) impossible to do at a scale that would impact results and 3) easy to spot.
  - rootusrootus 4y ago
    You're rehashing literally the same exact argument we're having about US voting, it's not different. Some people think fraud is easy, some people say what you just did, that statistically it's very unlikely.
dismantlethesun 4y ago
In this case it looks like you could bribe the volunteers to simply give ballots without checking for ID, then bribe the overseers to validate the fraud. So long as the people who’s votes you are stealing don’t come in, then you are safe. There are no systems safe from fraud if you allow human judgment to be a part of the system.
- hef19898 4y ago
  elections are as fraud save as they are because you have humans in the loop. Hundreds of them, all over the place. And it is not judgement, but decentralized supervision that solves this problem for you. Not some flimsy electronic system without auditable paper trail.
  - dismantlethesun 4y ago
    Hundreds of humans who can all work for a single individual or organization. Without any additional rules, adding more people to supervise is simply security theater. Note, I am not a general proponent of electronic voting machines either. They can easily make fraud easier by reducing the number of people to bribe to the few engineers with access to the blackbox code and the few officials who certify that the code is valid and was used on Election Day.
- Izkata 4y ago
  > So long as the people who’s votes you are stealing don’t come in, then you are safe. There's a pretty good chance of being safe even if they do come in: https://nypost.com/2020/11/03/houston-woman-turned-away-from-polls-after-being-told-she-already-voted/ https://nypost.com/2020/11/03/houston-woman-turned-away-from...
dahfizz 4y ago
- SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
  I can’t tell if this is a joke. Is that really a Democrat position? I feel like there must be a “quiet part” no one is saying out loud, because it makes no sense to me.
  - krapp 4y ago
    The "quiet part" is the US' long history of using ID requirements and other tactics to suppress and disenfranchise black and other minority voting[0,1], especially in the South, for example in North Carolina[1] and Texas[2], going all the way back to poll taxes[3]. If considered in a vacuum, completely absent the context of historical precedent, voter IDs seem like a simple common sense solution to the (practically nonexistent) problem of voter fraud. Unfortunately, we are talking about the US, and it's simply not possible to assume good faith. [0]https://time.com/5855885/voter-registration-history-race/ https://time.com/5855885/voter-registration-history-race/ [1]https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/new-voter-suppression https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/new-... [2]https://www.npr.org/2021/09/17/1038354159/n-c-judges-strike-down-a-voter-id-law-they-say-discriminates-against-black-voter https://www.npr.org/2021/09/17/1038354159/n-c-judges-strike-... [3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_State... [4]https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/22/politics/ted-cruz-texas-voter-id-professor-hearing/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/22/politics/ted-cruz-texas-voter...
    - SV_BubbleTime 4y ago
      So, are you saying Europe’s voter ID laws exist to solve no problem? Because from where I sit, confidence in the electoral process seems to be a larger problem preventing than imaginary racism using real racism of low expectations.
  - makomk 4y ago
    Yes, that is really a Democrat position, along with opposing signature checks on postal votes, supporting sending out unsolicited mass postal voting forms, opposing removing people who've moved states from the electoral register on the state they left, dismantling any system for identifying people recorded as having voted in more than one state, and fighting even the most basic checks on their programs for literally paying workers to fill out voters' ballots for them. The stated justification for all of these is the same: not doing so is an evil attempt to suppress the black vote and disenfranchise black voters. The ACLU and the non-Fox News media generally support them on this. American politics is wild by European standards.