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This. The process in my precinct is roughly... - Enter queue - A front of queue, show ID of some sort (various accepted) to volunteer - They scratch you fro

This. The process in my precinct is roughly... - Enter queue - A front of queue, show ID of some sort (various accepted) to volunteer - They scratch you from the list and hand you a paper scantron sheet - Go to private booth, fill out scantron - Go to exit, scan ballot (it scans and then drops into a locked box for manual tally later, if necessary) The "easy" ways to vote fraudulently are also easily caught... fake ID documents, voting twice, etc. For people who forget their ID or have address changes that haven't propagated through the voter roll, there is provisional voting - you do the same as above, but they keep the ballot in a separate pile and validate your eligibility to vote at a later time. IIRC, the voter gets a ticket # so they can check the voter portal later to see if the ballot was accepted. As noted, the number of fraudulent votes are astonishingly small, given the amount of money spent on proving otherwise. The current GOP has spent 100s of millions or billions on proving wide-spread fraud and so far, all they've managed to prove a few voters, most of whom were actually GOP-leaning, have committed fraud (and most of them were caught day-of already).

rayiner 8mo ago
> As noted, the number of fraudulent votes are astonishingly small, given the amount of money spent on proving otherwise How would you even know? The fact that prosecutions for fraudulent voting are rare tells you nothing. Prosecutions for tax evasion are also rare. Does that mean nobody evades taxes? If you have a system that’s insecure, how would you even know when it’s been compromised?
- jfengel 8mo ago
  There have been numerous efforts to scrutinize the voting. In 2020 there were 62 lawsuits; none of them succeeded. Tax evasion is rarely prosecuted because nobody is looking very hard. People looked very, very, very hard for fraud in 2020 and found zilch.
  - rmunn 8mo ago
    Most of those 62 lawsuits were thrown out on procedural grounds, such as lack of standing (which I think was a bad reason: if the losing candidate doesn't have standing to challenge an allegedly fraudulent voting system, then who does?). But that means they never reached the fact-finding stage, so citing those cases as meaning "there was no fraud" is not supported by the evidence. The cases thrown out on procedural grounds only mean "no conclusion was reached on whether the facts alleged in the complaint were true".
    - TeapotNotKettle 8mo ago
      And in each of those 62 cases they gave up there and then ? Tells you something
      - rmunn 8mo ago
        They didn't give up, they appealed. Most of the appeals, as I recall, were also decided on procedural grounds, but by that time it was (IIRC) "this is moot, we're not going to overturn the result of an election that was decided last year". If I've gotten any of my facts wrong, corrections (preferably with links) would be welcome — I don't have time right now to go dig up five-year-old news articles, I'm in the middle of a project. But no, they didn't give up then and there.
        dataflow 8mo ago
        > They didn't give up, they appealed. Most of the appeals, as I recall, were also decided on procedural grounds, but by that time it was (IIRC) "this is moot, we're not going to overturn the result of an election that was decided last year". > If I've gotten any of my facts wrong, corrections (preferably with links) would be welcome See "Post-Election Cases Decided on the Merits" in [1]. How do you reconcile the idea that voter fraud is common with the existence of so many cases decided on the merits against the plaintiffs precisely due to sheer lack of evidence? You'd think these cases with people looking so hard would've uncovered nontrivial fraud if it was common, no? [1] https://campaignlegal.org/results-lawsuits-regarding-2020-elections https://campaignlegal.org/results-lawsuits-regarding-2020-el...
  - rayiner 8mo ago
    Lawsuits can’t manufacture a factual record that was never collected in the first place. I don’t know how you can say people looked hard for fraud in 2020 when the lawsuits happened long after the ballots were counted. How would a lawsuit even reconstruct what happened in an election that happened months before where nobody was keeping detailed records?
- tasty_freeze 8mo ago
  > How would you even know? The people who have claimed for decades that there is rampant cheating have spent years and millions of dollars and have found so little that it actually proves the case against their claims. Further, it has been shown that what sounds like reasonable checking ends up preventing 100-200 legitimate votes for every one illegal vote prevented. HN guidelines say not to get political, but it is hard to avoid in this case because it is one party which is claiming widespread voter fraud. Let's start with a simple case. Tell me which of these facts is not true: * Donald Trump has claimed and continued to claim millions of illegal votes have been made against him, including millions by illegal aliens. The same claim, perhaps not using such large numbers, has been widely and frequently repeated by conservative media * Donald Trump became president in 2017 and had the might and resources of the full federal government to root out voter fraud * Donald Trump aggressively prosecutes his self-interests, and millions of illegal votes against him would be against his self-interest * As president, it is not just in his personal interest but is part of his duty to ensure voting is fair * Trump appointed Kris Kobach (more on him later), the AG of Kansas, to form a commission to get to the bottom of the rampant voter fraud * Nothing of note was produced by the commission ... it just kind of petered out One must conclude one of three things: (1) Trump was negligent in his duties by not investigating the issue (2) Trump or his subordinates were incompetent in their investigation of the issue (3) Voter fraud is not common. I'll leave it to speculation whether this was an honest mistake on the part of conservatives or if they were lying for political gain Read the wikipedia article about these issues relative to Kobach. Even before Trump, he was banging the drum as Sec of State for Kansas, claiming he knew of more than a hundred cases and asked for special powers to find the thousands of cases he knew were happening in Kansas. He was given authorization to do that investigation. How did it turn out? Start reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris_Kobach#Voter_fraud_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris_Kobach#Voter_fraud_claims Quoting a bit of it: > At that time, he "said he had identified more than 100 possible cases of double voting." Testifying during hearings on the bill, questioned by Rep. John Carmichael, Kobach was unable to cite a single other state that gives its secretary of state such authority.[153] By February 7, 2017, Kobach had filed nine cases and obtained six convictions. All were regarding cases of double voting; none would have been prevented by voter ID laws.[154][104][155] One case was dropped while two more remained pending. All six convictions involved older citizens, including four white Republican men and one woman, who were unaware that they had done anything wrong. The rest of it is similar, and all confirmed only that voter fraud is rare. But worse than that is his tactics, which have been adopted by many states, disenfranchises 100x more legal voters than illegal voters it catches. And statistically, it disenfranchises Democrats in far greater proportion than Republican voters (35% vs 23% of the affected voters). Here is another useful quote, along with a citation, on this topic from that same wikipedia entry: > A Brennan Center for Justice report calculated that rates of actual voter fraud are between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent. The Center calculated that someone is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud.[156]
- therealpygon 8mo ago
  Put simply? Statistics. Care to explain why you think we “wouldn’t know” despite repeatedly getting an accurate result every time ballots are manually recounted (since every state requires keeping the paper ballots), by members of both parties? Is it that they are all complicit in tallying illegal voting in order to elect members of the other party? Seems like a simple recount is all it has ever taken to disprove that notion..every…time…that claim has been made. And no, it isn’t prosecutions, it is the number of instances discovered to have mistakenly (or intentionally) voted as based on analysis of voting records in states that these proof-less challenges have been made. As in single digits and double-digits that are statistically irrelevant to an election. So I’m curious why you still believe that is a realistic problem, outside of elections being federalized in which case it very much would be possible with zero oversight (unlike state elections who have had 250 years to perfect their preferred methods of voting and oversight).
- triceratops 8mo ago
  > Prosecutions for tax evasion are also rare. Does that mean nobody evades taxes? There's usually an immediate personal benefit from evading taxes and not getting caught. Fraudulent voting doesn't have that.
lobf 8mo ago
>A front of queue, show ID of some sort (various accepted) to volunteer This is explicitly not required, at least last time I volunteered as a polling place worker. You should NEVER be required to show ID to vote, at least in CA.
- beAbU 8mo ago
  How do you determine voter eligibility without ID?
  - lobf 8mo ago
    You register to vote, are assigned a polling place where your name will appear on a list of registered voters, and you go to that polling place and tell them your name. If you're trying to fake it, you need to know what address and name someone else is registered at, what polling place they were assigned, and you have to hope they don't show up to vote too. All of these uncertainties mean it's pretty difficult for an individual to do any serious (if any!) voter fraud. Remember we had voting for a long time before magnetic strips and plastic.
  - Muromec 8mo ago
    The name is on the list, so the person can vote. Why would you need them to show an id for that? You would need to establish the identity first (which everybody would have anyways, should the US not be a bunch of third world countries in a trench coat), but not eligibility.
    - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 8mo ago
      So all you need to do is know somebody's name for that voting station. And since we're not checking IDs, when the "right" person shows up, how do we know they're the right person? I have to show ID to get into my local zoo, but not to vote someone onto the board in charge of the zoo. That doesn't make sense.
      - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago

rayiner 8mo ago

> As noted, the number of fraudulent votes are astonishingly small, given the amount of money spent on proving otherwise How would you even know? The fact that prosecutions for fraudulent voting are rare tells you nothing. Prosecutions for tax evasion are also rare. Does that mean nobody evades taxes? If you have a system that’s insecure, how would you even know when it’s been compromised?

jfengel 8mo ago
There have been numerous efforts to scrutinize the voting. In 2020 there were 62 lawsuits; none of them succeeded. Tax evasion is rarely prosecuted because nobody is looking very hard. People looked very, very, very hard for fraud in 2020 and found zilch.
- rmunn 8mo ago
  Most of those 62 lawsuits were thrown out on procedural grounds, such as lack of standing (which I think was a bad reason: if the losing candidate doesn't have standing to challenge an allegedly fraudulent voting system, then who does?). But that means they never reached the fact-finding stage, so citing those cases as meaning "there was no fraud" is not supported by the evidence. The cases thrown out on procedural grounds only mean "no conclusion was reached on whether the facts alleged in the complaint were true".
  - TeapotNotKettle 8mo ago
    And in each of those 62 cases they gave up there and then ? Tells you something
    - rmunn 8mo ago
      They didn't give up, they appealed. Most of the appeals, as I recall, were also decided on procedural grounds, but by that time it was (IIRC) "this is moot, we're not going to overturn the result of an election that was decided last year". If I've gotten any of my facts wrong, corrections (preferably with links) would be welcome — I don't have time right now to go dig up five-year-old news articles, I'm in the middle of a project. But no, they didn't give up then and there.
      - dataflow 8mo ago
        > They didn't give up, they appealed. Most of the appeals, as I recall, were also decided on procedural grounds, but by that time it was (IIRC) "this is moot, we're not going to overturn the result of an election that was decided last year". > If I've gotten any of my facts wrong, corrections (preferably with links) would be welcome See "Post-Election Cases Decided on the Merits" in [1]. How do you reconcile the idea that voter fraud is common with the existence of so many cases decided on the merits against the plaintiffs precisely due to sheer lack of evidence? You'd think these cases with people looking so hard would've uncovered nontrivial fraud if it was common, no? [1] https://campaignlegal.org/results-lawsuits-regarding-2020-elections https://campaignlegal.org/results-lawsuits-regarding-2020-el...
- rayiner 8mo ago
  Lawsuits can’t manufacture a factual record that was never collected in the first place. I don’t know how you can say people looked hard for fraud in 2020 when the lawsuits happened long after the ballots were counted. How would a lawsuit even reconstruct what happened in an election that happened months before where nobody was keeping detailed records?
tasty_freeze 8mo ago
> How would you even know? The people who have claimed for decades that there is rampant cheating have spent years and millions of dollars and have found so little that it actually proves the case against their claims. Further, it has been shown that what sounds like reasonable checking ends up preventing 100-200 legitimate votes for every one illegal vote prevented. HN guidelines say not to get political, but it is hard to avoid in this case because it is one party which is claiming widespread voter fraud. Let's start with a simple case. Tell me which of these facts is not true: * Donald Trump has claimed and continued to claim millions of illegal votes have been made against him, including millions by illegal aliens. The same claim, perhaps not using such large numbers, has been widely and frequently repeated by conservative media * Donald Trump became president in 2017 and had the might and resources of the full federal government to root out voter fraud * Donald Trump aggressively prosecutes his self-interests, and millions of illegal votes against him would be against his self-interest * As president, it is not just in his personal interest but is part of his duty to ensure voting is fair * Trump appointed Kris Kobach (more on him later), the AG of Kansas, to form a commission to get to the bottom of the rampant voter fraud * Nothing of note was produced by the commission ... it just kind of petered out One must conclude one of three things: (1) Trump was negligent in his duties by not investigating the issue (2) Trump or his subordinates were incompetent in their investigation of the issue (3) Voter fraud is not common. I'll leave it to speculation whether this was an honest mistake on the part of conservatives or if they were lying for political gain Read the wikipedia article about these issues relative to Kobach. Even before Trump, he was banging the drum as Sec of State for Kansas, claiming he knew of more than a hundred cases and asked for special powers to find the thousands of cases he knew were happening in Kansas. He was given authorization to do that investigation. How did it turn out? Start reading here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris_Kobach#Voter_fraud_claims https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris_Kobach#Voter_fraud_claims Quoting a bit of it: > At that time, he "said he had identified more than 100 possible cases of double voting." Testifying during hearings on the bill, questioned by Rep. John Carmichael, Kobach was unable to cite a single other state that gives its secretary of state such authority.[153] By February 7, 2017, Kobach had filed nine cases and obtained six convictions. All were regarding cases of double voting; none would have been prevented by voter ID laws.[154][104][155] One case was dropped while two more remained pending. All six convictions involved older citizens, including four white Republican men and one woman, who were unaware that they had done anything wrong. The rest of it is similar, and all confirmed only that voter fraud is rare. But worse than that is his tactics, which have been adopted by many states, disenfranchises 100x more legal voters than illegal voters it catches. And statistically, it disenfranchises Democrats in far greater proportion than Republican voters (35% vs 23% of the affected voters). Here is another useful quote, along with a citation, on this topic from that same wikipedia entry: > A Brennan Center for Justice report calculated that rates of actual voter fraud are between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent. The Center calculated that someone is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud.[156]
therealpygon 8mo ago
Put simply? Statistics. Care to explain why you think we “wouldn’t know” despite repeatedly getting an accurate result every time ballots are manually recounted (since every state requires keeping the paper ballots), by members of both parties? Is it that they are all complicit in tallying illegal voting in order to elect members of the other party? Seems like a simple recount is all it has ever taken to disprove that notion..every…time…that claim has been made. And no, it isn’t prosecutions, it is the number of instances discovered to have mistakenly (or intentionally) voted as based on analysis of voting records in states that these proof-less challenges have been made. As in single digits and double-digits that are statistically irrelevant to an election. So I’m curious why you still believe that is a realistic problem, outside of elections being federalized in which case it very much would be possible with zero oversight (unlike state elections who have had 250 years to perfect their preferred methods of voting and oversight).
triceratops 8mo ago
> Prosecutions for tax evasion are also rare. Does that mean nobody evades taxes? There's usually an immediate personal benefit from evading taxes and not getting caught. Fraudulent voting doesn't have that.

lobf 8mo ago

>A front of queue, show ID of some sort (various accepted) to volunteer This is explicitly not required, at least last time I volunteered as a polling place worker. You should NEVER be required to show ID to vote, at least in CA.

beAbU 8mo ago
How do you determine voter eligibility without ID?
- lobf 8mo ago
  You register to vote, are assigned a polling place where your name will appear on a list of registered voters, and you go to that polling place and tell them your name. If you're trying to fake it, you need to know what address and name someone else is registered at, what polling place they were assigned, and you have to hope they don't show up to vote too. All of these uncertainties mean it's pretty difficult for an individual to do any serious (if any!) voter fraud. Remember we had voting for a long time before magnetic strips and plastic.
- Muromec 8mo ago
  The name is on the list, so the person can vote. Why would you need them to show an id for that? You would need to establish the identity first (which everybody would have anyways, should the US not be a bunch of third world countries in a trench coat), but not eligibility.
  - kQq9oHeAz6wLLS 8mo ago
    So all you need to do is know somebody's name for that voting station. And since we're not checking IDs, when the "right" person shows up, how do we know they're the right person? I have to show ID to get into my local zoo, but not to vote someone onto the board in charge of the zoo. That doesn't make sense.
    - JumpCrisscross 8mo ago