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Just way below the number needed to influence elections. People say this like there are no close elections, or are only talking about Presidential elections (a

Just way below the number needed to influence elections. People say this like there are no close elections, or are only talking about Presidential elections (and ignoring Florida 2020), but pretty much every year there are razor thin votes in statewide and congressional races. Good example is Iowa 2nd district in 2020 which was decided by 6 votes: https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/democrat-rita-hart-ends-election-challenge-close-iowa/story?id=76796759 https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/democrat-rita-hart-ends-elec... GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks was certified the winner in November by a mere six votes out of 400,000 cast, marking one of the closest House races in modern history. Given 400,000 votes, there is guaranteed more than 6 fraudulent, mistaken, or sabotages ballots. Maybe that affected the result, or just missed flipping the seat, who knows. But small time voting fraud can still be a big problem.

tptacek 4y ago
It makes sense when you write it that way, but not in reality. There is a risk/reward to doing this. Part of your premise is that you can know when an election is going to come down to 6 votes. But in fact Meeks vs. Hart was newsworthy because results like that are incredibly rare. 99 times out of 100, if you try to juke the election, you're putting yourself at pretty grave legal risk and accomplishing absolutely nothing.
- mistermann 4y ago
  > Part of your premise is that you can know when an election is going to come down to 6 votes. Not in reality, you appended that to your local model. It's true that there is only so much fraud you can get away with, and if the legitimate votes outnumber your ballot stuffing then your plan failed. Presumably fraudsters do not know what the final counts are going to be (unlike how many people in this thread "know" things they have no way of knowing), so this would not necessarily alter their plans on sites that are plausibly (in their estimation) swingable. > But in fact Meeks vs. Hart was newsworthy because results like that are incredibly rare. 99 times out of 100, if you try to juke the election, you're putting yourself at pretty grave legal risk and accomplishing absolutely nothing. This rests on the premise of omniscience, and while this is a fairly standard convention on the internet these days, there is no scientific evidence I've seen that substantiates the phenomenon.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Which part of the risk/reward equation I've presented do you disagree with? That the reward is higher than I think it is? Can you be specific as to how many votes you think you'd be able to swing with a scheme targeting e-day voting? Or is it that you think the risk is lower?
    - mistermann 4y ago
      I'm disputing the claim that a premise of the argument is necessarily knowing the final vote count prior to launching the scheme. This knowledge is not actually necessary, although having it would certainly be beneficial.
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  Part of your premise is that you can know when an election is going to come down to 6 votes. Assuming that's true, you just need to know when it is going to be close, and that only requires polling, not prescience. https://www.thegazette.com/article/polling-shows-iowa-2nd-district-open-seat-race-a-dead-heat/ https://www.thegazette.com/article/polling-shows-iowa-2nd-di... Slightly more than two months before Iowans begin voting, polling shows the open-seat race in the U.S. House 2nd District as a dead heat. In a live poll of 406 likely voters by Harper Polling, Republican state Sen. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Democrat Rita Hart each had the support of 41 percent of the respondents So this is exactly the kind of race where a smart cheater would cheat, not trying to get Trump to win California or Biden to win West Virginia. But I assume people who are corrupt and cheat are going to be corrupt and cheat even when it is not in their own interest. And just by chance that will affect other elections happening at the same time.
  - tptacek 4y ago
    No, it's easy to know what the tight races are likely to be, and very difficult to predict which races are going to come down to a margin of just dozens of votes; it's much harder to predict those races than it is to predict the winners of races, since they're very uncommon, and lopsided polling is not. No, this doesn't sound plausible.
  - ricudis 4y ago
    In Greece, we've seen quite a lot of cases where polling failed spectacularly to detect even large vote swings. Given that those polls are usually being done by organizations closely tied to political parties, I guess they weren't just incompetent. So there's probably quite a lot of error margin there.
  - dukeofdoom 4y ago
LocalPCGuy 4y ago
In addition to the other response, elections where there are razor thin margins like this garner a TON of attention, making the likelyhood of getting away with fraud much less likely.
pyuser583 4y ago
A recent county wide election was dead even. They flipped a coin to determine the winner.
- kevinmchugh 4y ago
  People _hate_ this but it's as fair as anything and probably okay whenever the vote tally is very tight. There are solutions to this, in rcv (or runoffs period) or proportional representation
  - pyuser583 4y ago
    The position was for county coroner. I don’t think proportional representation would have helped. What is rcv? How would runoff’s help if there are only two candidates?
kevinmchugh 4y ago
I would just like to point out that my comment is about expecting legitimate votes cast by voters who are dead before election day.

tptacek 4y ago

It makes sense when you write it that way, but not in reality. There is a risk/reward to doing this. Part of your premise is that you can know when an election is going to come down to 6 votes. But in fact Meeks vs. Hart was newsworthy because results like that are incredibly rare. 99 times out of 100, if you try to juke the election, you're putting yourself at pretty grave legal risk and accomplishing absolutely nothing.

mistermann 4y ago
> Part of your premise is that you can know when an election is going to come down to 6 votes. Not in reality, you appended that to your local model. It's true that there is only so much fraud you can get away with, and if the legitimate votes outnumber your ballot stuffing then your plan failed. Presumably fraudsters do not know what the final counts are going to be (unlike how many people in this thread "know" things they have no way of knowing), so this would not necessarily alter their plans on sites that are plausibly (in their estimation) swingable. > But in fact Meeks vs. Hart was newsworthy because results like that are incredibly rare. 99 times out of 100, if you try to juke the election, you're putting yourself at pretty grave legal risk and accomplishing absolutely nothing. This rests on the premise of omniscience, and while this is a fairly standard convention on the internet these days, there is no scientific evidence I've seen that substantiates the phenomenon.
- tptacek 4y ago
  I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Which part of the risk/reward equation I've presented do you disagree with? That the reward is higher than I think it is? Can you be specific as to how many votes you think you'd be able to swing with a scheme targeting e-day voting? Or is it that you think the risk is lower?
  - mistermann 4y ago
    I'm disputing the claim that a premise of the argument is necessarily knowing the final vote count prior to launching the scheme. This knowledge is not actually necessary, although having it would certainly be beneficial.
WillPostForFood 4y ago
Part of your premise is that you can know when an election is going to come down to 6 votes. Assuming that's true, you just need to know when it is going to be close, and that only requires polling, not prescience. https://www.thegazette.com/article/polling-shows-iowa-2nd-district-open-seat-race-a-dead-heat/ https://www.thegazette.com/article/polling-shows-iowa-2nd-di... Slightly more than two months before Iowans begin voting, polling shows the open-seat race in the U.S. House 2nd District as a dead heat. In a live poll of 406 likely voters by Harper Polling, Republican state Sen. Mariannette Miller-Meeks and Democrat Rita Hart each had the support of 41 percent of the respondents So this is exactly the kind of race where a smart cheater would cheat, not trying to get Trump to win California or Biden to win West Virginia. But I assume people who are corrupt and cheat are going to be corrupt and cheat even when it is not in their own interest. And just by chance that will affect other elections happening at the same time.
- tptacek 4y ago
  No, it's easy to know what the tight races are likely to be, and very difficult to predict which races are going to come down to a margin of just dozens of votes; it's much harder to predict those races than it is to predict the winners of races, since they're very uncommon, and lopsided polling is not. No, this doesn't sound plausible.
- ricudis 4y ago
  In Greece, we've seen quite a lot of cases where polling failed spectacularly to detect even large vote swings. Given that those polls are usually being done by organizations closely tied to political parties, I guess they weren't just incompetent. So there's probably quite a lot of error margin there.
- dukeofdoom 4y ago

LocalPCGuy 4y ago

In addition to the other response, elections where there are razor thin margins like this garner a TON of attention, making the likelyhood of getting away with fraud much less likely.

pyuser583 4y ago

A recent county wide election was dead even. They flipped a coin to determine the winner.

kevinmchugh 4y ago
People _hate_ this but it's as fair as anything and probably okay whenever the vote tally is very tight. There are solutions to this, in rcv (or runoffs period) or proportional representation
- pyuser583 4y ago
  The position was for county coroner. I don’t think proportional representation would have helped. What is rcv? How would runoff’s help if there are only two candidates?

kevinmchugh 4y ago

I would just like to point out that my comment is about expecting legitimate votes cast by voters who are dead before election day.