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.
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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.
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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.
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).