[dragonwriter]

> It's ridiculous to assert that it doesn't exist in practice due to lack of evidence when in reality pretending to be someone else to vote leaves virtually no evidence.

If it's happening at any significant rate, without perfect knowledge of which eligible voters won't vote (or have someone else try to steal their vote, which is just as bad for the prospective vote thief), it leaves quite tangible evidence in the form of people presenting themselves to vote under names that have already voted.

The absence of this occurring fairly strongly indicates that vote stealing by impersonation isn't a thing that happens at any meaningful rate.

[blackflame7000]

Or people are smart and only pick names of people who haven't voted in quite some time. 2 out of 3 people don't vote. If you have ever volunteered at a precinct you would know that it's literally just an excel sheet of names and you're supposed to check someone off. It's very easy to check the wrong line and your failsafe is easily explained away as a mistake instead of raising any sort of alarm. There is no one investigating that people actually voted.

[dragonwriter]

> Or people are smart and only pick names of people who haven't voted in quite some time.

If there was more than what vote theft operation in the same area, you'd still expect them to have collisions.

> 2 out of 3 people don't vote.

Wrong. A majority of the voting-eligible population votes in Presidential elections.

> If you have ever volunteered at a precinct you would know that it's literally just an excel sheet of names

A printed paper sheet, sure. Whether Excel is used in making it or not is immaterial (I assume it's generated straight from the voter database, which I hope isn't Excel.)

> and you're supposed to check someone off.

California state law requires the actual voter to sign in on the list; I would think that this is normal.

> It's very easy to check the wrong line

If it was a just a check off, maybe it would be easy.

> It's very easy to check the wrong line and your failsafe is easily explained away as a mistake instead of raising any sort of alarm.

Even if it was just a check box, you'd also need to have extremely lax procedures that all the poll workers and any observers were all in on for this basic integrity check to be routinely ignored.

Given the political factions interested in selling the idea of rampant voter fraud, you'd expect them to raise a ruckus if there were actual instances of this going on routinely.

You'd also have to either randomly mark off some non-voter (potentially creating a new instance of the problem) each time this happened or turn in a tally sheet where the count of marked voters didn't match the ballot count. The former would magnify the visibility of the casual disregard of integrity, the latter would definitely raise an alarm in counts.

[codedokode]

If there is an observer in the polling station, how are you going to throw ballots in a box without them noticing? You need to find people who would pretend that they are voters. It only works when nobody is watching (when nobody cares).

Also, here in Russia, voters put a signature in the voters registry when receiving a ballot.