[ciarannolan]

So 0.000001% of votes were fraudulent if you take the Heritage Foundation's analysis as fact (1,285 votes fraudulent out of 119,000,000 who voted in 2016).

Does 0.000001% fraud qualify as a problem in any reasonable sense?

Republicans' electoral strategy is basically "the less people vote, the better". Is that good for democracy? Is that just?

[CapricornNoble]

>>>f you take the Heritage Foundation's analysis as fact (1,285 votes fraudulent out of 119,000,000 who voted in 2016)

That's not how I interpreted the data. Not 1 incident = 1 vote, but 1 incident = 1 criminal case affecting 1 election. So election fraud at Timbuktu County could have impacted 2 voters, or 500 voters, but either way is recorded as 1 incident. I'm not seeing a link to their actual database so we can't dig into the records to confirm either way, which is disappointing. But the narrative text seems to support this.

[ciarannolan]

>Not 1 incident = 1 vote, but 1 incident = 1 criminal case affecting 1 election.

This doesn't reason out.

The question is "What impact does voter/election fraud have on elections?"

You determine this by calculating the impact that these fraudulent votes had on the election. It doesn't make sense to say "because there was 1 fraudulent vote in one county in one state, we have to count all 500-100,000 (?) votes in that county as fraudulent too."

This Heritage Foundation report is literally an analysis detailing how voter fraud is a non-issue in American elections.

[CapricornNoble]

I found their webpage for their database! It's not 1 database record = 1 voter, they are listing cases of election abusers, often multiple criminal defendants in a single record, with multiple felonies and multiple votes per record.

https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud

Here's one entry for the state of Pennsylvania: "According to Wild Acres Property Manager Robert Depaolis, Cowher approached him and asked him to provide Cowher with ballots that were due to be mailed to property owners in the community who seldom voted, for the express purpose of filling out those ballots and guaranteeing victory for Cowher's preferred Board of Directors candidates. Depaolis went to the state police, who surveilled a meeting where Depaolis handed over the ballots, catching Cowher in the act of filling out the mail-in ballots. He was arrested and subsequently convicted on 217 counts, including forgery, identity theft, and criminal conspiracy. His accomplice, Kupershmidt, was found guilty on 190 counts."

[ciarannolan]

Wait a minute. That 1,285 total includes every case they could find since 1979? LOL

This proves the point even more in the extreme that voter fraud is a non-issue. An extremely motivated source like the Heritage Foundation was able to find 1,285 instances over 41 years? About how many billions of votes cast in that time period are we talking about?

Maybe my 0.000001% voter fraud estimate was too generous. It's looking more like 0.000000000001%.

Edit: Did you even click through more than one of these? The first 20 that appear for my state show that no votes were actually cast fraudulently, meaning some portion of that 1,285 instances accounts for zero fraudulent votes. This gets more hilarious the deeper we go.

>Donald Dewsnup, a housing development activist in San Francisco, registered to vote using a false address.

>State Sen. Roderick Wright (D_Inglewood) was convicted of eight felony counts of perjury and voter fraud. He deliberately misled voters as to his residency in order to run for office in a neighboring district.

>Immigrant-Rights activist Nativo Lopez pleaded guilty to one count of voter registration fraud when it was discovered that he registered to vote in Los Angeles while living in Santa Ana.

>Jose Fragozo, a trustee on the Escondido Union School District Board, pleaded guilty to a felony charge that he voted in the 2014 general election while registered at an address where he did not live.

>Alexander Bronson, former Trustee for Manteca Unified School District, California, pleaded guilty to charges of voter fraud. He listed a false address in order to qualify for candidacy in the November 2014 Manteca Unified School District Board of Education election.

etc.

[CapricornNoble]

blows whistle Flag on the play. Moving the goalposts. Five yard penalty. Repeat the first down. But more seriously, let's go allll the way back to your original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23318100

>>in the complete absence of any actual fraud happening

That is an objectively false statement. Will you concede that?

>>>An extremely motivated source like the Heritage Foundation was able to find 1,285 instances over 41 years? >>>Did you even click through more than one of these?

Did you? California's list doesn't have a single entry pre-2000, and over half of them are post-2010. Texas? Same, nothing pre-2000. New York? One in 1983, one in 1999. Florida? Four entries pre-2000 (and a BUNCH 2002-2010, probably due to fallout of Bush-v-Gore).

So either election fraud enforcement has become significantly more vigilant post-2000, or election fraud incidents have seen an astronomical uptick. Or both. But what we DO know for certain is:

-The incidence rate is non-zero, especially in the past 10 years. -Some elections have in fact been swayed by fraud.

-We should probably spare at least some modicum of serious thought and allocate some resources to improving the process integrity and security of one of our most sacred civil institutions. We make it rain fiat currency for every other government boondoggle imaginable, why is there so much opposition to THIS?

[ciarannolan]

>But more seriously, let's go allll the way back to your original post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23318100

On this website, there's an indication above each comment that notes which user left that comment. You'll notice that the comment you link was not posted by me.

>So either election fraud enforcement has become significantly more vigilant post-2000, or election fraud incidents have seen an astronomical uptick. Or both.

An astronomical uptick from 0.0000001% to 0.00001%? Horrifying! This is like when there's 1 murder in a town of 100,000 people one year, 2 murders the next, and the local paper prints "MURDER RATE DOUBLES".

>The incidence rate is non-zero, especially in the past 10 years.

Okay? Whether there was zero or greater than zero incidents doesn't tell us much.

>Some elections have in fact been swayed by fraud.

Fair enough. But again you're basing your argument on conveniently skipping over the real question which is not "was there at least one fraudulent vote in America in the last 41 years?" (the question you're trying hard to answer over and over with "yes!").

The question is whether it's a problem that has a material impact on our elections. Basically, is it really a problem? 1,285 instances over 41 years (and how many _billions_ of votes in that time period) makes the answer extremely obvious.

It's funny because I am in favor of voter ID on principle alone. But you have to acknowledge the fact that voter fraud is a non-issue in practice. There are better arguments to make in favor of election integrity.