What I dislike about a lot of these potential fraud analysis techniques is that if a group that was performing fraud was aware of them, then they would simply perform the fraud 'properly' such that the given technique(s) don't show evidence (since they know what others are looking for and hoping to find, they simply ensure it isn't there).
The same goes for similar techniques like Benford's law: once you know about them, you can improve your sophistication so that no conclusion can be made (There are some interesting exceptions here since most claims of fraud would have one believe that centralized or semi-centralized fraud is much harder to perform than decentralized/random fraud, in which case due to coordination issues, some of these techniques could still bear fruit).
But, the obvious overlaying issue is that the system is broken from the bottom up: there is no authentication, authorization, or encryption. Rather than having random Internet bloggers attempt to detect fraud with the information and tools they have, the system should instead be made secure and robust from the bottom-up, starting with how votes are made, tallied, transported, and so on. Additionally the technologies used, voting machines used, counting methods used, and voting system itself (lacking any ranked-choice or similar options) are all severely lacking modern improvements.
No single person should be counting votes and typing numbers into fields. We should at least try to use some of the multidisciplinary technology developed in the last five or so decades to try to patch this from the bottom-up so that the system is much more robust and auditable for the future, because things are only going to get weirder (honestly, the US election went very smoothly compared to how it gone have gone, imo - there is no better time to prevent future disasters than today).
The system is secure and robust, at least with regards to the mechanics of individual votings.
Among the main factors is its distributed nature. You just can't run a scam with senior citizen volunteers in thousands of individual precincts.
Then, there are observers. Famous case from this week's election was Republicans complaining that their two dozen(!) observers weren't allowed closer than 6 feet to the ballots.
If it were possible to manipulate the vote tabulation in any meaningful way, the GOP wouldn't need to go to all the lengths it does w.r.t. gerrymandering, purging voter roles, coming up with new requirements for voting, or closing voting precincts.
> The system is secure and robust, at least with regards to the mechanics of individual votings.
Agreed. If anything this has shown me just how robust the voting system is currently. Many of the counting locations live streamed the process, there are watchers from all interested parties, and the various people in charge/control seem to be from a mix of both sides. Small errors can still occur, but like we saw from 2016, a recount changed the final tally by a couple hundred votes in close states.
The real effective fraud, is voter suppression. Shutting down polling places where one side doesn't want people to vote, and making absentee voting seem like something that isn't done every single election for example.
Then there is after election fraud where one side attempts to delegitimize and throw out legally cast votes.
>Many of the counting locations live streamed the process
applying magician's principles one would make observing public focus all the attention at one place while the actual "magic" would happen outside of that focus spot.
You found one in the 0.00002%. Notably, this occurred during a primary. It's still awful, but the GOP trusts the Democrats to run their own primaries and vice-versa.
Twisted things being done in our elections goes back to Tammany Hall. If you know where to look in American history it's not hard to find credible instances of important elections having substantial amounts of fraud. Why do people believe that when the chips are down and vast amounts of money and power are at stake that people are simply going to play fair? Especially when the players are some of the most ruthless, narcissistic, and sociopathic people in America?
>The validity of the runoff election was challenged before the US Supreme Court due to allegations of election fraud, and in later years, testimony by parties involved indicated that widespread fraud occurred and that friendly political machines[3] produced the fraudulent votes needed for Johnson to have a numerical majority, in effect stealing the election.
> Some, including Republican legislators and journalists, believed that Kennedy benefited from vote fraud from Mayor Richard Daley's powerful Chicago political machine. [12] Mayor Daley’s machine was known for "delivering whopping Democratic tallies by fair means and foul."[13] Republicans tried and failed to overturn the results at the time—as well as in ten other states.[13] Some journalists also later claimed that mobster Sam Giancana and his Chicago crime syndicate "played a role" in Kennedy's victory. [13] Nixon's campaign staff urged him to pursue recounts and challenge the validity of Kennedy's victory, however, Nixon gave a speech three days after the election stating that he would not contest the election.[14]
This "Chicago political machine" was later shown to have committed voter fraud in 1982. 26 people were convicted[1], and here's the grand jury report[2]. They had been getting away with it, until they didn't.
Fortunately, as media reassure us, today voting fraud simply cannot happen: you'd need a whole conspiracy of dozens of people, a real, as one could call it, machine.
Okay, here’s a non-media non-partisan source. What I’m linking to was written in 2007. This seems prescient:
In the aftermath of a close election, losing candidates are often quick to blame voter fraud for the results. Legislators cite voter fraud as justification for various new restrictions on the exercise of the franchise. And pundits trot out the same few anecdotes time and again as proof that a wave of fraud is imminent.
You don't need to. In the US you can lose the nation by 3 million votes as long as you win 3-4 swing states in the presidential or senate vote -- be it your brother making 538 votes disappear or your staffers creating 203 ballots with your name on it...
It’s really really difficult to do either of those things, especially in vote by mail. In Washington, for instance, I can see who is registered, who voted in a given election, and match that to the vote totals.
I live in Washington state. There is someone registered to vote on my street who has voted, consistently, since 2012 - The year the resident by that name moved out. We have raised the issue to the Secretary of State’s office, and they have sent out a mailer for the resident to confirm their address.
turnout is always < 1.00 in the US because voting is not mandatory and registration is not (universally on a national level) automatic—which would need to happen before mandatory voting.
so it is theoretically trivial, once you know how many votes you needed to have won that you did not, to add a number of fake votes N to the number of real votes P such that N+P < T, the total of registered voters.
however, this is actually not that easy to do en masse scale because of how discretely elections are conducted. people in the US generally vote by precinct (determined at the local level by the county board of elections) which is about the size of a census tract, which is a relatively small area. it is basically impossible to know ahead of time which specific precincts you need to flip in order to change the result in a credible way. injecting the ballots into the process would require a level of sophistication that interacting with the county election officials or volunteer election administrators would lead you to believe is not possible.
the actual way to do election fraud would be to just report vote totals that have no basis in fact. which, sure, i guess is also possible. but then, while Democrats control the urban centers so may have more registered eligible voters who do not vote to be able to fake vote totals within their cities, Republicans control the vast majority of counties in the country. so at scale, effective use of this strategy would just result in everyone reporting 100% turnout every year...which clearly doesn’t happen.
the fact that any arms race here would rapidly devolve into a situation neither side can accurately predict means that election fraud at scale not only does not occur, but also that is is actually not preferable. it is way easier to play in other margins (make it harder for people to register, kick people off voter rolls, etc).
3-4 swing states is still a national level. You're also talking about 20k-100k type numbers. This isn't someone winning by 100 votes.
What's funny about this situation is that Biden is on track to win most of these states by a larger margin than Trump did against Clinton. She did ask for a recount, but I don't remember her ever going on and on about fraud.
The big difference is that it's been clearly shown that Russia did interfere [1]. The arguable point is did Trump's campaign know and direct the interference?
And if we're really talking about shaping elections, disinformation and voter suppression is the way to get it done. Once votes are cast, it's too hard to move enough in order to have any meaningful change. There are too many checks, rechecks, and processes in place to commit fraud at the scale needed for a large election.
Russia has been meddling in our elections since the Cold War began[1]. China, Israel, and every other power "interferes" in our elections, too, just like we do to them.
What was disingenuous of the US media was to make a huge deal out of 2016 shenanigans by Russia without any context, making it appear to the average voter that it was both significant and unique, neither of which is true.
The intel community and major media spent 3 years and tens of millions of dollars looking for something illegal or even unethical that the Trump campaign did related to Russia, and nothing was found.
The idea that there are "too many checks, rechecks, processes ... to commit fraud at the scale needed for a large election" is absurd in the US where the whole national election can be determined at the end by a single large county in one swing state, as happened in 2000. Now realize that 45 states were required to haphazardly design and implement, in 3 months, a mail-in voting system on a scale with which they had no experience, we'd expect a lot of errors that aren't even malicious.
Add in a flurry of state governments quickly passing various laws to swing things to their favor as happened in all the swing states, and you have a recipe for disaster as we're seeing.
Might have something to do with all the provable connections to Russia the Trump campaign had. People are sitting in jail for lying about contacts with Russia.
You really can't pretend these are similar situations.
And it's also a huge difference between undermining the entire process vs claiming that Russia conducted psyops on American voters in favor of Trump.
Trump is saying you cannot trust the vote counting. That's a big deal.
Which of course didn’t happen hear - Biden is on track to win by a clear electoral and popular margin. Florida in 2000 was decided by hundreds of votes though.
People are being willfully obtuse when they say the kind of fraud being alleged isn't possible. A certain political party spent that last six months forcing rule changes on swing states vis a vis mail in voting that you can't compare this year's election to any that came before.
Most of the fraud allegations (at least the ones where the numbers would be large enough to make a significant difference) revolve around these unsolicited mail in ballots and the extended deadlines which we've never had before in this country.
And please, kicking out GOP poll watchers (and only GOP poll watchers) and blocking their ability to observe and inspect ballots might not prove fraud took place, but it does prove criminal intent in my eyes, and the eyes of millions of other Americans.
I believe there was one where GOP poll watchers were barred from entry - because there were already GOP poll watchers in the room and the room was at capacity.
> these unsolicited mail in ballots and the extended deadlines which we've never had before in this country.
Many states added new procedures like these to this election, but I don't believe any state added procedures that weren't already used in one or more other states.
- Despite the scope of this fraud, it didn't alter the election outcome.
- The bi-partisan checks and balances failed because the Republican party had insufficient strength in the areas of Chicago where the fraud occurred.
- They got caught.
- This was 40 years ago. It was novel for the FBI to use computers at the time to detect irregularities.
In the states that Trump is currently contesting, the GOP controls either the legislature or the legislature and the Governorship. The GOP isn't going to let any precincts go unwatched in these states.
Fraud isn't impossible, it's just impossible at a scale to change an election outcome and get away with it, especially the presidential election.
One thing I find interesting is that one of the measures the GOP regularly calls for, voter IDs, wouldn't have prevented the fraud that occurred in Chicago in 1982. Meanwhile, the sorts of measures that would've prevented that fraud (bi-partisan administration of the voting process) don't suppress the vote.
Fortunately, as media reassure us, today voting fraud simply cannot happen: you'd need a whole conspiracy of dozens of people, a real, as one could call it, machine.
This I find impossible to believe.
How hard is it to intercept mail-in ballots, sign them, then mail them in? Who knows that you did so? I personally find it very implausible that in both elections that Trump was in he produced results about 3% better than polls indicated he would. And both times alleged that the other side was cheating. So much so that pollsters are engaged with asking how they are so wrong when Trump is on the ballot.
You know the old saw that cheaters always accuse others of cheating? What does that suggest about Trump?
(If it weren’t for massive “cure” efforts by both parties, a shocking number of ballots would be discarded due to errors like DMVs failing to forward registrations to BOEs. In 2016, the NC Democratic Party through cure outreach got provisional ballot acceptance here from 30% to 50% if I remember correctly.)
People would complain they never got their ballots, and mail in ballots are tracked. So a few people complaining they never got their ballots, but their ballots show up as voted, would be a big deal, and we would know it was happening.
Intercepting mail in ballots would be quite difficult and obvious. A far simpler solution would be to simply fill out the request forms that were conveniently mailed out to every voter on the rolls in my state. This led to thousands of households receiving applications for residents that no longer lived at that address
> How hard is it to intercept mail-in ballots, sign them, then mail them in? Who knows that you did so?
Well first of all, the person who was supposed to get the mail-in ballot in the first place. In Michigan, you can check to see whether they've received your mail-in ballot.
Don't you think that if 100k Republicans in Michigan didn't receive their ballot at all, but checked and found that they had been registered as having voted, we'd be hearing about that?
> I personally find it very implausible that in both elections that Trump was in he produced results about 3% better than polls indicated he would.
I find this highly suspicious too. In 2016 it might have been the "Shy Tory" effect, but the Trump voters in 2020 didn't seem at all shy to me.
If 50% of the country hates the president (rightly or wrongly) and much of the media argues that he's a bad person, and everyone who supports him are racists, then I could easily see people lying to pollsters.
Like, the shy tory effect comes from a much less polarised election in the UK (the 1992 GE).
That being said, I actually think that it was the likely voter models that messed up this year, given that turnout was so much higher than expected.
> Don't you think that if 100k Republicans in Michigan didn't receive their ballot at all, but checked and found that they had been registered as having voted, we'd be hearing about that?
The most common claim I've been seeing is that dead people are voting Democrat, not that living people's votes were stolen.
1. Halt counting (or at least 'reporting') in critical swing states simultaneously. We all saw this happen.
2. Kick out poll watchers
3. Figure out how many votes your preferred candidate needs.
4. Examine the voter rolls and see who never turned in a ballot.
5. Fill in ballots for those people (and if you're in a rush, don't even bother to vote in any down-ballot races) and mix them in with the legitimate ballots.
If you control a few key urban centers in a few key states - you can definitely pull this off. Given the behavior of the left over the last 4 years, I absolutely believe they did something like the above.
> Given what my extremely biased sources have told me about the behavior of the left over the last 4 years
FTFY
> Kick out poll watchers
Were any poll watchers kicked out? Trump's claim that there weren't poll watchers in Pennsylvania all turned out to be false; their lawyer admitted in court that they actually had 19 observers in the room [1].
EDIT Meanwhile, the graphs in TFA shows that there are "bumps" in the curve, showing that Democratic-leaning counties had lower turnout in the 2016 election. This is consistent with the widespread reports of Republicans trying to suppress the vote in Democratic-leaning areas, of which [2] and [3] are more recent examples.
> I personally find it very implausible that in both elections that Trump was in he produced results about 3% better than polls indicated he would.
We'll have to see once the final counting is done, but +/- 3% is within margin of error for most polls.
Polls also seem to have a hard time finding new voters to poll. It's very exciting to see the records numbers of people who voted, many for the first time.
That's not the type of problem that usually happens with postal voting. Intercepting votes like that on a large scale would be indeed hard.
But what people do get caught doing quite regularly and not just in the USA are things like:
1. Going door to door and giving people blank ballots, pressuring people to fill them in, right in front of them. As a 'helpful service'.
2. Dominant members of the families taking the ballots from family members and filling them all in themselves. This gets reported a lot in various ethnic minority areas in the UK, for example, where the father is traditionally dominant.
3. Ballots being destroyed or not delivered in swing areas where certain sub-regions are known to be strongly pro one candidate or another.
It's good to hear that some places let you check if your ballot was received, but almost by definition, for that to work you need a lot of people to do that kind of check and then publicly broadcast their findings. In an environment where social media is suppressing discussion of the possibility of voter fraud and the media is polarised, it's not so clear how people would do that reliably, even if enough checked in the first place. And a lot of places you can't easily check - I know I can't in my elections!
As for Trump accusing others of cheating, conservatives in multiple countries have been talking about the problems of postal vote fraud for a long time. This is not new, they care because when it is uncovered it always seems to be tipping the vote for the left. Trump in particular shouldn't be under suspicion here because he has been strongly encouraging his supporters to vote in person, where fraud is much harder to pull off: it's his opponents that strongly encouraged postal voting despite knowing that postal voting is less confidence-inspiring than the ballot box.
> he has been strongly encouraging his supporters to vote in person
He also attempted to sabotage the USPS, and cast doubts on mail-in ballots as a whole, with the obvious intent of suppressing opposition voters, and/or having reason to question the election after the fact.
The only party with anything to gain from suppressing voters are the Republicans. Look at the map of states that didn't ratify the 24th amendment. They've repeatedly made false claims of voter fraud, and engaged in voter intimidation and voter suppression.
And just this election, the Republicans put up fraudulent, illegal mail-in ballot drop boxes.
> Trump in particular shouldn't be under suspicion here because he has been strongly encouraging his supporters to vote in person, where fraud is much harder to pull off:
That...doesn't follow.
If I was planning massive mail-in voter fraud/sabotage/suppression, I'd probably be overly sensitive to the possibility that my opponent would also do what they could in that direction (or, in the case of unfocussed sabotage efforts, that my voters’ ballotd would be at risk from my own efforts), which would make me more likely to encourage my voters to vote in person, so that only my opponent’s votes would be at risk.
So what you are pointing to, inasmuch as it says anything relevant, makes Trump more suspicious, not less.
Are you saying voter fraud can't be a victimless crime? What "couldn't be"?
How do you falsify me voting for my grandmother with dementia? My grandma will never know, and neither will anyone else.
Look, I am more into data-driven policy than the vast majority of people. But the data saying you don't need to make a change is not the same as the data saying you shouldn't make a change.
This is a golden opportunity for the left to implement a policy which historically the left has been advocating for and the right been blocking. National Identification. No more social security numbers, no knowledge about a name or a street. Practically every other country in the world has national identification and uses them as the building block for holding elections, social security, health care, licenses, drugs and so much more.
It would be a political tragedy if the sides on national identification would swift sides just because the status quo has shifted.
The left have been opposing voting requiring identification (on the grounds that it discriminates against those without it) for years. Even if they brought in national identification, they wouldn’t make it necessary for voting.
> The left have been opposing voting requiring identification (on the grounds that it discriminates against those without it) for years.
The left is worried that any ID scheme would be used to disenfranchise voters. Studies have shown that requiring an ID does not impact voter turnout for the most part, but we only need to look towards voter registration rules to see how the system can be gamed to prevent people to vote. Some states allow same day registration while others require 30 days, etc... I could think of similar rules around voter ID to add another hurdle to voting.
Shouldn't that be an issue they could meet half way on in order to get national identification implemented? Here we have an hook for which the right could get behind, and the benefit of national identification is very clear for all that time between elections.
It would indeed discriminate against those without it, but then a national identification is given to everyone who has a right to vote. One is directly linked to the other. In countries with national id you have to have the card if you want to buy alcohol, buy tobacco, drive, go to the doctor, get social security, banking, and many other regular stuff which people need to do multiple times between elections. If it something people need daily, they will have gotten it before the election.
It comes up when there’s services illegal immigrants will use anyway and you want it to be done properly. For example, you want illegal immigrants to still have a valid driver’s license and insurance as the alternative isn’t “no illegal immigrants” but instead just a generally a society that functions less well (and in the case of driving more costly and less safe).
Yep. This is also why e.g. Portugal has decided to give all persons in the country, no matter immigration or other status, the right to free-of-charge coronavirus tests and treatments without threats of deportation or whatever - simply because the risk and follow-up costs of illegalized persons spreading around coronavirus are higher than any potential benefit.
They wouldn't, it's just deliberate confusion. If an arm of the government knows someone is there illegally they're meant to report them for deportation or other handling, not offer them infrastructure and rights, but in the USA the problem of illegal immigration has reached such scales that a large part of the left basically advocates for giving up on border enforcement of any kind. They don't really campaign directly to abolish borders because it would raise obvious and difficult questions, instead they campaign against enforcement: arguing for a world in which immigration rules exist but anyone who follows them is effectively playing a mug's game.
>They wouldn't, it's just deliberate confusion. If an arm of the government knows someone is there illegally they're meant to report them for deportation or other handling, not offer them infrastructure and rights,
You forgot the obvious middle ground, milk them for every penny.
If we had multiple classes of IDs you'd see every damn government transaction that requires ID come with a surcharge or different fee schedule for people using the variant that can be obtained without being a legal immigrant because those people can't complain.
> but in the USA the problem of illegal immigration has reached such scales that a large part of the left basically advocates for giving up on border enforcement of any kind
I'm not even an American, I only have a massive dislike against borders that let money and goods flow unimpeded, but not people. The economy, the government, the system should serve the people - not the other way around.
Besides: the official immigration rules of the US are screwed up beyond any reasonable hope for repair (and remember, the original idea behind US immigration policy as to take in everyone as inscribed on the Statue of Liberty!). If one cannot repair or replace a broken system, it is wise to work around it instead of keeping up bullshit - and yes, giving up on enforcement is one such strategy.
That's actually not that wise a strategy. Think of it like tech debt. Working around a bug can be useful if there's genuine time pressure. If you're doing it because you don't think you can fix it, or worse, haven't convinced other people there's any bug at all, then it is inadvisable to keep doing that in the long run.
There are good reasons why the rules for people are different to those for goods and capital. However, you may note that Trump specifically is also in favour of tariffs i.e. impeding the flow of goods. Via FATCA the USA also practices an obscure form of capital controls.
I don't know if getting into a debate about the merits of borders is a great idea for this thread, but, consider at least the following things:
1. Historically people have fought and died for the rights to create borders (or a nation, as they saw it). The world in 1800 was a world of sprawling empires. Passports didn't really exist in their modern form. Borders were weak or non-existent. In the past 200 years the number of countries has gone up drastically, often because people fought against those empires for the rights to create a smaller, more localised nation that would be better attuned to their local needs and cultures.
Are you sure all those people were that wrong that they sacrificed so much, for something they shouldn't have wanted?
2. The world at the time of the Statue of Liberty was rather different to the world of today. For one, relatively few people could actually reach the US to do that sort of immigration. The arrival of cheap air travel fundamentally changes the equation for borders and immigration rules, as the flows of people involved are so much larger.
3. Culture is a real thing, a describable thing. The left exhalts it and upholds the benefits of a diversity of cultures. But in practice, cultures don't always co-exist peacefully. In Europe countries are resurrecting internal borders (e.g. Sweden did this just a few days ago) in the wake of yet more Islamist terror attacks, including the beheading of a school teacher that was trying to teach French values of tolerance and freedom of expression. Presumably you're aware of this story. As a consequence even Macron, who is as global-elite-anti-borders as they come, has had a sudden 'conversion'. The left has no coherent answer to how to sustain the values of 'enlightenment liberalism' that they hold dear in the face of large-scale immigration from cultures that doesn't share those values, nor tolerate them.
The left is losing this argument despite that borders seem retrograde, are inconvenient, and so on, because it hasn't yet found any coherent tradeoffs or solutions for the problems that prompted them in the first place. Indeed nobody has: the right doesn't even try. But the left is simply ignoring them and campaigning against the infrastructure of enforcement, which is a childish approach. A similar problem can be seen in the USA with respect to the police: campaigning against the existence of a thing that creates problems, without any answer to how to address the problems lack of that thing would create. It's this kind of anti-tradeoff thinking that eventually led me to abandon the left. It's OK to recognise that a situation is unsatisfactory, yet also recognise that you don't know of an alternative tradeoff that's clearly better.
Small nitpick : "people have fought and died for the rights to create borders (or a nation, as they saw it)"
Well people have fought and died for many many stupid pointless things so it hardly constitutes an argument in favour of it. People have fought and died for conquering other's people land, to enforce the "true" religion, for money, for glory...
"Are you sure all those people were that wrong that they sacrificed so much, for something they shouldn't have wanted?"
The more wrong, the more stubborn. More seriously : This a a very abstract reasoning. How do you apply it to WWI? What did "people" want then? Did it matter what they wanted?
It's really not that abstract. Phrased another way, would you want the world to go back to a state where the sun never set on the British Empire? Most people wouldn't, including most Brits, even though it was a large free trade zone (the "Imperial Preference"). There are more borders now, but that's offset by the benefits of localism. The great empires were not famous for their love or respect of local cultures.
WW1 was a good example of where a lot of those countries came from. The empires of the day were very large, not many countries, and the people running the German/Austro/Hungarian/Ottoman empires thought that was great and maybe they should reduce the number of borders in the world a bit more. They were defeated and in the aftermath a lot of new countries sprang up, for instance, the modern concept of countries didn't really exist in North Africa/Arabia until the Ottoman Empire collapsed.
And the argument about people from other cultures not always mixing well isn't abstract. That is a lesson being learned in blood. The killer of Paty was an illegal immigrant, that's why Macron is suddenly pro-borders.
The point is, the modern left treats borders as some unspeakable evil, but never make any kind of intellectual argument against them, probably because the moment you do try to grapple with this issue intellectually and the history of where this system came from it becomes complex. Probably also because borders are an aspect of localism and the left historically is a globalist ideology. So instead they just attack the infrastructure and skip the whole thought process entirely. It's anti-intellectual.
> Practically every other country in the world has national identification
That surprised me (I don't have an ID card here in Australia, nor did I in the UK), so I looked it up :
"A number of countries do not have national identity cards. These include Andorra, Australia, the Bahamas, Canada, Denmark, India, Japan, Kiribati, the Marshall Islands, Nauru, New Zealand, Norway, Palau, Samoa, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, the United Kingdom and Uzbekistan. Other identity documents such as passports or driver's licenses are then used as identity documents when needed. However, governments of Kiribati, Norway, Samoa and Uzbekistan are planning to introduce new national identity cards in the near future. Some of these, e.g. Denmark, have more simple official identity cards, which do not match the security and level of acceptance of a national identity card, used by people without driver's licenses.
A number of countries have voluntary identity card schemes. These include Austria, Belize, Finland, France, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Saint Lucia, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States."
I did notice that on wikipedia but statement like "voluntary identity card schemes. These include ... Sweden" and it lost the sight of the forest for the trees.
If you can't go to the doctor, can't buy products in stores that have an 18+ requirement, can't vote, can't drive, can't travel, can't buy a train or buss ticket, can't get social security unless you fight with bureaucracy for several years and still likely loose, can't have an bank account, can't buy a card at a swim/gym, well, home much of a voluntary scheme is that? I guess there is voluntary, and then there is voluntary. In a similar way its voluntary to have an bank account but you can't pay rent, get social security money, get paid (by most companies), buy products in what seems to be the majority of stores, or travel by buss/train/plane unless you got a bank account. It is voluntary in terms that you will not end up in jail if you don't have it, but living without is made extremely difficult.
It is interesting that in UK, the requirement for ID card during elections depend on where you live. Northern Ireland must have it, while England, Wales or Scotland do not require it.
Going back to the Scandinavian countries, Norway which do not have an national identity cards do still require a photo ID when voting. Instead of a national id card they use their passport, driver license or banking ID, in which case one of those serve the purpose of authentication.
The UK doesn't have national identification. The government tried to bring it in a decade or more ago but it was shot down by the successful no2id campaign. The UK also doesn't have a significant problem with electoral fraud: like the US it has robust processes in place to ensure that its (admittedly less than perfect) electoral system is implemented fairly[0], correctly, and with integrity. This doesn't depend on national identification so I'm not sure why you're implying it should be a prerequisite for holding elections.
[0] Fairly within the constraints of its framework: you can obviously argue about first past the post versus alternative vote versus proportional representation versus a collegiate system as being the fairest system, but that's a separate question.
When I voted in the UK I didn't feel like it was very secure at all. At the most, you only have to show a proof of address IIRC, but anyone can snatch a bill from your mailbox and vote in your place. Or you can take your grandma's and vote for her etc.
"I believe the overwhelming majority of my constituents would be shocked if they knew the extent of corrupt election practices and voter fraud which happen each time there is an election. I want open and lawful elections, upholding the principle that every entitled voter should have one vote, and cast it freely."
The system is wide open to abuse. The article goes into a large variety of schemes. There's a risk that in future the UK may face a similar outcome as the USA. The only way to really fix this is to reign in postal voting significantly to only those who strictly need it - and I say that as someone who votes by post (because I live abroad).
> There's a risk that in future the UK may face a similar outcome as the USA.
What outcome is that exactly?
Are you alleging that there has been widespread electoral fraud in the USA? Because if that is what you're suggesting you need to drop the euphemisms and point to the hard evidence.
I am aware of precisely zero solid evidence of material levels of fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and zero evidence that postal ballots have caused any fraud-related issues.
If that's not what you're saying then what exactly are you saying?
The outcome is "an election in which a large number of people don't believe it was a fair contest".
What matters is people's belief that the process has integrity. By its very nature, most vote fraud is hard to prove as due to the privacy protections in the system, it will boil down to people saying "I saw fraud happening with my eyes". And there are people in the US making that exact allegation right now under oath. I take no position on whether they're correct or not, merely observing that polls show the number of people who don't believe the election was run properly is dramatically higher now than it was before election day (amongst Republicans, Dems of course love it and are sure there's no fraud at all).
It would be interesting to see if he actually reported those cases to the relevant authorities. The Electoral Commission takes voting fraud pretty seriously:
The article says that in one case they can evidence it, but an individual MP isn't a police force. At any rate, the reasons behind the design of elections is to pre-emptively block fraud because proving it retroactively is hard. Hence the private ballot box, polling stations, the reluctance to use computerised/internet based voting and so on. People have to believe the system is inherently robust. Why, because what sort of hard evidence could be generated for those sorts of problems, and at what scale? People registering with their friends/family addresses so they can tip votes outside where they live is inherently hard to obtain large-scale evidence of.
> It would be impossible for fraud to happen on any regular basis and not coming to light. So the incidence of 0.00002% is somewhat informative.
Individual fraud, sure. But treating 0.00002% as some sort of tolerance on the election results strikes me as likely bullshit. That is nearly 7 9s levels of precision. The electoral system is fault tolerant, but it is not 7-9s accurate. Boxes of ballots will go missing, and it seems very likely that there are polling places out in the countryside that are compromised for whatever reason. There is going to be background error and it just isn't being detected because of lax standards.
Furthermore an argument that boils down to "we don't need to secure this system because we aren't detecting any breaches" is farcical. That raises the same alarm bells as a company deriding GAAP standards and accounting because they are old and boring.
But in context of this election, Biden won the popular vote by >4 million votes and it appears the overrides built in via the electoral college didn't trigger. To get that overturned there would need to be very, very real evidence of systemic mass fraud.
The problem is that making it seem as though fraud is an actual problem is a political weapon used to suppress voters.
So, sure, making sure that elections can’t be tampered with is important – however, don’t for one second assume that by saying such a thing you can be above the political fray.
This argument is abused as a political tool to take people away their rights.
Chicago is famous for voter fraud, in the tens or even hundreds of thousands[1]. It's almost as if the USA has political machines that mastered electoral dipsy-doodle over a century ago.
It seems like the "fraud" in that article was no more than people voting when they weren't on the voter registration rolls. Today because of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 and the Help America Vote Act of 2002 require states to provide provisional ballots.
While there probably was some "fraud", it looks like this is more of a process violation, and one barrier that fortunately has been eradicated.
In the book “Gang Leader for a Day” the author detailed how the local gangs and building mangers of various housing projects would coerce their members and tenants to vote and who to vote for. With retaliation if the person(s) didn’t comply.
For instance, the building manager could withhold things you needed. The gangs would also ensure they’d get preferential treatment from their aldermen, etc.
No idea if this was effective in influencing any outcomes.
My biggest concern with widespread mail-in voting is ballot stuffing (bribe for votes becomes easier) and abusive relationships forcing their family members (or community members) to vote a certain way by filling in the ballots themselves.
There’s a good reason the voting booth is private.
Election fraud is right there, the elimination of drop boxes and other actions to limit turnout or the ability to vote. That's real un-American, taking the right to vote away from people. I've been told that the second amendment exists to prevent such gross abuse of our rights but I haven't seen the NRA or GOP get too mad about it lately.
Voter registration databases. If you get access, you can send extremely targeted messaging at a huge amount of people. I wouldn't put it past someone to find key counties and cities, and take a number of actions to influence the vote.
How might we know that that impressive looking number is accurate? Does vox have an omniscient on staff?
I wonder if when the discussion is about a non-politicized topic (like standard, run of the mill security), might there be a difference in mindset when people are formulating their opinions. If the system in question was for anything other than voting, I suspect IT folks would be a little less accepting of evidence-lite assurances that a distributed, largely manually implemented (by non-experts) system of this scale and frequency of usage is 100% up to snuff. It seems rather unlikely that an inconsistent, somewhat cobbled together and non-expertly manned system of this scope is absolutely perfect. And yet, this seems to be not only the overwhelming narrative, but the fact passed down from the media - the same one that spent the last 4 years assuring us that Russia had hacked the prior election.
There are cases in court right alleging this was not allowed to happen.
"The Trump campaign said it is calling for a temporary halt in the counting in Michigan and Pennsylvania until it is given “meaningful” access in numerous locations and allowed to review ballots that already have been opened and processed." - https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-seeks-voting-stop-25...
Yeah; the existence of a court case does not imply even -evidence- that the event occurred, let alone the fact. Trump has filed 1900 lawsuits over the past 3 decades; that's over 63 a year. It's obvious that's his response to any perceived slight, including "not enough people voted for me".
Thor Hearne, an attorney for the Trump campaign, said he wanted an order directing Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson to require "meaningful access" for campaign poll watchers to the counting of state ballots, plus access to videotaped surveillance of ballot drop boxes installed around the state after Oct. 1.
Michigan Court of Claims Judge Cynthia Stephens said the ballot counting in Michigan, which shows Democrat Joe Biden receiving about 150,000 more votes than Republican Donald Trump, was completed Thursday morning.
That made the access request moot, but Stephens said Benson already issued a directive for meaningful access for poll watchers at local ballot counting places. That directive arose from a separate recent lawsuit related to ensuring proper access during the coronavirus pandemic, with the associated social distancing requirements, she said.
As for the videotapes, Stephens said there is no legal basis for Benson to provide — or be expected to provide — access to video surveillance of ballot drop boxes installed by local officials.
A recent law passed by the Michigan Legislature requires video surveillance of ballot drop boxes installed after Oct. 1. But assistant Attorney General Heather Meingast said the law does not require Benson or her agency to track which boxes were installed after Oct. 1, let alone provide access to video. The ballot drop boxes are primarily a local function.
------------------------------------
Well that's reassuring.
> As was the PA case
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The president’s campaign argued that his supporters weren’t being allowed to monitor the tallying of mail-in ballots, but U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond instead argued the two sides to come to an agreement.
He suggested each party be allowed 60 observers inside a hall in the downtown Philadelphia convention center where the final ballots are being counted.
In Georgia, a judge dismissed a lawsuit from the Trump Campaign on Wednesday.
That case from the campaign claimed that a witness said that late-arriving ballots in one county had not been stored properly and may have been mixed in with timely ballots.
------------------------------------
Similarly reassuring.
Yes indeed, this is rock solid proof that nothing improper occurred.
> The president’s campaign argued that his supporters weren’t being allowed to monitor the tallying of mail-in ballots, but U.S. District Judge Paul Diamond instead argued the two sides to come to an agreement.
Just a note on this; (part of?) the reason Judge Diamond asked the two sides to come to an agreement is because the plaintiffs admitted they already had observers in the room [0]:
> During the hearing, a lawyer for the campaign admitted that “they had several representatives in the room,” according to a statement by the bipartisan board. In fact, the Republicans had at least 19 observers in the room during the afternoon, according to the statement.
From a Twitter thread with quotes from the hearing livestream [1]:
> Diamond: "I’m asking you as a member of the bar of this court: are people representing the Donald J Trump for president, representing the plaintiffs, in that room?"
And if you continue the colloquy you'll see the problem is the observers in the room were not allowed within several tens of feet of the ballots being counted, this making observation impossible.
Hence why the judge ruled to allow observers closer.
> And if you continue the colloquy you'll see the problem is the observers in the room were not allowed within several tens of feet of the ballots being counted, this making observation impossible.
So assuming the motion linked at the top of the Twitter thread is the one the hearing is about, what you say does not appear to be completely correct.
The complaint in the original motion is that the County Board of Elections is "intentionally refusing to allow any representatives and poll watchers for President Trump and the Republican Party," and that "It has been studying the Order [to allow representatives/poll watchers to observe canvassing] for over an hour and a half, while counting continues with no Republicans present."
Assuming the Twitter thread is correct, the bits of the conversation I quoted show that the problems in the original motion do not, in fact, exist (as of the time of the hearing, at least), and that observation distance was a separate issue brought up during the hearing.
> Hence why the judge ruled to allow observers closer.
This is actually a ruling from a different case (emphasis mine):
> Earlier on Thursday, a Pennsylvania state court judge ruled that observers could stand as close as 6 feet (2 meters) away while election officials counted mail-in and absentee ballots.
The case the article/Twitter thread I linked was in a US District Court.
Ok, now this is much more convincing, thank you for posting it.
I swear, it's like a significant portion of the media is designed to sow dissent and outrage in society. If the links provided were questionable looking you might think twoice, but Detroit Free Press and CBSLocal at least sound like mainstream publications to me. Although considering the quality of their stories I guess that's not saying much.
I honestly think it's highly questionable whether the unique combination of variables the USA has going on is sustainable much longer in this age, I think something's gotta give.
The dismissals in your links were "interesting", at least based on the information contained within the links.
You also said:
"It's relatively difficult to pull off hoodwink when you've got adversarial observers standing there."
But this being 2020 and the topic politics, he who makes the first assertion wins.
Not that it matters really. Perception is reality, and the media has more control of the perception of Americans than any other entity. Welcome to a brave new world - enjoy your stay, citizen.
> In practice, interested parties observe the process.
On paper, interested parties are supposed to observe the process. What actually happens in physical reality does not always match the guidelines laid out on paper.
> It's relatively difficult to pull off hoodwink when you've got adversarial observers standing there.
I read assurances about what happens in physical reality on a regular basis. Often, these assurances are not actually correct (in no small part because the person providing the assurances was not actually physically present).
I am not asserting that something improper has occurred here, but when journalists are asserting unequivocally and in unison that nothing improper has happened, because the US election system is non-exploitable (while providing zero evidence of this), after having just finished telling me in unison for the last 4 years that Russia "hacked" the 2016 election, I hope you can pardon me if I'm not too keen on taking evidence-free assurances on pure faith.
There was a lot going on across a huge number of voting stations that evening, the notion that not one single thing went wrong is a bit of an extraordinary claim, especially coming from a group of people who don't exactly have a pristine track record of bias or accuracy.
I doubt we'll ever find the truth, or even exert any significant effort in discovering it - that's just the way it is and I can accept that. But it's frustrating that the public is so accepting of this state of affairs.
> I am not asserting that something improper has occurred here, but when journalists are asserting unequivocally and in unison that nothing improper has happened, because the US election system is non-exploitable (while providing zero evidence of this),
It's an even more extraordinary claim that widespread fraud did occur—a claim Trump was making in advance, before the votes were even cast, and continued to make, as expected. What I'm seeing from most media outlets are not claims that it didn't or couldn't occur, but simply that Trump is making the accusation without any evidence. Add to that the fact that he's been claiming fraud before the election even started, and it's pretty clear this was his strategy all along to cast doubt on an election he expected to lose (just like in 2016).
I do not disagree. But at the end of the day, there is:
- that which occured in reality
- our measurements (best possible effort, or not, often with unknown(!) accuracy) of that which occured in reality
- what the media (and individual persons) say has occurred in reality (sometimes based on measurements (accurately, or not), sometimes completely made up)
These are almost always not equal, especially in complex situations like this. That the media and intelligent people cannot acknowledge this without resistance is rather alarming, to me. Mainstream thinking is increasingly starting to resemble that which is usually attributed only to conspiracy theorists.
One very important point to consider in all of this is that the states administer their own elections and election processes directly. While this makes unifying the voting system practically impossible, it prevents a singular federal authority from directly interfering in the electoral process.
I don't think we can safely assume that a president or any other federal authority should have the power to oversee any aspect of the voting process, regardless of party affiliation. We discovered the value of that power check during this election cycle.
Just because it's distributed or handled individually by each state doesn't necessarily mean it can't be compromised or interfered with.
If anything, I would argue that because it's distributed and handled by individual smaller units, each individual one is susceptible to interference within its own area. On a side note: There is a reason why people recommend "don't roll your own encryption". Some things such as security are hard problems, and just because you want to be "independent" doesn't mean you should come up with your own half-baked solution to the problem instead of using a secure and standardized one.
I'm not saying that state-run election systems can't be interfered with, there's just no way for a single actor to compromise all systems simultaneously from a single point, legislatively or otherwise. Of course those systems can and should be hardened, but arguing that it should be done in a standard way completely ignores the reality of the political system that we're in. That's like going to your boss and suggesting to completely rewrite your company codebase in X language because it's more secure. Theoretically, it's not a bad idea, but the reality is that it doesn't work that way.
A feature of simple paper based systems is that normal people can understand the system and can even help to validate the process. It may have flaws, but they are pretty apparent to everyone.
Technology and encryption seems far less easy to understand and more open to malicious complaints. A voter who doesn't trust the current system is not going to trust block chains or hashing algorithms.
The other feature of paper systems is that they're physical.
Casting 10,000 fraudulent votes is 10,000 times harder than one fraudulent vote, unlike an attack on a digital system where if you have an attack, there is likely no significant difference.
I’m not a statistician or political scientist, but my intuition would say that it is probably easy to defeat any given statistical analysis of voting data, but would be difficult to defeat two or more simultaneously. In cryptographic terms, it might be possible to find a collision in MD5 or SHA1, but finding a collision in both for the same target payload would be significantly more difficult.
This is actually a very valid use of blockchain, imho, that would go very far in securing elections, make remote online voting more secure, and provide a public, auditable, immutable log.
- How does this work and simultaneously protect the secret ballot. For example how do I as an outside audit it if I can't check the a vote for foo wasn't counted as a vote for bar. I know in theory you could provide a means for THEM to verify it and again you have broken the secret ballot and they can prove to others how they voted.
- With one technology used to secure the entire election on which hinges trillions of dollars and control of the most powerful military in the world how do you know that a singular exploit wouldn't allow you to forge the election.
- Given that the functioning or non functioning would rely on crypto instead of things people understand like counting marks on paper how would you ever expect regular people to trust it?
For one, a blockchain based voting system would allow individual voters to ensure that their votes haven't been tampered with, without breaking anonymity. If one or more voters fail to check their vote registered in the blockchain, they could submit a complain providing their voting key and voting receipt (this receipt could be any proof of vote, like a public verifiable signature provided by the blockchain at the time of voting)
The main reason you can't force people to vote for you is that once they get in the polling booth, no one knows how they specifically voted. If you allow people to "check their vote" later, an attacker could verify that they voted in the way the attacker wanted.
You're right, this approach would require a strong protection against deanonymization of votes, which could allow attackers to guess who voted for each candidate, for instance according to voting time and location.
Attackers don’t need to guess. They can equally strongarm the information. Under any “blockchain” based voting system, what is preventing your boss from saying “Sit down in this chair and log into the system and let me see who you voted for”? The answer is: Nothing prevents that. So long as you allow checking who you voted for afterwards, you allow the participants to verifiably disclose their votes.
This is precisely what secret votes are guarding against: This prevents vote-harvesting schemes where a corporation forces its workers (or otherwise buys) verified votes. They can pay you to vote X, but they cannot verify that transaction: You can take their money and vote Y.
I think most of the improvements can be made in relation to voter registrations and rolls. How a state can keep people who have obviously died on voter rolls should be a red flag.
1. A voter registration of a T R D* in the Detroit area in the 1970s
2. A death certificate for T R D from the 1980s
3. A record of a T R D voting in the Detroit area in the 2020 election.
That's because T R D from #1 and #2 was my uncle, who grew up in the Detroit area, and died in the 1980s; and the T R D from #3 is my brother, who also grew up in the Detroit area, and is still alive and well.
It turns out that 1) a lot of people are named after their relatives. And also, 2) a lot of people still live where those relatives lived. And, 3) a lot of those relatives, being from the previous generation, have died. Any intersection of #2 and #3 will give you the "evidence of dead people on the voter rolls" (or "evidence of dead people voting") that we've been hearing so much about.
How big is that intersection in a state with 10 million people?
(* Full name redacted, but I have a very specific T R D in mind)
You seem to miss the point - they do not have the same date of birth. You're oversimplifying the situation and potential of fraud to satisfy your Democratic bias.
And you're assuming bad faith, perhaps due to your Republican bias.
The main examples I've seen on my feed are claims of dead people voting, all of which match the situation I described. If you're talking about people still registered where the DoB makes it unambiguous, then yes, we're talking about different situations.
I think most democrats would agree purging dead people from the voters roles is something that could be improved. However, dead people voting is not a significant problem. Trump is using it as a reason to cast doubt on the election outcome.
No one likes to hear these, but some simple ones to try:
1. Central database of all citizens. (Can be state-level if you want to do that).
2. Require voter-ID to link against 1 above.
3. Tick off people on the database as they've voted so they can't vote twice.
And just like that, most (but not all) of the "mail in ballot" concerns are rendered mute and we can all continue with trusting the election results.
I've only worked on one US election (Colorado 2014), but they did check people off a database when they voted. So some places already do this. Unfortunately that database went down multiple times during the day, leading to long queues and delays for voters.
In Australia, we do a similar check, but using paper rolls and cross-check for duplicates afterwards. No computer to go down means no delays.
If they find a duplicate they investigate, and if there's ever enough to make a difference, they would re-run the election in that area.
Once we lost a box of votes and they had to re-run the election across a whole state to make sure.
1. Already exist in various forms, for the purposes of voting.
2. See #1.
3. When people vote by mail, they get ticked off in #1. This doesn't happen immediately, because mail-in ballots can be claimed lost or found to be spoiled (with opportunity for correction), and because they have to be cross-referenced against in-person votes - which is why it takes days or weeks for all ballots to be tallied.
People running elections aren't stupid. They've already thought of all this.
Unfortunately, the barrier to making false or completely unsubstantiated allegations about wide-spread voter fraud is zero, so every Tom, Dick, and Harry is currently throwing in their two cents on the matter. (Bonus points if they don't actually understand, or actively pretend to mis-understand how the process currently works.)
I'd give those claims the time of day when their proponents are ready to put some skin in the game, and swear on them under penalty of perjury.
These databases already exist. How else do you think your government can determine whether or not you are allowed to vote, or whether or not you can be issued a passport.
> then they would simply perform the fraud 'properly' such that the given technique(s) don't show evidence
Unless the fraud is decentralized, for example when some scattered districts fudge their numbers but can't necessarily coordinate with one another (and especially not with those districts that aren't fraudulent). In that case, the anomalies would still show up.
Another thing worth mentioning is it’s a lot easier to spread a faulty statistics analysis than it is to spread an explanation. I’ve seen a lot of viral posts about Benford’s law and the 2020 election. I finally dig up the data and the explanation - which is mundane - and yet I’m not seeing a bunch of viral “this is why those posts were wrong” responses.
Always keep in mind that however distorted the electoral college is, that distortion is tremendously magnified by the cap on the size of the US house of Representatives and the fact that the Constitution specifies a lower bound for district population but no upper bound.
I have been thinking that maybe states should get an equal number of electoral votes. We would get the protection of the electoral college and every state would have an equal say.
Rendering the federal government impotent by ensuring that 10% of rurals owned it but 90% of populous states were subject to it wouldn't discourage people from getting their policy goals done at the federal level it would insure that there wouldn't BE a federal level in 10 years.
This is true in the sense of if you ask someone "Should the federal government be smaller?" they will say yes.
It is not true in the "Should we get rid of Medicare and Social Security and reimplement them on a state by state basis?" or "Should we abolish the FCC, SEC, EPA, FDA, Postal Service?"
When you ask people if we should make the federal government smaller they'll say yes, when you ask them about a specific piece of the federal government they say no.
In order to reverse the trend you have to have people who are the very representatives of the power you wish dismantled choose to dismantle it. This is even harder than it seems.
The job naturally predominantly attracts those who desire the power in the first place and they retain the support of the people who put and keep them there by giving these people things they desire. This is why you see tax cuts but no real meaningful reduction of the federal government.
You might as well consider it an axiom that no government willingly dis empowers itself.
You say its not settled but it has been moving the same direction for 244 years and shows no sign of reversing course. What suggests a reversal to you?
Depends what you mean by settled matter. In discussion, I'm sure you can find a lot of people that think it's a bad idea, and I'm ambivalent myself. But as a matter of reality a strong federal government is what we now have. I think the federal government and the executive in particular is much stronger than the founders thought it would ever be.
The federal government absolutely has more power than was intended. The constitution only allows the federal government to do very specific things. This includes the power to coin money, to regulate commerce, to declare war, to raise and maintain armed forces, and to establish a Post Office. Everything else is left to the states.
How many powers does the federal government have that are above those enumerated powers? The government we have is not what the constitution defines. It is what the constitution was designed to prevent. But, we have slowly marched towards a central government that the founders feared and warned needed to be protected against. A central government has a much higher risk of tyrannical control.
Trusting the people to hold the government to the Constitution may have been the fatal flaw. I know that being a Constitutional idealist is a weak position. I feel that is very unfortunate. The Constitution was intended to protect against human natures of avarice and corruption and limit to paths to tyrannical government. Every time the Constitution is weakened the paths to corruption and tyranny are widened.
Allowing a minority of welfare states to extract the money and blood of the united states while voting in their representative to oversee the extraction literally weakens the constitutional protections afforded to everyone as we have seen in the last 20 years.
Thread is dead but I want to add that it isn't a minority of welfare states. There are only 11 states that pay more in federal taxes than they spend in federal benefits.
But it doesn’t have to be that way. Other countries have maintained a robust federalism. (Canada has 80% of total spending at the provincial level, versus our 50%.) Some countries like Sweden which are unitary reformed to push more decisions and spending down to the provincial level. Some unitary countries like Spain are exploring it: https://www.internationalaffairs.org.au/resource/federalism-...
I think the point being made is the federal government was originally given a very limited charter, over time that charter has expanded to the point where factions are battling for control of it, because it is now the seat of power. When the republic, as it was designed, was intended to deal with things at the state level. The foundational republic looked more like 13 small countries that bound together by a federated agreement on defense, taxes, liberties, citizenship. This was the idea, that the states could look very different from one another on the way they governed. The problem was while this was great for the individual to find a representative government, it creates a horrible business climate for those so inclined. So gradually business money wanted to move more of their regulation to the federal level and avoid state regulation as they had to comply with each state to conduct business. It started with banking, then the railroad barons, then electric companies and other public works, then moved on the the military industrial complex and now we have the tech companies getting in on the actions. So in today's context, due to distortion towards business interests, it is very disjointed and does not make sense, but under the limited federalist contract of the founding republic it made sense that each state had equal representation at the table that bound them together. Now we have gotten to the point where we are pushing social issues to the federal level and it is not going to end well. That being said, the remedy is not just go to a popular vote, a popular vote is just mob rule by the majority. The republic was designed to co-exist with people that don't agree on everything, federalization forces them to agree, and the popular vote, just silences the minorities voice and will eventually lead to their rights being revoked, which is not a formula for success.
The solution to "mob rule" isn't less democracy traditionally it to provide rights that require more than a simple majority to abrogate. This also means that if you believe that the document requires amendments to better protect rights NOW that also means that you will require overwhelming support for that as well.
The interesting thing is what DOES not take 2/3 is a compact by an increasing number of states to give their votes to whom ever wins the popular vote if enough states to equal 270 votes enact it.
States worth 196 states have enacted it and states worth 60 are pending. If we push hard we can have this in the next 10 years whether people like you disagree or not.
Because they are all states that should have an equal say in what president is elected. A republic of states is beholden to the states. Each state is beholden to its population.
Well if you believe Wyoming should just be steamrolled by California's desires 100% of the time, why shouldn't Wyoming secede from the union? In fact, why should any "small states" join the union in the first place if they are just going to be steamrolled by California and New York?
This is a red herring. All the states are only a few % away from net neutral when it comes to federal money in vs out. Pretty much any state could go it alone from a monetary perspective. Trade agreements would be the hard part.
Also, I think you're greatly mis-judging how a deal to the tune of "be 5% poorer but do 100% listening to what the people on the coasts have to say" sounds to e.g. the midwest. You say that like it's an obvious bad deal. I don't think all of them would agree with you on that though. They might just take you up on it given the option.
I'm unconvinced that I'd be any worse off if, say, Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas left. Again, right now, I'd like them to take me up on it. Their citizens' voting power is so much greater than mine, it is infuriating.
Canada and EU don't seem to mind having tiny militaries and relying on the US protecting them. Small states can just be their own countries that pay some small % of GDP for USA to protect them with military.
Your state doesn't start counting mail in ballots until a week after election. Given the logistical challenge you ought to be simply mailing out ballots sooner and counting them as they come in. Every other state avoids duplication between mail and in person voting without waiting a week between polls and ballots.
Because if they leave, they'll have the pleasure of getting steamrolled by other countries, including the United States.
Fundamentally, you're making an argument against democracy, and in favor of giving people who live in small states greater influence than people who live in large states. A person who moves a few miles across the border from Colorado to Wyoming suddenly sees their vote count for 3 times as much in the Electoral College. It gets even crazier once you start considering how swing states play into this. Your vote makes no difference in most states. But there are a few states where your vote might count, for the sole reason that those states happen to be evenly balanced. It's a ridiculous, irrational system. It was the best that could be negotiated in 1787, but it doesn't make sense in 2020.
So would you say Canada (the entire country of which has a smaller population than California) regularly gets steamrolled by other countries, including USA?
And if not, then maybe all the small states need to do is band together into their own country, away from large state bullies
Sometimes it does. It certainly doesn't get the preferential treatment from the US that Wyoming gets. Would the US treat Wyoming better as a state or as a foreign country? Just as importantly, how much leverage would Wyoming have in dealing with foreign countries? How much leverage would it have in trade negotiations with the EU, or with the US, for that matter?
Your vote counts just as much as the other people in your state. You are voting for who your state thinks the president should be. You have never voted for the president directly.
I'm hopeful the popular vote interstate compact[0] will get adopted by enough states to make it so each person's vote counts equally.
What you suggested above is a way to weight citizen's vote's even less equally than they do now, which is what I was responding to. The situation we have now is bad too, imo, but better than each state having an equal vote, irrespective of population.
Popular vote destroys any shred of state sovereignty that remains. Why would states remain in the union if California and New York forever dictate the direction of the country? This is a dark path to tread.
Presumably because they'd want something that another union state provides, and/or benefits that comes with being a larger country rather than an small independent one.
A union can't really be "equal" between all states unless all states contribute and benefit equally, and you can't really expect millions of people who live in a prosperous and populous state to be willing to discount their own voices so that the voices of those who may contribute less count far more than theirs. I'm not sure a perfect system exists -- it's all a series of tradeoffs, and a popular vote system would have its own -- but saying that the 700k people living in Alaska should have the exact same influence as the 40 million people living in California doesn't make things any better.
Ultimately, a country is made up of people, not political entities.
> Popular vote destroys any shred of state sovereignty that remains.
No, it doesn't. It doesn't even remove unequal, state-based voting power, which is greatest in the Senate, not the Electoral College.
But direct popular election of the President doesn't impact state sovereignty, which is a matter of Constitutional limits on the federal government and guarantees to the states, which the states control changes to via the amendment process.
> Why would states remain in the union if California and New York forever dictate the direction of the country?
Why would states remain in the union if their citizens had only an equal voice?
Why do California and New York remain in the union when their citizens are denied an equal voice, and the states whose citizens are given a greater voice consistently drain their resources?
> Popular vote destroys any shred of state sovereignty that remains
Popular vote will only remove state sovereignty if the majority of people are aligned with that, at which point yeah, it should be done away with.
However, the reality is that people generally do agree that quite a few laws are state-level, not federal, and so even with a popular vote for federal laws, states would retain the sovereignty they have now.
Your reply there seems like a drastic overreaction. If we voted on our president via popular vote, we would have had a few different presidents in recent times, but I doubt any of them would have reduced state sovereignty significantly.
States are still free to set their own taxes, run their own police as they see fit, etc etc.
Basically, I don't think the popular vote would vote to repeal the 10th amendment, so it seems silly to say it would "destroy any shred of sovereignty". Especially since in this election, the outcome would have been identical.
I think a state ought to be free to vote its way out of the union along with out of any favorable trade agreement, mutual defense, educational opportunities for its citizens, freedom of immigration to the united states etc. It would immediately become poor and vulnerable but that is its citizens choice.
In 18th century theory. In 21st century practice it's incredibly influential.
Do we tax more for social security or cut benefits, do we extend medicare to 55 year olds or delay it until 70, can my daca friends get a job, can Icontinue to operate a company(Obamacare), not to mention war. It's far more influential than my city( or state government.(I live in Houston, this would probably be less true in states like New York or California which has have a larger government)
Another proxy for influence is money, and I contribute far more to the federal government than I pay in state and local taxes, which reflects the very large impact it has on our lives.
It’s not an 18th century versus 21st century thing. Switzerland manages to be a 21sr century country without equal representation at the federal level.
I live in Switzerland. There are a few key differences.
1. The scale of population difference between the most and least populous full cantons (that have equal representation in the Ständerat) is somewhat lower than CA versus WY, and they're geographically much (!) closer which I suspect at least allows for a bit more "intercantonal" exposure.
2. Even more importantly, in my opinion: the two houses in the bicameral system have essentially identical powers. There isn't a system of important executive or judicial appointments requiring only a Senate appointment (although the analogs here are blurry), so a majority of the national population's representatives must also sign off as well as a majority of cantons. Providing the Senate unique powers protect the tyranny of less-populous states without limiting the dependence on the federal government.
My point was just that you're right, in the 18th century when the founding fathers designed this system the federal government was weak and federal law had very little influence.
But in the 21st century the u.s. federal government has a much larger influence on people's lives.
When a government is closer to a defense pact like Nato it makes sense to have voting apportioned by regional power. But as that government starts to have a larger impact on your day to day life than it makes less sense.
If we started sending nato several trillion dollars a year it makes less sense for Bulgaria to have the same say in how that money is spent as we do.
And there isn't really any political appetite to roll back the federal government to a size where that type of representation made sense. Moving social security and Medicare from the federal to the state or city level would be a political non starter.
Primarily because the original states were sovereign before creating the union, and they formed a republic that maintains some level of autonomy for states, as the people in those states wouldn't want to loose their sovereignty completely. California and Texas joined because the benefits of the larger union outweighed staying independent (no doubt Texas second guesses that at moments). Fast forward a hundred odd years, and the system while somewhat unfair on a per count vote still at the federal level still allows for greater overall autonomy for citizens of different states. California can and does use its clout and local autonomy to make laws that its population wants (e.g. car emissions standards) without forcing the same on the rest without more effort. It's also why the increase in federal power and presidentialism in both major parties leads to less overall individual autonomy and control, IMHO. Even with a direct 1-1 vote count, a single vote for a president out of a 100+ million votes has much less effect than the same vote for a governor in a state with a population of even tens of millions of people. Generally, the federal government should only make laws that need to or can only be made nationally. The rest should be state level. Its less efficient but generally considered more robust. Also, to a degree the idea of a republic of states implies that the 4 million people of LA cant readily "group-think" the rest of the people in the union into whatever laws enable or inhibit whatever lifestyle/beliefs/etc they want via the federal government. In that sense it maximizes the fairness of "tribes of people" slightly over that of single individuals, which seems consistent for a republic rather than a more direct democracy.
Yes that is how it should be. Each state has different interests. By having electoral votes based on population we are not avoiding the problem of population centers directing the country.
How is electing a president different than votes for a constitutional amendment? Each state gets one vote there.
Why do you believe "population centers directing the country" is a bigger problem than "arbitrary historical boundaries directing the country?"
If you replace the euphemism "population centers" with the word "people" you get "the problem of people directing the country"... which doesn't sound like a problem to me compared to the minority direction we have today.
People in population centers tend to think similarly due to a similar environment. What a city desires in the nation's leader does not necessarily align with rural voters. You must see the danger in a few, albeit large, groups having the majority of the population.
Say LA and New York decide that a communist leader would be best for the country. How the hell do residents outside the cities stand up against that in any way but force.
People in rural areas think similarly due to a similar environment. What a rural area desires in the nation's leader does not necessarily align with city voters. You must see the danger of minority having the majority of the voting power.
Say Louisiana and the mid-west would decide that a fascist leader would be best for the country. How the hell do residents in the cities stand up against that in any way but force.
Works just as well, and is what is actually happening.
Ok, accepting it can go both ways. Why would you want one small portion of the country deciding the direction of the country instead of each state having an equal say? Isn't an equal say more fair for all states?
Split California into 6 states and they could still each have more population than many other ones. In your system, they not have 6 times as much total power.
Because they are 1 of 50 states. A state is a single member of a union. The influence of a state should not be determined by geographic size or population.
The compromise of quantity of electoral votes was in response to your argument. I am saying that it was a poor compromise that has resulted in eroding the protections of the electoral college as populations have grown.
What we have is like saying the fat guy in the group counts a 3 people.
It comes down to the question of whether we are a nation of a single people or a nation of autonomous states. We cannot be a nation of a single people due to the diversity of people spread across an immense chunk of land. What is important to me in Alaska is only tangentially related to what is important in NYC. A popular vote is a path to disbanding states and removes an important protection by the states against a tyrannical national government. By maintaining states we allow issues of state importance to only be important in that state instead of requiring the whole nation be subject.
What you are also saying is that you are ignoring up to half of the people of Alaska as the elections are winner-takes-all. If instead it was one person one vote, and representational per state, everyone would have a say. Everyone in Alaska with your views would be heard, as well as everyone in NYC with your views.
What you are calling "tyrannical national government" would be majority rule (ie what more people wants, as opposed to now), and is just as true on a state level, just on another scale.
Also how the presidential election is structured isn't actually related to the question of federal control. Federal control over state control has been a hot topic in the last 4 years either way.
> Say LA and New York decide that a communist leader would be best for the country. How the hell do residents outside the cities stand up against that in any way but force.
By having a Constitution that protects a basic model of government and requires a supermajority of states to consent to changes.
People having unequal representation in the national legislature or Presidential elections doesn't help that and isn't useful too it (well, the general problem. It might help specifically against unwelcome government supported by large-population states, but only by magnifying the risk of such when supported by small population states.)
Urban/rural isn't really the divide the Senate/EC works on. California’s rural population, whose voting power is deweighted by the Senate and EC just as much as that of the urban population, is bigger than that of the six smallest states combined.
The constitution provides hard limits to what anyone can do without overwhelming support and substantial due process. You cannot implement a communist dictatorship within the scope of the current US constitution. The supreme court provides another check as the composition changes slowly.
Your charge could be leveled in reverse and better wielded.
>People in rural areas tend to think similarly due to a similar environment. What a rural area desires in the nation's leader does not necessarily align with city voters. You must see the danger in a few, smallgroups having the majority of the power.
>Say 10 states comprising less than 3% of the population decide that a communist leader would be best for the country. How the hell do residents outside the cities stand up against that in any way but force.
Note the 10 lowest population states really do comprise less than 3% of the US population.
Tax revenues which pay for federal services like the armed forces, led by the president, aren't equally contributed by each state. The day that happens is the day Wyoming's vote can be equal to California. It'd also be the day California succeeds from the union.
Because a representative democracy privileges the voice of the many over the voices of the few. For example in the current contest if it plays out as expected the likely winner will defeat the loser by 4 million votes and your methodology would hand the 4 million vote loser the win. Indeed this would become the norm
Well, for one thing, the foundational document that the states used to establish the union has different rules for electing president than for modifying the union.
You aren't arguing that part of it, the part where people (likely) wouldn't put up with the system you propose.
You've rediscovered the ancient art of drawing lines on a map to make some people more powerful than other people. Usually preferred by the 'some people'. Always followed immediate after by attempts to justify why cheating is good.
A popular vote opens the possibility of candidates essentially gerrymandering their campaign to look like their in group. Similar to how swing states are more heavily campaigned now. Both give small areas an overwhelming amount of power in selecting an executive.
The United States is not a union of separate republics. The method of electing the president is supposed to reflect the sovereignty of the people, with most of the electoral votes being apportioned according to population. The Great Compromise did give the small states disproportionate representation (an extra two electors, independent of population), but most electors are still tied to population.
The Electoral College is an anachronism. The US is far more unified now than it was in the 1780s. People move between states, and believe much more strongly in democracy than they did 240 years ago (e.g., state legislatures appointing Senators would be unthinkable now, as would denying the vote to any adult citizen). If anything, arbitrary state boundaries should play no role in how much of an impact a person's vote has.
So you are arguing for no more states. I very much enjoy the ability to move to another state on a whim if I dont like the state government. Under a popular vote we might as well disband congress. No need for state representation in a direct democracy.
Where did I argue for that? I'm arguing for the state one lives in having no impact on how much one's vote for president counts. I never said that the US should eliminate federalism and run everything directly out of DC.
> Under a popular vote we might as well disband congress.
I don't follow your logic here. Based on my reasoning, it would make sense to either make Senate representation proportional to population, or to disband the Senate altogether, but some representative legislative body obviously has to remain. The House of Representatives is just such a body.
I don't like this example because the effectiveness of direct democracy is greater in small groups. I selected a dinner with families as representative of states with different desires but similar desires within a state. Akin to how a family has similar tastes in food. On that level I feel it is a good example.
Lets say we have a group of families voting on what to have for a shared dinner. Each family gets one vote. Each family gets to decide how their vote is cast. One family of 10 decides they want roast beef. One family of 5 decides they want roast chicken. One newlywed couple decides they want roast chicken. Every member of each family is happy with their choice because they agreed through discussion in their family.
So, there is one vote for roast beef and 2 for roast chicken. But, every family member was happy with the way their vote was tallied even if 10 people aren't getting what they want for dinner.
A popular vote removes the ability of a family to vote in a way they all agree. The family of 10 will always be deciding what everybody has for dinner. At that point it isn't a dinner of families it is a dinner of 17 individuals with 7 never having what they want. So if you are having a dinner with 17 individuals why maintain the grouping of families? With regards to directing what is for dinner the group of a family becomes irrelevant. It also creates division within families instead of agreement on shared direction.
This is similar to popular vote vs electoral college. A popular vote makes the grouping of a state irrelevant and more easily argued that it shouldn't exist. "The populous elects the president directly. Why do we have representatives? We should make policy direct vote as well. Lets get our greater number of representatives to push that through."
Disbanding congress is not an immediate result of popular vote. It is a possible undesirable end. The structure of government should remove the possibility of undesirable outcomes of human nature as much as it can.
In your dinner example, giving each family one vote wouldn't make things any better. Instead of the majority of people deciding what to eat every night, the majority of families would decide every night. If 25% of the families liked Thai food, but 75% liked Italian food, they would all eat Italian food every night. The only thing that would solve your example would be to let either one person or one family choose what to eat each night, on a rotating basis.
Of course, you could just let each family choose its own meal, while using a majority vote (either of people or families) to decide things that affect all the families. This is federalism.
But I submit that families choosing what to eat is different from government making laws. Many things have to be decided by a central authority, and there has to be a way of apportioning representation in that central authority. Giving certain citizens 3x as much power because they live on one side of a line vs. another violates the principle of "one person, one vote".
Why should all states have an equal say in how the president is elected? Why should the desires of half a million in the lowest state be worth as much as the 40 million in the most populous state. In this context either the 40 million have to give the half a million gifts of tax dollars and policy goals that the minority could never dream of achieving in an actual democracy or they have to give them bullets. Which do you think it would be long term?
Can you name another functional democracy of any variety who gives arbitrarily constructed territories of wildly disparate population sizes "equal" say in the running of things?
It would be worthwhile to look at the history of the electoral college [1].
It was not there to balance state powers (that's what the senate is for). It was a compromise between the people who did not want congress to be part of the voting (due to opportunity for corruption) and the ones that did not want a popular vote, because they did not trust the uneducated masses and feared mob rule. So the electoral college was born as compromise.
The distribution of votes was actually performed based on population which even included slaves (as 3/5 people as another compromise, because the southern states wanted slaves to count for their votes, but not have them vote). It's just state populations have changed dramatically since then and the electoral college has not.
The article and your comment summarizes factions into simply "mob rule", and seem to lead the reader to believe the electoral college wasn't well thought out--just a compromise. While the 3/5ths idea is apalling, using it the way you've done is, in my opinion, done to try and enforce the idea that its fundamentally flawed. The electoral college is designed to balance power.
"
In The Federalist Papers, James Madison explained his views on the selection of the president and the Constitution. In Federalist No. 39, Madison argued that the Constitution was designed to be a mixture of state-based and population-based government. Congress would have two houses: the state-based Senate and the population-based House of Representatives. Meanwhile, the president would be elected by a mixture of the two modes.[35]
"
"Historians such as Charles A. Beard argue that No. 10 shows an explicit rejection by the Founding Fathers of the principles of direct democracy and factionalism, and argue that Madison suggests that a representative republic is more effective against partisanship and factionalism."
"Hamilton there addressed the destructive role of a faction in breaking apart the republic. The question Madison answers, then, is how to eliminate the negative effects of faction. Madison defines a faction as "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community".[14] He identifies the most serious source of faction to be the diversity of opinion in political life which leads to dispute over fundamental issues..."
You quote quite selectively. For example your first link also says:
"Madison acknowledged that while a popular vote would be ideal, it would be difficult to get consensus on the proposal given the prevalence of slavery in the South:
There was one difficulty, however of a serious nature attending an immediate choice by the people. The right of suffrage was much more diffusive in the Northern than the Southern States; and the latter could have no influence in the election on the score of Negroes. The substitution of electors obviated this difficulty and seemed on the whole to be liable to the fewest objections.[31]"
So pretty much what I said, the direct popular vote would have been ideal in Madison's view and the electoral college was a compromise. In fact the compromise was because the southern states wanted voting power according to the slaves they owned without letting them vote.
I want to point out that diversity of opinion was celebrated in Federalist 10. The govenment was meant to constrain the power of factions and allow the diversity of people to flourish.
You are right small states are quite over represented in the EC NOW. For example if they were actually proportional Alaska would have 1 elector instead of 3.
This is a terrible terrible idea. To understand how large the 10 least populous states have a population put together of about 9 million people. The 10 most populous states have about 179 million.
What you are suggesting is that we weigh small state voter as equal to 20 large state voter. That isn't an "equal say" its tyranny. To put it in perspective you are suggesting that say Wyoming and Vermont whose population amounts to a million people out to be able to out vote Californias 40 million.
This is in fact such a terrible idea that were in implemented it would be in and of itself so terrible that it would sufficient reason for the dissolution of the entire union as rich populous states rebelled and left. You would do less damage to the union by picking a state with a map and a dart board and nuking it.
A few large cities ruling the country is tyranny to those that live outside the cities. Only by granting equal state votes can we avoid a small portion of the country having an overwhelming amount of say in electing an executive.
States are members of the union. You are a member of your state not of the union. Not being a member directly of the union you should not have equal say. If you did have equal say there is no reason to have states. If we dont have states it is time to draft a new constitution cause the old one doesnt apply.
>Urban areas make up only 3 percent of the entire land area of the country but are home to more than 80 percent of the population. Conversely, 97 percent of the country’s land mass is rural but only 19.3 percent of the population lives there.
Its not tyranny for a democracy to privilege the voice of 80% over 20% its is the literal definition of the term democracy.
It is a matter of courtesy that we debate it here because back in the real world in the corridors of power it is so far from acceptable it will get no hearing now nor ever because it would literally require the 80% to support their own subjugation. You are more likely to see a cure for aging and see the shores of alien worlds with your own eyes than see this come to pass.
I understand you may feel that your views are discounted but for you and indeed everyone like you there is 4 people for each one who will not vote to be subordinated to you. Why would they? Given that they don't agree with you why would they vote to implement a scheme by which your will would be placed above them. Sooner ask for the US to be riven in 2 so that people in the "heartland" can opt to go their own way. Its not going to happen either but at least it in theory could absent the contentious challenge of slavery maybe confederacy 2.0 could work.
Personally I'm curious how much voter fraud is committed by parents of college students who receive their students absentee ballots and decide to "fill them out" for them. It's the most intentional voter fraud that I'm aware of at the moment and non-conspiratorial.
I'd be very surprised (given the appeal to Reddit's political leanings) if all of those aren't examples of reddit's favorite past-time (creative writing).
Like, come on, there is no possible way these people are actually dumb enough to even question whether or not someone voting for you is allowed, yet they all ask that question. Because if they didn't ask a dumb question like that, their creative writing sample wouldn't get to live in /r/legaladvice.
Assuming college students are on average more liberal than their parents, parents fraudulently filling in votes for their children would benefit the GOP more than the Democrats.
He speaks of poor turn out in LA, because of the electoral college system which means additional democratic votes don’t matter. Then speaks about the same lack of Democratic turnout in Texas, because it always go Republican (again, due to the electoral college).
But wouldn’t those same effect apply to Republicans as well? They don’t bother to vote in CA because there is a 0% probability they will affect the outcome. And in addition, there are likely Republicans in Texas who don’t vote because they know the state will go Republican.
I would argue that if you dropped the electoral college, you’d see a massive change in how people vote and it’s not obvious that the popular vote would remain the same.
I saw the same thing. He says Democrats won't vote in California because they know they are going to win, and Democrats don't vote in Texas because they know they are going to lose. I think it would apply equally to both parties.
I was surprised to see this article on HN, since most other statistical election fraud analyses I have seen are being dismissed as conspiracy theories. Facebook even censored one of them. I'm glad to see they are getting some serious consideration.
The issue is that the US has not officially selected a President yet.
So Facebook, Twitter etc are being prudent and not allowing misinformation until that is the case. And I've yet to see any fraud analysis that is coming from reputable sources i.e. not Gateway Pundit or 4chan so it makes sense to err on the side of caution.
> So Facebook, Twitter etc are being prudent and not allowing misinformation
Do these censors have the means to determine what is and is not "misinformation"?
Do we have comprehensive insight into to what volume and types of censorship are (or are not) happening behind closed doors at the various social media companies?
> And I've yet to see any fraud analysis that is coming from reputable sources i.e. not Gateway Pundit or 4chan
Do we have comprehensive insight into to what volume and types of censorship are (or are not) happening behind closed doors at the various social media companies?
Facebook's process is pretty transparent and clear.
They rely on independent fact checkers e.g. AP to determine what is true or not. And they regularly publish on the volumes and types of content they are removing:
Here’s someone who did analysis of 2020 NYT time-series data, and is trying to make a case that the currently-contested states show odd patterns. Note that this would be circumstantial evidence at best, but still a little fishy when compared with the timeline:
I made a GitHub repo of this analysis ported to Python3, with a quickstart and a matplotlib script, if anyone wants to try it. If nothing else it’s kinda fun to tinker with the data:
The premise of this analysis appears to be that mail-in ballots are a uniform sampling of Democrats and Republicans. But of course, in 2020, that's not at all the case; the Republicans made a campaign issue out of not voting absentee, and of attempting legally to reject absentee ballots under a number of conditions. As a result: mail-in ballots are sharply more Democratic than Republican this year.
Further, any analysis that compares returns over time and holds Florida up as the model state to match against needs to account for the fact that Florida was able to begin counting ballots early, because they passed state laws to do so†. PA and WI were legally prevented from counting ballots until election day. The returns over time are going to be much different in FL than in PA.
Here's another data point: you're about to see Biden's lead in New York open up and drive his popular vote victory even higher, because NY, which is a shitshow, is only now getting started counting all the mail-in votes. Obviously, the Democratic Party didn't launch a giant vote fraud operation in New York State, which they would have won even with a dead candidate.
† Every state should be like Florida, in this regard.
I collected Florida ballot returns and early voting by party registration by date.
I allocated independent registrations 50/50 to each party, and ignored 3rd party registrations.
Obviously this isn't the same as actual votes, but it is instructive. The Democratic party had a large lead at the start from postal votes, but that shrunk as more early voting happened.
Date Likely Democratic lead
24 Oct 2020 386,908
26 Oct 2020 354,654
27 Oct 2020 299,021
28 Oct 2020 245,912
29 Oct 2020 204,277
1 Nov 2020 94,325
2 Nov 2020 108,123
3 Nov 2020 114,889
To me this indicates that the narrative of postal votes being vastly more from the Democratic party holds up.
In states (like PA) where postal votes weren't counted until after polls closed we'd absolutely expect to see a large Republican lead which would shrink as postal votes were counted.
I've watched California's election results for decades. You totally see mail in ballots trend Democratic. And urban areas tend to be slow to report. The tallies always shift towards Republicans then shift back toward Democrats.
AK is even crazier. It doesn’t start counting its absentee ballots till a week after the election which is why it’s been stuck at 56% votes counted since Election Day.
I'm guessing that's why it hasn't been called yet, despite trending very red. It'll probably still end up in Trump's column, but with such a disparity in voting methods by party it's more uncertain than usual.
Alaska will vote for Trump, but Alyse Galvin told me the other day that internal polls show her still in the running for the at-large House seat. We'll know more tomorrow.
edit: OP expanded their post and my comment below is now inconsequential and even misleading.
While I do not find the analysis particularly strong, it does not have the premise you describe. It only has the premise that the mail-in ballots are randomly shuffled before their counting starts (which is also not a reliable claim).
I could be misreading it, but I don't think I am; for instance, the bit in the middle, about how the batches should be getting more Republican as time goes on and returns come in from rural counties (also: not how it works).
You are right. The author is assuming the premise that all mail in ballots go to some central location, get shuffled together and thus should have a uniform count. The mail in ballots actually go to local precincts which count them and report them at different times. In fact there were times where mail-in ballots and in-person provisional ballots were being dumped at the same time because different precincts were at different stages of processing ballots at a given time.
This analysis makes no sense and shows nothing unusual.
Yeah, that one particular tweet becomes contradictory with the larger point they are making, but at face value [1] the larger point is that "each new batch of mail-in votes being reported as counted should have the same D/R ratio because they were shuffled before the counting started". It does not make a claim about what that ratio should be.
[1]: Given the flimsiness of the arguments, taking it at face value might be giving it too much credit. My opinion is that this is nonsense.
edit: your sibling comment about mail-in counts in PA also being explicitly not shuffled, but by county throws another wrench in their argument.
Sure, but the analysis is supposedly showing even vote-by-mail trending toward R in other states, explained by the hypothesis that mail from more outlying areas tended to arrive later. The observed discontinuities in the contested states could be explained simply by the sequence in which these states processed their mail-in ballots (i.e. ballots mailed from cities were processed later), but the fact that so many of them changed in the middle of the night on election night, while not evidence of anything by itself, is what I referred to as being “a little fishy”.
As a counterexample, Kansas appears to have hit a batch from a metro area shortly before midnight on election night, too.
You know, if you had been following 538, none of this was either mysterious or unexpected.
The challenge is that the vote counting got behind. Specifically in most places it got behind in major cities. Which voted more D than R, even among mail-in ballots (which already lean more D than R than in person voting in most states - Arizona being a notable exception).
As soon as you correct for where the ballots are from rather than guessing that it is all rural, the discrepancy disappears. But that's inconvenient for a disinformation campaign so gets lost.
It's not at all fishy. You could --- and places like DDHQ did --- scrape the SOS sites to know almost exactly where the ballots were coming in. The central premise of this analysis is not just that the mail-in process was partisan-neutral, but that it had the effect of randomizing the returns statewide. Of course, it did nothing of the sort.
Again, what you really saw here was that the election day vote trended sharply more R, because R voters were encouraged not to use mail-in votes, while the entire D campaign apparatus was --- like it has been since Obama --- designed to get people to commit their votes early with mail-ins. The mail-ins took longer to count, because unlike in Florida, they couldn't be counted early. So what you were watching as time went on was large tranches of mail-in ballots that took forever to count coming in from D-heavy areas (or from areas where Biden outperformed Clinton, and where the mail returns were, like everywhere, more D than the election day returns).
> The mail-ins took longer to count, because unlike in Florida, they couldn't be counted early. So what you were watching as time went on was large tranches of mail-in ballots that took forever to count coming in from D-heavy areas (or from areas where Biden outperformed Clinton, and where the mail returns were, like everywhere, more D than the election day returns).
So if I understand correctly, you're saying that there's a gradual (in PA) or not-so-gradual-at-first-but-then-gradual (in MI) shift from in-person ballots to mail-in ballots, which explains these trends? That does seem possible.
Another possibility is that the USPS processed the mail-in ballots from big cities differently from those from towns with smaller mail volume.
Here's another thing to look at: the Florida time series starts on election day. But vote counting Florida didn't start on election day. The state was allowed (because they are smart about this) to start counting 23 days in advance of e-day. The author of this thread is unaware of that, and has been fooled by Florida's efficiency into believing that vote returns are uniform everywhere. But that wasn't true in PA, where there was no preprocessing time at all. The clock started in PA on e-day, and the busiest, largest, most Democratic counties naturally took longer to count.
> While county election officials were able to verify signatures and voter registrations upon ballot receipt, normally, absentee ballots can't be further processed or opened until Election Day. But this year, beginning 15 days before the 2020 general election, officials were allowed to open returned absentee ballots, remove those ballots from both the outer and inner secrecy sleeve envelope, and scan the ballots using a ballot scanner machine.
> At least three election workers must be present at all times during this processing and officials are prohibited from doing any tabulation of results until polls close at 7 p.m. on Nov. 3. At that point, tabulation is simply pressing a button.
Again: we watched the ballots come in from Georgia. They came in county-by-county, in partisan-leaning lumps. There was a running joke on Twitter on Wednesday about people who have never been to Georgia suddenly acting like they knew where Clayton County was. It was a whole shared cultural experience!
I'm still struck by the fact that you'd have had to not be paying attention at all to not understand that the results weren't arriving uniformly from across the state, or that different locations in the state have different partisan leans. From what I saw, the whole country was basically transfixed by those two facts. We got nothing done! For like a week!
It's fine if you're not paying attention, but way less fine to build a narrative about voter fraud based on it.
So you're saying one county, with ~80,000 delayed votes, ~60% of which were for Biden, completely eliminates Georgia as a counterexample here? I don't have a good spider-sense for this kind of number crunching so I'd have to do some math.
> It's fine if you're not paying attention, but way less fine to build a narrative about voter fraud based on it.
I have not been claiming there is anything to this theory, but it is fun to argue about. And I'm definitely not happy to see this argument get personal, but from my perspective, it is least fine of all to gaslight people with a nonsense fairy-tale that corruption and fraud do not exist.
The gaslighting happening here is the accusation of widespread fraud without any evidence, based on the kinds of intentional misunderstandings tptacek spent so much effort laying out for you.
For what it's worth, my "you" upthread was meant to be rhetorical, to refer to the batshit Twitter thread, but I can see how it would have been taken as personal. I mean, I still think we should all be able to quickly and decisively agree that the thread was, well, batshit. But I wasn't trying to confront anyone commenting on HN.
FL was allowed to process and count mail in votes early (they always deal with a lot of absentee votes b/c many people have their residence there to avoid state taxes). Once polls closed they were able to transfer those with the early batches of day of votes. Because absentee was such a big thing this year, many states were also telling the networks/reporters what each batch of counts was made up of (absentee vs. in person). Even in GOP areas, absentee went heavily towards Dem.
The GOP legislature in PA denied the SOS request to begin processing absentee early. It was known for weeks that the count would not be done until Friday or possibly the weekend. Because the pandemic has been politicized, many GOP voters saw in person voting as a statement. Dem voters just wanted to vote.
There also wasn't really a gradual shift. Day of gets counted more quickly because states use machines that take the the vote directly from the user at the time. Absentee takes longer because the votes are opened, verified (some states check signatures, but I think all make sure the it's not a double vote, etc...), cured, and then the ballot is ran through a flattener then vote counter. I saw a story that this took longer in PA, because many of the votes had been sitting folded up for almost a month by the time they were opened.
No, the premise is that mailin ballots should have a roughly uniform D/R ratio, no matter what timeslice of a state you look at. Of course they skew, but the idea is that the first mailins counted should have basically the same ratio as the last. Which appears true in most states, but not some, for unknown reasons.
(The skew it proposes as normal, R later in time due to receiving R ballots on a later distribution, exposes an assumption it makes: that counting is in order of ballots received.)
They're not all counted at once. You watched the returns come in drop-by-drop in PA, and each was attributed to counties and precincts. You are not going to see a uniform D/R ratio between a drop from Carbon County and a drop from Allegheny County.
This is so basic --- you had to have not watched the PA returns come in at all to not know it --- that I read this twice, figuring that I had to have misunderstood what the thread was saying. But I don't think I am; I think this person believes that the mail-in process randomizes the ballots statewide.
Interesting enough, the mail-in ballot returns on a per-precinct basis were actually shockingly consistent, even over time, likely proving by this method that there wasn't any voter fraud.
The thing is though, if you look at the returns on a state level over time, what you are actually seeing is the results from all sorts of different types of votes in different places over time, so you won't see any consistent pattern. But if you break down the votes to the specific places then you see exactly what you'd expect to see.
> No, the premise is that mailin ballots should have a roughly uniform D/R ratio, no matter what timeslice of a state you look at.
Which is based on a series of assumptions that simply do not generally hold (the most central being that the entire statewide collection of mail-in ballots is homogenized before being counted.)
Having not thought for more than a few seconds about this, it sounds like a clearly invalid premise. People decide to mail their ballot for all sorts of reasons including seeing an ad, being telephoned by a campaign worker, seeing a movie on tv, being well organized or lazy, and on and on. Those catalysts are obviously not likely to be uniformly distributed between parties.
Philadelphia, Detroit, and a number of other cities are notoriously slow in counting their ballots.
This happens every election that I can remember, going back to 2000.
If I had to guess, the complexity of counting may increase in a non-linear way after a certain number of precincts.
I'm unconvinced the proportions should be consistent at the state level or any level really. There have been GOTV events that have thousands of attendees, then there's the "souls to the polls" event every time, I can't think of a way to slice it where I would be convinced by unbalanced batches.
> If I had to guess, the complexity of counting may increase in a non-linear way after a certain number of precincts.
I'd bet that the larger counties, while they have more ballot counting machines, probably don't have proportionally more. Expensive, specialized, maintenance-intensive, etc. Every county needs at least one, but beyond that I doubt there is a huge priority on having excess capacity.
Ballot counting machines are probably a case of over-automation. The polls station clerks are volunteers and are maybe doing their first election. Setting up a manual process is just way easier then dealing with complex computer reporting systems. As soon as some machine or computer is not cooperating they are stuck. With pen and paper the worst that can happen is that the pen is out of ink.
If all the ballots were shuffled in the mail across the timespan in which they were counted, that would make sense.
However, they are not, so the assumptions underlying the analysis do not hold.
For one thing, many states did not begin counting these ballots until Election Day, per state law. For another, the entities performing the unofficial counts were not necessarily the entities receiving the ballots. The author clearly conflates these two points when he says that Milwaukee ballots heading to the county to be counted were received after the deadline. They were received by the precinct at the appropriate time, and then transported to the county for final tabulation - again, presumably, in compliance with state law.
(EDIT: Notably, the video clearly shows the ballots being transferred by law enforcement, so it's patently dishonest to suggest that was the time they were received through the mail.)
If a state performs constant counts and constant updates as they receive individual ballots from across the state, then you should get a more-or-less constant D:R ratio.
If you count mail ballots in batches of updates from different counties and within counties from different precincts, then you will see the D:R ratio generally shift, with precincts and counties with higher populations (ergo higher batch processing times) coming later.
> Around 3am Wisconsin time, a fresh batch of 169k new absentee ballots arrived. They were supposed to stop accepting new ballots, but eh, whatever I guess.
> By 4am the D to R ratio was all thrown out of whack. That is because these ballots were not sampled from the real Wisconsin voter population, and they were not randomized in the mail sorting system with the other ballots. They inherently have a different D to R signature...
Anyone who knows anything knows Milwaukee (not just as a city but as Wisconsin's largest city) votes blue. So as soon as those votes start getting counted the votes will shift blue. You _should_ see this bimodal distribution in vote counts.
It seems reductively easy to see that the basic premise is incredibly flawed here: that ballots are uniformly shuffled in all states. Some very basic things that would cause those exact shifts in the data witnessed:
1. Mail vs Drop Box could very easily have a different ratio, which would easily explain a sharp shift if they counted them in different sets for some states when it's a plateau and a hard line jump.
2. Same goes for any sort of discrete shuffled sets - say they are boxed by the week through early voting, or by county early voting, etc. There's literally dozens of explanations for how you can end up with discrete shuffled sets.
3. If mail ballots are counted in roughly the order received, then any gradual shift may represent that one candidate may have early support fade or strengthen over the course of early voting.
4. All of this also ignores that the time series of reporting may not be from the same counties or mix of counties. Change that mix slowly and you also get a gradual shift.
Basically, you need full insight into exactly how ballots are collected (and vary by state) in order to actually have the central hypothesis hold. With no shred evidence of voter fraud at any level and a very clearly biased author, I don't see this holding any merit. While I understand the idea of trying to consider all data, the resounding lack of any evidence should lessen our resources put towards these unlikely theories.
To repeat myself because I think it's worth being clear about this: we have enough insight to know that the premise of ballots being randomized statewide does not hold, at all. The reason we were all hitting refresh on Wasserman and Cohn's feeds on Twitter was that each Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday batch was attributed to a specific county, and we had expectations about what returns in those counties would look like.
This pretty much adds up, and invalidates the whole analysis in my opinion.
But I still believe that the first conspicuous batch of mail-in ballots being dumped in the witching hour, after poll watchers were told the counting was done for the night, is fishy, and I will not be surprised if the court considers it part of a larger pattern of behavior which causes ballots (legitimate but unverifiable, in many cases) to be thrown out.
The first couple days the big counties were counting 24/7. The managers were on TV talking about their teams, and you could watch live streams on many of the counting areas.
The court is likely throwing nothing out. The no poll watcher lawsuit was already laughed out of court when the lawyers had to admit a 'non-zero' number of poll watchers were present the whole time [1]. Trump might be fine lying on Twitter constantly, but in court his lawyers would prefer to not commit perjury.
There are many sworn affidavits being filed in court right now, from poll watchers claiming that they were kept too far away to validate a single ballot, or turned away entirely. We’ll see, it will definitely go to court.
Read the fact check. The too far away claim was decided days ago, and people were allowed to be within 6'. There were also live webcams setup. This has literally been one of the most transparent elections in history.
Read through the lawsuits [1]. Most have already been rejected due to no proof. The others outstanding have to do with so few votes it doesn't matter or they actually go against Trump's interests, like stopping the count when he's behind. This is all theater at this point. Maybe they can have a few more press conferences at the garden center next to the sex shop.
Note also the extremely telling detail that Trump's WinRed links for fundraising the recounts and legal challenges allocate 60% of those funds to retiring his campaign debt.
> With no shred evidence of voter fraud at any level
I feel like this is actually the most suspicious thing here. In a country of over 300 million, in one of the most contentious elections in living memory, not one person was found to have committed voter fraud? It seems more likely that we're just terrible at detecting voter fraud rather than that there were literally zero instances of voter fraud anywhere.
Which implies we might need some better measures to detect it. The thing they were trying to do with dead voters is promising but has the obvious problem that there could have been legitimate ballots submitted, or unintentionally illegitimate ballots, if the death was recent etc. But the general idea seems to hold. Maybe we should add a few percent fictitious entries to the voter rolls and then see if any of them votes next time.
Anybody have any good ideas for how we could be detecting this, if it's happening?
If it isn't happening then having some measures in place like this would be good to point to as affirmative evidence that it isn't rather than merely the absence of evidence that it is. And if it is happening, it would be good to know that too.
First, we do detect a small number of voter fraud cases. People have gone to prison for it.
But your premise is also broken. You assume we should see regular attempts at voter fraud, given our enormous sample size. But voter fraud, on the "retail" level, is heavily penalized and extremely unlikely to impact outcomes. There are all sorts of crimes that could occur, but don't, because there's no point.
> First, we do detect a small number of voter fraud cases. People have gone to prison for it.
Fair enough, though now I'm wondering why I keep hearing "no shred of evidence of voter fraud" from so many people.
> But voter fraud, on the "retail" level, is heavily penalized and extremely unlikely to impact outcomes.
There are currently four states (AZ, GA, PA, WI) with less than 1% margin between the candidates. Georgia is at 0.2%. It wouldn't take a high percentage of fraud to flip a state.
But let's suppose that retail voter fraud is rare. How are we even detecting wholesale voter fraud? What's the method to detect when someone with access to the voter rolls slips an extra crate of ballots into the count, or fills out and mails in thousands of ballots in the names of people who never asked them to?
16,000 votes is only a half a percentage of people in AZ committing voter fraud, and that's assuming they each only submit one fraudulent ballot. Apparently people have been caught submitting dozens of ballots in the names of people they didn't have any right to. If 0.02% of people did that, it flips the state.
You can also make the "doesn't make sense" argument about voting itself, since exactly zero of the states will be decided by a single vote with extremely high probability, but lots of people still voted.
It's not much of a stretch to expect that a fraction of people smaller than the lizardman constant are not doing a diligent cost benefit analysis.
What do you think a fraudulent ballot is? You can't just make a person up; there are voter rolls. Whatever means you find of coming up with a name and address that will be accepted as a vote, you have to do it (here, hypothetically) 16,000 times. If you use real people's names, which you have to because, again, voter rolls, many of them have already shown up to vote. The epollbook shows that on the screen, and you're standing there being asked for ID by a suspicious poll worker. Meanwhile, you would need thousands of coconspirators, and count on none of them ever leaking. You face the prison sentence to end all prison sentences (we put someone in prison in TX for years for casting an invalid vote accidentally) and, if you pull it off, you have... a chance? of altering the outcome if the election is very close?
There's a reason this just doesn't happen, and it's because it doesn't make sense. As a prediction: America is not going to spend a lot of time and energy making you feel safer about it.
My advice to you is, next cycle, sign up as a pollworker. It's so much more of a shitshow than you can possibly imagine, but I came away from it feeling paradoxically better about the process.
It's unfortunate that people will simply not listen to reason. You have gone above and beyond explaining the realities of mass voter fraud, but it goes against the outcome people are searching so they ignore you. You have more patience than I have.
> It's so much more of a shitshow than you can possibly imagine, but I came away from it feeling paradoxically better about the process.
This is the first time I really dug into the process, and I agree. I voted absentee, and that process plus what I saw on TV around the counting process made me much more confident in how things work.
> The epollbook shows that on the screen, and you're standing there being asked for ID by a suspicious poll worker. Meanwhile, you would need thousands of coconspirators, and count on none of them ever leaking.
You're talking about someone showing up at the polls to commit voter fraud in person, when the contention here is primarily about mail-in ballots.
If someone has access to the voter rolls from the previous election, how do you detect if they've submitted mail-in ballots for people who were registered but didn't vote last time, on the theory that most of them still won't? Or who registers new people without their request and then submits ballots in their names? That entire process would be taking place outside of the polling location.
> Apparently people have been caught submitting dozens of ballots in the names of people they didn't have any right to.
You'd think there'd be evidence for that somewhere, but you're just parroting die-hard Trump supporter talking points now off Twitter with no evidence. It's very clear you are not talking about any of this with good faith.
There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud is what’s being said. It’s on the accusing party to provide that evidence and they haven’t. It also strikes me as strange that they’re targeting only the cities that they are. Detroit for example when it was actually Oakland and Kent Counties that most altered the outcome in Michigan for Trump.
Election officials have many ways to audit elections for example knowing exactly who voted in an election how and where.
To fill out and mail thousands of ballots you’d need to have them in the first place. Ballots are tracked from mailing to receipt and processing. How would you know who to pick so that there’s no conflict if they show up at the precinct to vote in person?
> It’s on the accusing party to provide that evidence and they haven’t.
But that's what I'm saying. What measures can we put into place to allow them to do that if it's actually true, or rule it out if it isn't?
I'm asking for a good way that someone could find evidence that someone else e.g. mailed in a large number of ballots fraudulently, and you're telling me that there is no evidence of that happening. Well yeah, that's the issue. What I want is a way to distinguish the case where there isn't evidence because it isn't happening from the case where there isn't evidence because we don't have a good system in place for detecting it.
I want the ability to show conclusively that this isn't happening if it isn't happening, not just a lawyer's argument that absence of evidence is evidence of absence.
Before you ask for people to help you preclude that anyone mailed in a large number of fraudulent ballots, I think it's fair to put to onus on you to describe how that actually could have happened. Start at step 1 and talk us through it: what does the "thousand ballot mail-in attack" look like? Bear in mind voters are registered with ID and proof of address into every state's voter rolls, states have records of when people die, and every election authority watches for duplicate votes; those are the table stakes mitigations you need to get past. Go ahead, I'm interested in hearing this out.
Probably the hardest one to catch is where they have access to the voter rolls and submit ballots in the names of people who were legitimately registered but didn't vote. The stealthier way to do that would be to have real-time access and then inject the ballots at the last minute in the names of people they know didn't vote, so there wouldn't be duplicates.
The scattershot method would be to predict who isn't likely to vote, e.g. because they didn't vote last time, and submit ballots in those names. Then they would have some duplicate ballots, but if the predictions about who wouldn't vote were mostly right, they could submit thousands of ballots and only have a small percentage of duplicates. There would be some duplicates, but then what do you do? You could throw out the duplicates, but one of the two was a legitimate ballot, and the majority of fraudulent ballots wouldn't be duplicated and would still get counted. It's also not obvious how to distinguish between whether a small percentage of duplicated ballots out of millions cast are a result of a single act of intentional fraud or many independent acts of incompetence.
Another alternative would be to register people who didn't request to be, e.g. people who are institutionalized and a worker at the institution is in a position to register them and then intercept their ballots and submit them.
Some privileged positions would allow someone to do this at greater scale, e.g. postal workers. A postal worker in a high density city could have many thousands of residences on their route, each with multiple eligible voters. Get a copy of the voter rolls, register every eligible voter on their route who isn't already in there, use their real social security numbers obtained from a copy of the Equifax leak or similar, then request mail-in ballots to take and submit.
1. You have to get the actual ballot for the people who haven't voted (you have to request that ballot, of course). You can't just fill them out from a template.
2. To register, you need enough information to steal someone's identity. In states like PA, the first time you vote after registering, you have to present photo ID.
3. The largest mental institution in the United States houses 1,400 inpatients. In the implausible event that you were able to somehow vote for all of them without being detected, you'd have flipped none of the states this cycle.
And until you have that, you're going to assuming the unlikely, unproven, and unprecedented side from a president literally known for lying and questioning the results of the past election baselessly, finding no evidence in 4 years of time to search and the DOJ at their disposal? You think the conspiracy is so widespread and perfect that there's no trail at all, not even to maybe 20% of the alleged fraud? C'mon now.
Keep in mind there are two kinds of voter fraud: the ones that get caught (and never show up in vote data), and the ones that don't. There are always stories about the person dead for 10 years that gets a ballot that is maybe even turned in - but that vote isn't counted, precisely because it got caught.
While I think you're arguing in bad faith, at least there's some interesting discussion in the replies. I think it's an interesting thought experiment to figure out how to do mass voter fraud though:
> How are we even detecting wholesale voter fraud? What's the method to detect when someone with access to the voter rolls slips an extra crate of ballots into the count, or fills out and mails in thousands of ballots in the names of people who never asked them to?
The mere act of bringing in a "create of ballots" is going to be incredibly tricky. You have to obtain the valid ballots somehow: steal them, get some printed, or print them yourself. If you print them, you have to perfectly replicate the design, type of paper, etc. Then you have to physically get the box into the building, into the right room, with the proper security seals or whatever is used.
But let's pretend security is crazy lax, and/or several people are involved AND somehow not one of them is caught or a whistleblower. This is already a stretch -- as the number of people involved goes up, so do the chances one gets caught and/or one is a whistleblower.
If we add the ballots without it adding up to the number of names crossed off the voter rolls list, that's going to be a giant red flag of voter fraud happening. Either this has happened and no one has noticed (one one has ever thought to check this?), or.. it hasn't happened.
With access to the voter rolls we could inject names, but of course that leaves a paper trail. Thousands of names of people that don't exist or are deceased or are from the wrong place would appear and would have all voted. We could also figure out how many deceased people are on the list and have them vote, but this too leaves a paper trail. While there's some reporting of incidences of deceased people voting, it appears to mainly be clerical errors [1] and certainly doesn't appear to be at the scale of thousands needed to sway the vote, so likely this also hasn't happened.
Casting any significant number of ballots for legitimate voters ahead of time would be likely to result in lots of people showing up to find out they've "already voted" and being turned away. Once again, this either has happened and thousands of people quietly walked away saying "oh well" and not going to the media.. or it hasn't happened.
With access to the rolls, we could look up who didn't vote, and cast votes for them. We'd need to be able to cross out names after the polling has closed, then make sure our crate has a matching number of ballots to the people that didn't vote and physically get it in to the count room. And of course, this would show up in the type of analysis this article is doing: it would look exactly like the Russian election results at the start. This also doesn't appear to be the case, at least for 2016.
All of this work would allow some fraction of voting fraud to happen at ONE polling station. If we pick the right station in the right district (where the security and scrutiny is likely to be higher) we could maybe even have a meaningful effect, but for all that work and risk (of jail time) there's no guarantees. We'd need to do it at multiple polling locations, but unfortunately most of the work involved doesn't really scale: we we just need more and more people involved in the conspiracy.
The concept of voter rolls kills the "crate of ballots" idea just as dead as the "retail voter fraud" idea, because you need to know who's voting and who isn't to pull it off; otherwise, you make a whole mess of duplicate ballots, which is one of the most basic things the election administrators are looking for.
And, as you point out, that's what you're dealing with after you James Bond the crate of ballots into the counting facility and through the scanners.
They are wrong to do it because it convinces millions of uneducated Americans that it's all rigged and their vote doesn't matter. Here are investigators debunking most of the voter fraud allegations thus far. https://twitter.com/Ike_Saul/status/1324435797374808066
I'm absolutely willing to accept that very few people are (e.g.) voting twice in different states, filling out ballots mistakenly sent to their address, and similar small-scale stuff. But I do share your skepticism that when the stakes are this high, nobody's trying to meaningfully affect this. Especially this year when anyone could have told you the election will come down to the same small number of states waiting for days to count ballots in a small number of precincts.
We know how well the TSA does because we actually try to send people through with weapons to see how often they get caught. In 2015, the answer is that 95% of weapons get through.
I think we need the same kind of thing for elections. How tough is it to get / remove a few boxes of ballots overnight from wherever they're stored prior to being counted? When you do, is that immediately detected and reported, or is it presumed to be a mistake and just accepted? How many people does it take?
That's a separate conversation, though. I agree reducing poll locations can make some people less likely to vote, but it's not in the same category as fraud.
To commit fraud at the level required though just isn't plausible in a national election. Even in a close state like PA, we're going to end up talking about 45k+ votes. In MI, 100k+ votes, WI 20k+ votes, etc... All these states have mixes of R/Ds running things, and any fraud claims quickly ends up in grand conspiracy fallacy territory.
This is not some 1000 vote situation like FL in 2000 (which was actually much more complicated than everyone paints it out to be).
20k in WI, 45k in PA.....let's call the baseline as a swing of 20,000 votes in a single state.
That would be 7-20x the impact of election fraud from the Patterson, NJ election case this year (estimates range from 1,000 to 3,000 votes affected). [1] There were four men charged in that incident. [2] So with about 30-100 personnel with malicious intent, distributed across a dozen election districts, you could theoretically swing an entire state's results in the 5-figure ballot range.
While this is not PROBABLE, we should acknowledge that it is POSSIBLE, and take steps to mitigate the risk accordingly. But basic enforcement of election integrity just outright sucks. Why else would someone feel so bold as to video themselves ballot harvesting and thinking it's ok?[3]
Philadelphia received over 350k mail-in ballots [1]. Biden's current winning margin for the whole state is under 46k [2].
Wayne county (Michigan) received over 430k [3]. He's won Michigan by 148k [2].
In Wisconsin, the margin is just 20k [4], with the most populous county representing 459k votes.
In Georgia--same kind of thing.
Normally I agree with the dismissive "it's so decentralized, you couldn't do it." But it's different this year. Anyone could have predicted that the pro-Trump areas would finish counting faster, and then the pro-Biden areas would have multiple days and nights to count, all in staunchly pro-Biden areas capable of swinging the election. Of course we expected mail-in votes to lean Biden, but that doesn't mean anywhere from 51-99% indicates "no fraud."
I'm not saying any fraud happened. All I'm saying is that it's not rational to presume it couldn't have happened without being detected. And it's worth some efforts to see how well we'd catch it if it were occurring.
So you're arguing that absentee ballot by mail is the problem? None of the states in question did automatic mail in voting. Each voter had to apply for absentee. And given the politicization of the pandemic, Trump made it a virtue signal to vote day-of in person. So of course the absentee vote was heavily D, and it came in from heavily D areas to start.
I voted absentee and honestly it felt more secure than any in person voting I've ever done. I had to apply, fill out, and then drop off my vote in a box. My wife wasn't even allowed to drop off my vote, and instead I had to do it personally. I was then able to track it online and verify it was counted without an issue. Contrast this to when I hit some buttons in person and have no idea what happens after that. The point is, you have to trust the process at some point, and in this case fraud is so unlikely across multiple states with 10s of thousands of votes.
> So you're arguing that absentee ballot by mail is the problem?
No. It's just one factor.
For the rest, respectfully, you'll have to actually read my comments. Your responses haven't yet taken into account anything in my comments. It's like you saw the word "mail-in" and just typed out a response.
Is there a small amount of fraud? It wouldn't surprise me at all to find some in every election.
How about a thought experiment: If you wanted to do it on a large enough scale to swing an election, How would you do it? Say you knew that there are three states which are going to be very close, and you wanted to add 10000 votes for your preferred candidate in each state. What would you do?
Excellent question. I don't know the answer. That's why I think we need a "red team" or "bug bounty" program to investigate.
How many ballots can fit in a mail truck? What does the chain of custody look like for all the different ways people can vote? What does the process look like when that chain of custody is suspected to have been broken? We've all seen how easily technological systems can be compromised through social engineering. Are there any gaps in the processes that could be exploited?
It is very easy but more costly than a recount to verify the integrity of an election.
Auditing relies on the assumption that real voters can be linked to attestations and the aggregate of attestations can be linked to the aggregate of votes.
In Australia when you vote in person your named is checked off on the electoral roll. This is an attestations. When you submit an absentee ballot you also fill out a form. This is an attestation as well.
The audit does a full recount of attestations and votes and verifies the totals are the same. Duplicate checking is also performed on attestations.
Furthermore, the attestations are randomly sampled and the real voters are interviewed to check if they actually voted. In the case of absentee ballots the details on the form can be checked as well. The random sample is performed so you have an ‘acceptable’ level of fraud and then you sample enough ballots such that if you were higher than the acceptable level it would be likely to sample a fraudulent ballot.
This process breaks down a bit at this point because of the issue of false positives where the voter cannot be contacted. However, with more work from the auditor it is often possible to distinguish between the voter being uncontactable and voting and the voter not existing, or being uncontactable and not voting.
Because the audit process establishes a trail from real voters to real ballots it is very difficult to commit electoral fraud.
There are some forms of electoral fraud this audit will not detect like bribery and coercion. It also doesn’t prevent substitution attacks where someone destroys real ballots and replaces them with dodgy ones.
It might be tougher in my state because we allowed ballots that were received by mail on Election Day, but without a postmark. One of the accusations of voter fraud includes backdating the postmarks on some number of ballots so they would be counted.
Obviously postmarks weren't created or intended to be cryptographic verification of when something was received anyway.
Well for example there are a more than a few definitely dead people who vote each election, that's pretty easy to show. But finding the, uh, living person who did the fraud is not always easy.
The "dead people" vote is a myth spawned as a result of technical issues, and is noted and discredited in voter fraud studies. State run voter rolls often didn't require DOB in past or continue to leave it optional in certain circumstances, causing the DOB to be represented as 0 AD, or 1970 AD, or some other spurious result. Even the Steve Bannon funded GAI study on voter fraud[1], which has been discredited, made this claim and refuted this data from the study. This is disinformation.
Dead people will vote in every election that allows absentee ballots, because people die after they mail their ballot but before election day. Atomicity. It's a bitch.
Every state has an electronic pollbook that tracks voter eligibility. Votes for dead people will arrive, but they should not as a rule be counted.
Okay, so your source is Giuliani. Well that is an answer, I guess. Sorry I was looking for a news source and not a political one. This is not nearly as credible - until evidence reaches a courtroom - as “somebody on the internet”.
It seems disingenuous to give a legitimate reason for an anomaly but then follow it with a claim that it’s fraud:
> By 4am the D to R ratio was all thrown out of whack. That is because these ballots were not sampled from the real Wisconsin voter population, and they were not randomized in the mail sorting system with the other ballots. They inherently have a different D to R signature... than the rest of the ballots quite possibly bc additional ballots were added to the batch, either through backdating or ballot manufacturing or software tampering.
Do we know that mail in ballots are randomly shuffled in the mail? I know some states specifically pull aside ballots cast after certain dates, which could easily explain the differences in the graphs.
> Again, this should not happen, and it is observed almost nowhere else in the country, because all of the ballots are randomly shuffled...in the mail system and should be homogeneous during counting.
No, they aren't. They aren't shuffled by time mailed (which may have significant D/R differences) and they aren't shuffled across counties of the state in places that have them mailed to the voters county election office and counted in that county with the results then reported to the state, the same as other ballots are.
>The following information is provided via an anonymous data scientist and another anonymous individual who wrote a script to scrape the national ballot counting time series data of off the @nytimes website.
>This is based on their proprietary "Edison" data source which would ordinarily be impossible to access for people outside the press.
Well that's why I ported and ran the python script, and put it on GitHub, so you could re-scrape the NYT data too, it will just overwrite what's in the repo. I'm not vouching for any of the corresponding analysis, but the data seems real: https://github.com/guscost/nyt-election-2020-analysis
Ah I misunderstood, I thought one can't repeat the scraping part. But what did they mean by "proprietary "Edison" data source which would ordinarily be impossible to access for people outside the press" then?
Obviously, the bigger problem with trusting this Twitter rando is that they don't know how mail-in ballots are county, came up with weird broken premises, and then accused Wisconsin, Georgia, and Pennsylvania of perpetrating a gigantic fraud.
From my understanding most of the press data sources are just companies that wrote code to scrape the multiple state sources of data and/or interface with archaic fax systems that sent counts from counting centers to central locations. I believe in some cases they had observers who took totals off the counting machines themselves.
I believe the primary reason for them is that they got the data faster than the official websites.
Thanks, now I understood that "this is based on ..." means "this script is based on ..." and I initially parsed that as "this information is based on ...".
And even if you accept that some shuffling occurs in the mail system, it's not nearly enough to homogenize the entire mail-in ballot intake.
Certain sorting centers (i.e. the first 3 digits of a collection of ZIP codes) are still going to have drastically different demographics than others. So as trays of mail arrive, and are stacked up in the tabulation centers, they're likely to stay clumped together.
It is completely unsurprising that a very large batch of mail-in ballots, arriving in one transport, are going to show a high ratio of D/R votes compared to other batches of mail-in votes. Knowing where the voters in each batch live will explain the differences.
They're showing results from Prince William County in Virginia to say, a-ha, a huge number of people voted for Biden but didn't vote at all for a downballot race: clearly a sign of fraud, irregularities, malfeasance, perhaps even skullduggery!
Except the image doesn't show the titles of those races: the second is obviously for President, and the first, with fewer votes, is... for the representative for the first Congressional district. There are three different Congressional districts that are partially within Prince William County.
These aren't nefarious, suspicious Biden-only votes, they're just showing one race that's on everybody's ballot and comparing it to another that isn't. The count of reporting precincts also seems to have been edited for the listing of Presidential votes: it shows 44 in the image instead of the actual number of 94.
You could chalk these things up to mistakes or misunderstandings, but judging by the content of the rest of this person's messaging I think it's pretty clear that assuming good faith isn't warranted here.
This is a really poor understanding of several things, including, for instance, how the USPS actually handled the ballots. This "randomly shuffled" thing is flat wrong.
There's actually a lot of really good data about how many mail ballots were requested in each state and the return rate. Many of the states even have data about which party did a better job returning the ballots.
Several of the "modelers" out there used such data to basically know by ~1am Wednesday morning that Biden would likely win PA, for instance. It was just a matter of time.
If states piled up the ballots in the order they arrived, that would mean later arriving votes would be counted before early arriving votes.
Then if one party had a propensity to vote by mail earlier than the other we'd see a pattern where the proportion from that party would increase over time.
That's what we see.
Can we verify this any other way? Not completely, but in Florida survey data shows that the Democrats had an early lead of 462,000 before early (non-mail) voting started and by election day that had decreased to ~100K[1]
Nice. You can get GitHub to do the scraping for you using GitHub actions. To better utilize git as a datastore, prettyprint it so each commit is a smaller diff.
The author says about turnout:
"One clarification: The turnout number at the bottom is slightly wrong: You’d think that you can easily get these statistics for past elections, but I can’t find the turnout number anywhere. Instead I was able to get the population of the counties, so this is the number of votes divided by the population."
Isn't this quite inaccurate? I think counties release registered voter numbers, so shouldn't we be instead comparing registered turnout, as votes/registered voters? (yes, some states do allow same-day registration, which might muck up numbers, but I still think its better than just going off population). But anyways, where do the population numbers come from? I imagine they're from the last census, which was in 2010.
edit: yes, they are using the census yearly estimates. I suppose that's as accurate as you can get, but its still not a true turnout statistic.
I'd argue registered voter turnout also isn't a true turnout statistic, as many people will not be registered due to apathy/feeling it doesn't matter/etc.
The statistic you really want is votes / eligible voters, not registered voters. But that's a hard number to figure out in the US.
What you want is probably the VEP number ("voting-eligible population", people who are of age and not disqualified for some reason, such as having committed a felony).
Complaining about populism and then desiring the popular vote. The fellow admits to not knowing statistics very well either. This analysis can show fraud, but it's not necessarily going to.
Am I the only centre-left type person in the world who thinks the Electoral College isn't a bad thing (in theory at least).
In the Westminster 2-house system in Australia voters vote for representation from their seat. These seats have approximately the same number of people, but they also vote for an upper-house representative and the smaller states are over-represented in terms of population.
This is because otherwise it becomes easy for a federal government to only govern for the very large populations in the cities, and that is bad for the country as a whole - places outside those large population bases are disenfranchised because no amount of voting would matter.
The electoral college seems to do a similar thing. I don't think it's perfect, but in principle I don't see it as a bad things that people in say Montana have a means to influence the presidency.
This entirely vacuous argument is surprisingly popular. Possibly because it gets mixed up with a related, more convincing one.
It can never be right to assign the majority of power to a minority of voters. If giving that power to the majority means they can only govern for the majority, then the opposite also holds true: governments elected by a minority can govern for only that minority. And that would seem to be even worse.
There is an argument for the minority to have some powers. First among them is a sort of veto power: requiring (some) support from the minority for enacting laws, or the most significant laws (and constitutional changes) is very effective at protecting them.
The US implements as much by requiring supermajorities for constitutional amendments, and by the non-linear apportionment of power in both houses of congress, and by the Senat's filibuster.
But all that's completely different from awarding the presidency to the minority! And your arguments about the the higher value of rural populations is equally ridiculous. "One person one vote" is a fundamental principle, and for every oh-so-important-farmer in Montana, I can find 10 scientist in a city that are each more important for the supply of food. Plus an additional 10 poets and musicians, because that's also something people need.
Tying political power to land isn't democracy, it's feudalism.
Whilst I don't agree with you calling this a vacuous argument I think you do make some useful points.
> It can never be right to assign the majority of power to a minority of voters.
Agreed in principle. Although how this works in a presidential system where there is only one President, it's unclear why someone with 70 million and 1 votes should get 100% of the power and the person with 70 million gets zero.
> There is an argument for the minority to have some powers.
Agreed, and I think the veto and supermajority powers are good examples.
> And your arguments about the the higher value of rural populations is equally ridiculous. "One person one vote" is a fundamental principle, and for every oh-so-important-farmer in Montana
I'd note that many democratic countries put in place specific representation for under-represented minorities, and that isn't generally seen as awarding the presidency to the minority.
> Tying political power to land isn't democracy, it's feudalism.
This sounds right, but it's important to note this isn't the same thing.
This isn't about allowing only landowners to vote. I'd argue very very strongly against that!
So from your description it sounds like you believe any work to help minorities have a voice is wrong. For example at one point redistricting was pushed by various people to help give minorities enough collective voice to have some influence.
To put it another way. Let's says there are 10 seats representing 1000 people. Those 1000 people are 15% A and 85% B and spread out into 10 districts of 100 people each where no district has more than 20% A. By that, A can never get any representation where as if they let A form a group they can likely get 1 of seat of those 10 representatives and at least have a voice.
That kind of thing has been done in many different ways but your post seems to suggest you think it's wrong.
> I don't think it's perfect, but in principle I don't see it as a bad things that people in say Montana have a means to influence the presidency.
Under the electoral college system, voters in so-called swing states have much more influence on the outcome of the election than voters in states with established political supremacy. To your point above, in a system where the popular vote determines the outcome, every person's vote weighs equally.
On top of that, the electoral college enables the "faithless elector" scenario, in which chosen electors who cast the legally-binding vote for president opt to either vote against the wishes of the electorate or to abstain entirely[0].
> voters in so-called swing states have much more influence on the outcome of the election than voters in states with established political supremacy
I can't imagine any system where there aren't "safe" areas that politicians essentially ignore.
Sometimes these "safe" states/areas aren't as safe as they were thought to be (2016 Midwest, 2020 Georgia and Arizona, Texas looks to be heading that way).
The Midwest is a perfect example: in 2016 people there felt that the Democratic party was ignoring their needs and switched their traditional trade-union based Democratic voting behaviour to Trump.
Areas get attention by changing their voting habits. I don't see this as a bad thing.
> On top of that, the electoral college enables the "faithless elector" scenario, in which chosen electors who cast the legally-binding vote for president opt to either vote against the wishes of the electorate or to abstain entirely[0].
> I can't imagine any system where there aren't "safe" areas that politicians essentially ignore.
Of course, when you're campaigning for the support of millions of people in a large country, some areas will be prioritized over others. The problem that swing states create, which we've seen play out on multiple occasions in the US, is that a candidate can win the popular vote by a margin of millions and still ultimately lose the election. It doesn't seem logical that a democratic system exists where the majority winner can still lose the race because of how particular states are weighed in terms of electoral power. With gerrymandering factored in, the system is further skewed to require an even lower vote threshold for a particular party to retain a majority in congress versus another. Compounded, these modifications begin to fundamentally undermine the democratic system, which further discourages voter turnout and participation in the system entirely.
I hadn't anticipated this somewhat odd conflation of the issue of swing states with the electoral college. That seems to be primarily a criticism from people who haven't been through many elections - California was a reliable Republican state until 1992, Texas has been reliably Republican for decades but now is a swing state etc.
Most political criticism of the electoral college comes from the idea it is non-representation: A vote in Wyoming is worth between 2.9 and 3.6 times a vote in California[1] depending on if you measure turnout of population.
A non-electoral college system will change that, but instead of it being Republican votes in Democratic strongholds that don't count (and vice-versa) it will be all the votes outside of CA, NY, IL, TX and FL. Parties will create policies that favor large, dense populate centers, and the rest of the country will be ignored.
The ruling grants states the power to enforce the pledge of an elector or penalize them for casting an alternative vote, but it's up to the states to do so.
Should the vote also be weighted to uphold the interests of other classes of people, like young vs old, or rich vs poor, or bricklayers vs hairdressers?
I consider myself more defined by my age and profession than by my hometown but in an electoral college system it is only that latter fact that affects how a vote is weighted.
But the country is not a union of people of different ages and professions, but of different states, technically.
The electoral college is a form of protection for the naturally less densely populated agrarian states against the densely populated urban ones. Without the electoral college, the colonies would not have agreed to unite under a shared federal government.
>The electoral college is a form of protection for the naturally less densely populated agrarian states against the densely populated urban ones.
This is commonly repeated, but it's BS. What "protection" does the electoral college give to Kansas, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Idaho, or Montana? Presidential candidates don't pay any attention to any of those "less densely populated agrarian states". In addition, dense states like NJ, NY, CT, and Mass don't get attention from candidates. California doesn't get any attention either, so what gives?
The states that get the attention are the swing states with the highest number of electoral votes, simply because the electoral college incentivizes trying to swing a small number of voters in such states.
> What "protection" does the electoral college give to Kansas, Wyoming, the Dakotas, Idaho, or Montana?
Their collective voice along with the rest of the “heartland” is the backbone of the GOP. Trump and Bush both won without the popular vote because the electoral college amplified their collective voice.
The electorate doesn’t make them win, it gives them better odds. The campaign focus on swing states should explain itself...
Why should their voices be amplified while mine (in a rural part of NJ) is muffled? Why should the same persons vote be five times more powerful in Wyoming compared to if they lived in California? Why should we disenfranchise the millions of Trump voters in New York and millions of Biden voters in Texas? What about all the cities in red states and the rural areas in dense ones?
I don't see a single good reason for the electoral college. And you haven't explained what they're being protected from and why they need such protection.
I think this is a better argument for proportional allocation of electoral votes per state instead of winner-take-all (a la Nebraska), rather than arguing against the electoral college itself. If you feel Trump voters' voices are muffled in NY or Biden voters' voices are muffled in Texas, I agree wholeheartedly and would be strongly in favor of proportional allotment of electors at the state level.
The electoral college, however, serves the explicit purpose of making Wyoming votes count more exactly because they are extremely disadvantaged when attempting to impact federal policy. The same argument against the electoral college could be made against the Senate (why should every state get the same number of Senators?), but I don't hear too many disagreements (yet, at least) that the Senate as an institution has value.
The top four states have roughly a third of the national population; if federal policy were enacted purely by population, why shouldn't they allocate all federal funds to themselves and deprive other states entirely? The Senate and the electoral college give enough of an advantage to small states that, even though no one or two small states are liable to flip an election by themselves, they are still able to have a voice in federal policy by coalition-building.
> The top four states have roughly a third of the national population; if federal policy were enacted purely by population, why shouldn't they allocate all federal funds to themselves and deprive other states entirely? The Senate and the electoral college give enough of an advantage to small states that, even though no one or two small states are liable to flip an election by themselves, they are still able to have a voice in federal policy by coalition-building.
Proportional allocation of the electoral college is just a slightly less accurate popular vote. If we're gonna do that, might as well just do pop vote.
You don't hear the same argument against the senate as often because it's practically impossible to get rid of it. But many people are still against it (myself included).
>why shouldn't they allocate all federal funds to themselves and deprive other states entirely?
That's a funny argument, because red states currently receive a lot more federal funding than what they pay in taxes, and blue states pay more taxes than what they get back in return. Plus, blue states actually want to give red states even more money, when you consider that blue states support more federal funding for healthcare and other programs.
Everyone is always concerned with protecting the smaller, less dense states, but really it's those states that have disproportionately more power. California contributes so much to red states, and what do they get in return? A bunch of senators and presidents who do nothing about climate change, thereby letting California burn even more. California is the one that needs more protection here, not the states whose farmers are getting six figure checks as bail-outs because the president they elected doesn't understand how trade wars work.
> California contributes so much to red states, and what do they get in return? A bunch of senators and presidents who do nothing about climate change, thereby letting California burn even more.
It's easy to imagine a political party that runs on a "cheap power for the cities" policy which involves mining and burning coal a long way away from any city.
How about renegotiating the number of electors to be equal per state. If we are a republic of states each state should get equal say. By going to popular vote a third of the country loses a voice.
The coast of California would then like to send 20 electors (most of them with rather nice beards, some in wetsuits).
Harvard wants to send another 40. Science is, after all, more important these days than natural resources. Just compare Switzerland (absolutely nothing of value in the ground) to Equatorial Guinea (top-10 oil reserves).
The one export market where the US dominates is culture. Mind if Hollywood sends in a few representatives?
Urban centres are always going to have an inherent political advantage because of the physically proximity to power. Shorter travel distance to lobby or protest government, closer polls, easier time canvasing, organizing political meetings etc. Have mechanisms to offset this so that rural and non-urban people who form the backbone of the economy are not disadvantaged is a good idea, although its hard to tell if the electoral college does too much to level the playing field or too little.
The scientists and Hollywood folks are already represented, though - they can vote. The land itself can't. True that today our natural resources aren't our most valuable asset. That makes them easy to ignore and neglect, especially for city dwellers. However, in the event of a major war or natural disaster our natural resources will quickly become very important again, and we'll be glad someone was taking care of them, even if we (and I definitely do) staunchly disagree with their voting preferences.
I don't like the characterisation as "land representation" because there is a long and sordid history of only land owners being able to vote.
But I do think that farmers (for example) contribute a lot to a country and would lack voting power in a purely population based presidential election system.
I'd note that this argument goes against my politics: Farmers as a block are rarely progressives.
Edit: Elsewhere gameman144 explains my point better than I have been able to:
> The top four states have roughly a third of the national population; if federal policy were enacted purely by population, why shouldn't they allocate all federal funds to themselves and deprive other states entirely? The Senate and the electoral college give enough of an advantage to small states that, even though no one or two small states are liable to flip an election by themselves, they are still able to have a voice in federal policy by coalition-building.
I think there's two difference that make it less problematic in Australia:
- The Australian Senate has significantly less influence on politics than the US President
- Senate seats aren't distributed per-state on a "winner takes all basis" - rather in rough proportion to the number of votes each party gets. This means that smaller states with outsized influence are still going to be electing a mix of representatives from each party. (Compare Tasmania to Victoria here [1] - 10X different in number of votes per seat - similar outcome.
Even with that said, regardless of the material impact - on principle I don't think it's fair that a person in Tasmania has 10X more voting power than a person in Victoria.
> the non-representitive effects on the Australian senate are much higher than in the electoral college.
Yeah not gonna lie, I was genuinely shocked to see that Tas holds as much votes as NSW and Vic.
>I think most kinds of voting that aren't first-past-the-post
Yep, I just wish they were easier to explain!
Run-off voting is hard to justify to angry relatives who are incensed that the person who got the second (or third, god forbid!) most 1st pref votes somehow ended up winning.
The Australian lower house is based on the British House of Commons, the Australian upper house is based on the American Senate. Since America already has a Senate to prevent the federal government from optimising for high-population cities, it doesn't need the Electoral College as a second factor.
If it was purely a popular vote system, then the president would always be decided by the large coastal states. The interior would have zero say in who the president is.
California has 55 votes, Montana and DC only have 3 each. Is that not enough influence? Cali and NY make up almost a third of the electoral votes.
Is it really fair for these two places to control and dictate the policies of a country spread as far and wide as the US? Hasnt the blue/red divide, not only in the country but within states themselves show that the desires and attitudes of people are heavily influenced by their geographic location? Isn’t a good thing there’s a political system (the electorates) that accounts for this?
> California has 55 votes, Montana and DC only have 3 each. Is that not enough influence?
No, California and DC always vote Democrat, and Montana always vote Republican. Individual Republicans in CA and Democrats in MT have zero voice - their voices literally don't matter. In fact, even Democrats in CA and Republicans in MT have zero voice - because these states' outcome is predetermined, no presidential candidate has any incentive to promise anything for them.
Except 1988, 1984, 1980, 1976, 1972 and so on. Aka in my lifetime (yes, I am old).
Georgia always votes Republican, except in this election (probably) or when Carter is running.
An acquaintance who hails from Indiana recently told me Indiana always votes for the Republican candidate, and was surprised to find out Obama took Indiana in 2008.
The Rust belt is deeply blue, except in 2016 when it was more purple with a tint of red.
Kennedy defeated Nixon in Georgia and New York and Nevada, but not in California. (And New York had more electoral votes than California until 1972).
The South used to be Democrat. The West used to be Republican. Except again when Johnson, Nixon, Reagan took essentially the entire nation.
Another example: Support for gay marriage between 1996 and now went from 68% opposition to 67% support. Proposition 8 in 2008 banning gay marriage in California was accepted by Californian voters just 12 years ago with 52% voting against gay marriage, and only 5 years later in 2013 that opposition had dwindled to 34%.
Even parties change: Republicans went from the party of Lincoln to the party of Trump with many stops in between. Demoncrats went from the party in favor of slavery and segregation to the party that claims to be all about racial/gender/sexuality justice.
Demographic and ideological shifts do occur regularly, often at a sluggish speed but sometimes quite quickly.
My point: don't say always.
(That isn't too say that I am in support of the electoral collage or the first-past-the-post voting system resulting in a defacto two party oligarchy; both are bad in my humble opinion).
> California and DC always vote Democrat, and Montana always vote Republican. Individual Republicans in CA and Democrats in MT have zero voice - their voices literally don't matter.
This is only true if you hyper focus on the President (and ignore Bush/Reagan/Ford/Nixon in CA, Clinton in MT, etc.) - those voices are heard in the House and Senate, which have key impacts on what a President can actually do.
It’s also omitting the question of why those states vote the way they do. California now votes for Democrats not because the Republican Party forgot to campaign but because they pushed Proposition 187 through and convinced multiple generations of Latino voters that the GOP hated them. It is very easy to imagine, say, a world where George W. Bush put the state back in play after being successful in the effort to get the party shift away from the anti-Latino positions - call it the Trump opposite-world. That’s a big incentive but not enough due to where those states have considerable voice: the primaries. California might not be in question for the general but it definitely delivers a lot of votes for the primary winner, which affects their positions.
Yes, my point was that it wasn’t true that voices in certain states are ignored even if they don’t directly produce EC votes. A Republican Presidential candidate isn’t going to ignore California and New York voters who still elect members of Congress they’ll need to work with, donate the increasingly large amounts of money needed to run, and whose presence in the primaries affects who’s going to make it far enough to care about the EC.
Your argument doesn’t follow. It sounds like you have a problem with the winner takes all system in us elections and not the electorate. Conservative voices in Cali and Liberal voices in Texas would be more relevant in a proportional system and not a winner takes all. These would be particularly relevant for states with split populations.
> No places should control an election. People should.
You say this but you dont mean it. In practice, removing the electoral college today would guarantee that certain places (coastal/densely urbanized states) control the election.
Should a Taiwan be able to dictate the laws and policies of a Tibet just because they have a larger population? The reason there are borders (in theory at least) is for different communities with different interest to have certain autonomy to choose their own destinies. It was part of the “deal” when the union was made because of this. If you want to remove the electoral college, then there should be a painless and democratic way for states to secede.
There are very few countries as large as the US, this circumstance is not shared by many countries. We should have a proportional system and then there wouldn’t be much of a need for an electorate AFAIK.
> removing the electoral college today would guarantee that certain places (coastal/densely urbanized states) control the election.
You're still arguing in terms of places. Coastal urbanized states will "control the election" only in the sense that they have the majority of population and their average preference will have greater influence than the rest, when you average the whole area. In other words, they will control the election in the same way "people living to the south of Minneapolis" or "people who ordered Chinese food in the past year" will control the election.
A 'place' is not a meaningful unit of civic participation.
From one direction, California and New York are populous. California has 4 individual cities that each have a higher population than Wyoming. Is it unfair that California's influence is larger than Wyoming?
From another direction, is California a single place? The Electoral College lumps together San Francisco, San Diego, and Sacramento into a single unit. Those are miles apart from each other culturally, economically, and demographically (and for that matter, they're hundreds of miles from each other geographically). The Central Valley's relative lack of influence at the national level is because they're tacked on to the same 'place' as Los Angeles and San Francisco, which is an arbitrary division.
The House of Representative does a much better (but not perfect) job of geographic representation, because the geographic units are more proportional, and are continuously re-drawn with community cohesiveness as an influencing factor. Much of the skew of the Electoral College comes from the +2 votes per state, when state lines are fixed for centuries.
Blacks and latinos can live in Montana as well... Also the electoral college predates emancipation, so I dont think the black vote was a factor for its creation.
They have one, via a significantly amplified voice through media, technology and economic influence.
The difference is that California has the power to govern itself. The policies it pushes forward at the federal level make it clear that it also wants to govern everyone else. The electoral college gives everyone else a way to protect themselves from that unwanted governance.
Yes, you are correct. at least in the USA it's called the "United" States. If each state gets effectively no voice there's no reason for it to stay united with the other states.
So yes, at least theory it's not a bad thing. Bad or good is an opinion and it's a valid opinion to see giving states with less population a larger voice in exchange for staying part fo the system as a reasonable tradeoff
This is damn interesting. I've seen a couple reads on the Russian elections but never seen it turned to the US. I think it would have to get a deeper analysis with more fine grained data but seems like it's got some solid indicators one could follow.
I think it is naive this is any kind of proof of anything.
The fraud can happen in many ways. It might be a person leaning one way or another thinking they are working for a good cause. Actually, I think making it difficult for people from opposing party to vote is a kind of fraud, made in broad daylight.
Proving absence of fraud is much more difficult than showing there aren't obvious signs of it.
BUT, and here is important thing, this is really a question of burden of proof, and in this case it is on the accuser. In absence of proof it is assumed voting was legitimate. Also, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proofs.
The more I think about it, the more I believe Benford's Law can be violated too easily within more urban areas, especially when precinct sizes are artificially limited to a fixed size (500~1000 people) without geographically-induced truncations. As long as voter turnout is consistently above 10-20%, with the 2-party system you're simply not going to get the vote count number to span the several magnitudes needed to induce Benford's Law. (Exception of course for smaller/independent candidates, and perhaps if one of the major candidates really sucked and kept getting 10% of the votes)
I think arguably the electoral process makes fraud harder. If the goal was to tip the scales, in a popular vote you could basically do this anywhere across the country. But in an EV system, you would need to pick and choose 1 or probably more places (vulnerabilities) to attack to tilt things in your favor
I think arguably the electoral process makes fraud easier. If the goal was to tip the scales, in an electoral vote, the election is very close in the tipping point state, which is usually predictable ahead of the election. In 2016, you'd only have had to add 45K votes in PA. Conversely, if the vote were national, you'd have had to add 3M votes.
Maybe ... actually in 2016 you'd have needed PA,MI,WI (and actually know with certainty those would have been the tipping point states, for which MI,WI at least weren't supposed to be that close, if I remember correctly)
There’s only a single tipping point state. It’s the one that puts you over 270 EV. In 2016, it was PA. I agree knowing which swing state is going to be the tipping point state can be harder to predict, but even if you have to spread your bet, it’s still fewer votes to sway than the popular vote.
Great point. I don't know why some states all of the sudden want to trust the others' voting systems. One state could choose to go electronic with no paper trail, for example, and we all know that's a bad idea.
Voter fraud does not happen on any sort of wide scale. Election fraud could.
Thank you for informing me about that. Still, the main problem with our elections IMO is the ease with which misinformation spreads online via social media. Dumping the EC does nothing to address that and it feels like a scapegoat. Like how we were diverted from caring about net neutrality and Comcast etc. to caring about FAANG monopolies.
There are a few reasons I've heard. The one I hear most frequently is that the electoral college is outdated and should be replaced on that basis alone. The second one is that it is undemocratic and allows disproportionate representation to small state voters. The third one that I believe underlies the two previous is that when the popular vote has been contradicted by the electoral college, it typically has elected someone from the "wrong party" depending on who you ask. Looking at the states in the popular vote compact there is some truth to that.
Ok, so let's look what Merkel did what would never be possible in the US according to that post (and by the authors opinion proves that the US is so much more on the right than Germany):
> In the 2008 financial crisis (and now again) the government paid part of workers’ wages to save jobs (Kurzarbeit)
Trump went even further and sent checks directly to every taxpayer.
> She stopped mandatory military service
US got rid of the draft in 1973 under Nixon
> Germany is getting out of nuclear power by 2022
> Germany is getting out of coal power by 2038
Neither is the business of the federal government in the US but instead of the states themselves, on top of that this is done in Germany by importing exactly that power from other European neighbours, an option the US does not have.
> She ran a balanced budget
That is considered as on the right in the US
> Legalized gay marriage
The US had that first nationwide, and individual states had it much earlier. On top of that, Merkel voted against that law in the German parliament (Bundestag)
> Accepted a large number of refugees from war-torn Syria
Since Syria is closer to Europe than to the US this is not surprising, the US accepts asylum from middle and south America instead.
> Cut taxes (Solidaritätszuschlag) for the working class and middle class, while keeping them in place for the upper class
Sounds like the tax reform of 2017
> If you did one of these things in the US, you would be considered a progressive leftist. Doing all of them would make you a radical. In Germany she is still considered center-right.
-> While this is a nice visualization, the author had no idea about US politics and how it contrasts to German politics
Every "right wing" US government in the last generation implemented substantial unfunded tax cuts that raised deficits and national debt... Politicians often say one thing when in opposition and do the oppositie when in power.
Beyond that, you point out that "they US does it too" - accepting refugees, accepting gay marriage, making taxation more progressive. All of these things were (and are being) done while being fought tooth and nail by the right wing in the US. You missed the point.
> Politicians often say one thing when in opposition and do the oppositie when in power.
Totally agree, it's all talk and no do. Does not change the fact that intending to do so (or at least pretending the intent) would not make you a progressive leftist in the us as the author suggested.
The adjective form of Democrat is Democratic. Perhaps as a German the author is unaware that usages like "all the democrat votes are ignored" are repeating the Republicans' deliberately insulting word choice.
"Democratic" is confusing because it could mean either "relating to democracy" or "relating to the Democratic party" whereas "Republican" almost always refers to the party. I don't blame anyone for using a less ambiguous word and this is the first I've heard of "Democrat" being an insult.
Good, that's consistent with my French and Greek, sorry for checking but your comment really surprised me ! Didn't realize it was a joke until having already checked...
it is absolutely true that “Democrat party” as opposed to “Democratic party” is a Republican shibboleth for some reason.
Democrats themselves don’t seem to think about it much but there is a portion of conservative media that is very careful to always say “Democrat party”.
> The first conclusion has to be that I found no evidence of fraud in any of these elections.
Given that people have been convicted of fraud and invalid votes are found, we have learned that either (1) this technique does not find evidence of fraud even when it happens or (2) the fraud that happens is marginal.
(2) seems likely, but given the small margins in some swing states, even a relatively small numbers of fraudulent votes could determine the election.
What constitutes a small margin? Even in Georgia the margin is just over 10,000 votes. Fraudulently casting that many votes undetected would be a non-trivial task.
Okay, I will clarify. Fraudulently casting 10K votes undetected is impossible.
And hey, the only actual evidence we have is from a couple republicans who tried to bring fake ballots to a precinct in Philadelphia. Maybe the real fraud we should be investigating is how one candidate beat his predicted performance by several points two elections in a row. What are the odds of that?
> > Some cheating leaves barely a shadow of evidence. In other cases, the evidence is massive. Consider what happened one spring evening at midnight in 1987: seven million American children suddenly disappeared. The worst kidnapping wave in history? Hardly. It was the night of April 15, and the Internal Revenue Service had just changed a rule. Instead of merely listing each dependent child, tax filers were now required to provide a Social Security number for each child. Suddenly, seven million children — children who had existed only as phantom exemptions on the previous year’s 1040 forms — vanished, representing about one in ten of all dependent children in the United States.
> The “seven million” figure appears to be accurate, as noted in a December 2000 National Tax Journal article by Jeffrey B. Liebman that drew its data from a 1990 Internal Revenue Service conference report:
The same people claiming there is minimal voter fraud on the basis of the relatively few in number convictions for voter fraud probably would have also claimed in 1986, before the IRS rule change, that there was minimal IRS dependent tax credit fraud.
Absence of evidence isn't evidence of absence unless you make a sufficiently thorough effort to actually collect the evidence (i.e., to detect voter fraud).
That seems like a false equivalence as perhaps the requirement to add a SSN for children was precisely because there was evidence of the fraud. In US elections there are fraud monitoring systems in place and there's a lot more anti-fraud and ballot checking processes than using an honor system to count your dependents on a tax form.
In general, especially legally, evidence is required to prove the merit of a claim, not to refute a claim. Proving a negative is often impossible, impractical or oppressive.
This reminded me of a hypothetical situation I thought of.
There's a town of 1,000 people. They have an election. One person wins by 100 votes. It is later found and proven that 99 of the votes for the winner were fraudulent. Who should win then? Who should be elected?
Clearly a lot of fraud went one way. If we look at it probabilistically, then the other candidate (the one who didn't benefit from fraud) should win, because most likely there were other votes that were also fraudulent. And yet, by electing the other candidate, you are ignoring a couple votes that were never proven to be fraudulent, which begs the question: exactly whose votes were thrown away and what is the justification for throwing them away?
The same goes for similar techniques like Benford's law: once you know about them, you can improve your sophistication so that no conclusion can be made (There are some interesting exceptions here since most claims of fraud would have one believe that centralized or semi-centralized fraud is much harder to perform than decentralized/random fraud, in which case due to coordination issues, some of these techniques could still bear fruit).
But, the obvious overlaying issue is that the system is broken from the bottom up: there is no authentication, authorization, or encryption. Rather than having random Internet bloggers attempt to detect fraud with the information and tools they have, the system should instead be made secure and robust from the bottom-up, starting with how votes are made, tallied, transported, and so on. Additionally the technologies used, voting machines used, counting methods used, and voting system itself (lacking any ranked-choice or similar options) are all severely lacking modern improvements.
No single person should be counting votes and typing numbers into fields. We should at least try to use some of the multidisciplinary technology developed in the last five or so decades to try to patch this from the bottom-up so that the system is much more robust and auditable for the future, because things are only going to get weirder (honestly, the US election went very smoothly compared to how it gone have gone, imo - there is no better time to prevent future disasters than today).