[dodobirdlord]

Voting fraud on the scale required to influence a US election is not possible due to voting registration requirements. Registering any significant amount of fake people is not feasible, and if you are trying to cast the votes of any significant number of real people you will quickly have a collision with someone who actually does intend on voting, leading to an investigation and the whole scheme unraveling.

Voter registration + signature checks + investigating duplicate ballots is a robust system for ensuring that systematic voting fraud can only achieve a small result without being overwhelmingly likely to be caught. If the election had actually come down to a margin of a few thousand votes in a single state it might have been worth the resources to do a deep-dive, but with the margins that occurred we can be certain that voting fraud did not influence the result.

[blub]

The claims I've seen were:

* dead people "voted" in the election

* late votes by mail were stamped with a fictive past date

Anyway, I don't see why you're so comfortable with election fraud as long as it doesn't influence the result. There is no way to know if fraud happened and what scale this happened at without doing this so-called "deep-dive" you mention.

[dodobirdlord]

The election boards of each of the 50 States and the District of Columbia do in fact conduct regular audits, and frequently purge voter rolls of registered voters that have been sufficiently inactive as to be suspected of having died or moved out of the state. You may have read about such events in previous months in the national news.

I don’t see why I would care much if there is voting fraud if I can be certain that it did not influence the result. What does it harm me if an election decided by a margin of tens of thousands of votes had some few hundreds or even thousands of illegitimate ballots cast? It’s a tiny amount of noise in a very strong signal. It’s easy for a state to estimate what percentage of the vote could possibly have been fraudulent, and when the signal seems to be at risk of being lost in the noise there is a robust process of signal recovery. But recounts are expensive and a waste of time and resources when they are not needed.

[totony]

Ten thousand votes does not seem to me like a strong signal. If you look at popular vote, there is a 4m discrepency. Asuming all the results are legitimate, that's maybe 2-4% of the voters that agree more with one than the other.

It is grotesque to call 2% a strong signal.

As for voter fraud, I'm curious how you think it is insignificant without an audit. And even if it was, shouldn't the fraudsters be prosecuted?

[dodobirdlord]

> It is grotesque to call 2% a strong signal.

It's a pretty strong signal of who won the election, given that we know that submission of fraudulent ballots doesn't work at scale.

> As for voter fraud, I'm curious how you think it is insignificant without an audit.

In is audited, continuously, by the fact that voters have to be registered and can't vote twice. Voter rolls are regularly audited by state election commissions to remove people who have died and/or moved out of the state, and there's no evidence of a non-negligible number of fake people making their way onto voter registration rolls. When two ballots are returned for the same person, or if a ballot is returned for someone who is known to be dead, etc, it prompts an investigation into how that happened. Not every registered voter votes, but by and large people register to vote because they intend to vote, so it's infeasible for a systematic effort to submit fraudulent ballots to avoid colliding with the real votes of the people being impersonated.

> And even if it was, shouldn't the fraudsters be prosecuted?

They are prosecuted.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/12/01/0-...

And really, "grotesque"? That seems pretty rude.

[totony]

>And really, "grotesque"? That seems pretty rude.

Did not mean it that way, my apologies. It was meant to be an hyperbole

>They are prosecuted.

You were suggesting not conducting an audit so they could not be prosecuted if we don't know who they are

>Not every registered voter votes, but by and large people register to vote because they intend to vote, so it's infeasible for a systematic effort to submit fraudulent ballots to avoid colliding with the real votes of the people being impersonated.

From what I have seen, only ~65% of registered voters usually vote. I am not convinced that impersonating part of that 35% is infeasible. There are also other ways to manipulate votes than to submit a ballot and hope the person does not vote, e.g. you could collude with UPS to lose ballots, buy votes, replace valid ballots/votes, etc.

EDIT: Take Wisconsin as an example. There is a 20k difference between the two candidates. 20k is ~0.6% of the 3.2m voters that voted (whereas the parent post stated 10k which is a very small signal)

[dodobirdlord]

> You were suggesting not conducting an audit so they could not be prosecuted if we don't know who they are.

I think there may have been a misunderstanding here. Up the thread I was explaining why systematic auditing isn’t done at the time of the election when the margin is large.

Audits are done systematically in the time between elections, to run down irregularities like the ones linked above, and to ready the registered voter rolls for the next election. Audits are also done during recounts, which happen if the margin is small enough that fraud could have tipped the election result.

During the election itself reliance is on validation. Ballots are mailed out only to registered voters, USPS mail-tracking tracks each ballot to ensure that it was delivered to the voter’s registered address, returned ballots have their signatures checked, and duplicate votes are detected.

There are definitely many other ways to defraud the election other than committing voter fraud. Hacking voting machines or the tabulating process itself is a concerning possibility. But this election I haven’t seen any accusations that this occurred, only accusations of illegitimate ballot submissions.

[nemothekid]

No one is comfortable with election fraud. Election Fraud is a well researched problem (by republicans too), and it's been shown again and again that it is an incredibly small problem. You are talking about a couple thousand confirmed cases [1] in elections where tens of millions of votes were cast. Claims of election fraud are not new.

A bigger problem is voter suppression, through ever growing extraneous requirements (such as Harris County, a population of 5 million, only have 1 ballot drop off, due to a law to prevent more than one drop off per county). Voter supression however does not get anywhere near the same amount of attention.

[1] https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud

[nogglet]

Both of those claims are likely based on this Steve Bannon funded study of voter fraud: http://g-a-i.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/07/Voter-Fraud-Fina...

Data analysis would indicate that the DOB for many voters are over a 100 years old. Even as mentioned in this very report, that's because of a technical bug. DOB wasn't required, and when it was, the system used something like 0000 as the birthdate. The report dismissed these findings, but it seems either the media or general public has still been running with it.

Finally, it's worth noting the study itself is highly inaccurate: https://electionupdates.caltech.edu/2017/09/11/report-on-vot...

(edit: updated original link of study to g-a-i, this study is also mirrored on whitehouse.gov)

[charliemil4]

Great — so let’s just run the queries so I can go to sleep

[dodobirdlord]

It’ll happen, but nobody’s going to hold up on calling the election, certifying results, and choosing electors in the meantime.

[charliemil4]

Yep. That's what scares me a bit - you don't want to find this out after all the endorphins and emotions solidify sides.

[dodobirdlord]

Well, there aren’t going to be any surprises. It’s not like voter fraud is an actual problem in the United States.

[hosteur]

Because you say so?

[scsilver]

Because it only seemed to effect the person incapable of handling a loss. Why arent losing congress people claiming their races were defrauded aswell?

[thingsgoup]

Your answer shows a lack of imagination in regards to how fraud might be perpetuated in this situation.

As our election systems come to depend on electronic solutions the attack surface increases significantly.

[dodobirdlord]

Sure, sure, but that's a completely separate topic from voter fraud. And it's also not something I've heard anyone alleging happened in the 2020 election.

[sparkling]

> Voting fraud on the scale required to influence a US election is not possible due to voting registration requirements.

Im not from the US, but my understanding of the alleged fraud is that due to coronavirus many states sent every registered voter a blank ballot (where in the past they explicitely had to request a ballot) and that, again allegedly, some people would habe been able to obtain such blank ballots and vote for their prefered candidate?

[dodobirdlord]

I’ll lead off by mentioning that some states already voted by mail and have for many years. So if there were a problem with this approach that enabled mass voter fraud we would be well aware by now.

The “blank ballots” are not blank in the sense that they are interchangeable. Each ballot sent out is the specific ballot of a specific person. It’s certainly possible that some ballots were stolen from their intended recipients and mailed back with forged signatures, but what’s important is whether this could have been done on a mass scale to influence the election result. And the answer to that is no. A coordinated effort to fraudulently return enough ballots to matter would require large-scale raiding of mailboxes to steal ballots, or stealing ballots in mass quantity soon after they were put into the postal system by each state’s election commission. The former is impossible, as it would require an organization comparable in size to the postal service to be able to go house by house stealing ballots as they were delivered, and it would be obvious that it was occurring. The latter is easy to detect and trivial to rectify.

In both cases, the fraud would be detected as soon as anyone who hadn’t received their ballot went to their state’s election website and requested another ballot and were informed that their ballot had been delivered and returned.

[charliemil4]

I'll post this scenario here again just to get your opinion on it -- you have good thoughts.

Here's the scenario as it plays now: many 'grassroots' movements are reified when a bus comes to pick a group of people up, hands them a template ballot of who to vote for, then brings them to the polls to vote, and finally ends the ride with a dinner and party back at the place.

First, this is legal, at least where I'm from, and is a common way to 'get out the vote.'

Second, this implicitly has a built in rate-limiter because I need the physical voter to be present and to go into the booth alone.

However! This time, I don't have to bus you to the polls... I can host a party at my house to request all of your ballots come to me, where I fill them out and copy your signature from the party / event. OR I do this over the course of a few months, and still have all the ballots directed to me, still copy your signature from the form we filled out together. Or even worse, I use hacked data to request a ballot on your behalf because you never show up to the polls anyway.

To me, that's an extreme vulnerability -- that means beyond it not being rate limited, the physical person is no longer needed to fill out their own ballot. Not only this... there was always the chance someone could go 'off script' and vote for who they wanted for and just get the free meal. Now, they are guaranteed to be the way you wanted because you filled them out.

^ I've known people go on buses to get meals and vote 'off script'

And finally, the reason 'this hasn't happened until now' is because most mail in voting was for absentee voting (in the battle ground states) and never done at this scale where you could have a whole community request ballots to one address almost undetected. (yes this is detectable post-fact, but damage is done and intent is there on both sides.)

[dodobirdlord]

Oregon, Washington, Colorado, and Utah have voted by mail and sent a ballot to every registered voter for years. No signs so far that this has been abused to facilitate the sort of coordinated large scale fraud that you’re concerned about. Though there’s some evidence that it leads to closer matches between the votes of married partners compared to in-person voting, which is very concerning for for similar reasons! But spousal vote coercion is not new and by most definitions is not a form of voter fraud. I dream that someday we will be able to introduce a voting system that can ensure ballot secrecy even in these scenarios, but sadly the technology isn’t there yet. (Side note - this is why taking a picture of your ballot in a voting booth is illegal. It prevents being able to prove how you voted.)

Ballots are delivered to the legal address of each registered voter. A state election board is going to notice (and maybe call the fire marshal haha) if 1,000 people all suddenly announced that they are moving into the same house. The premise that neither the state nor the people having their legal address surreptitiously changed would notice isn’t a realistic cause for concern.

[jimmygrapes]

It is hard to find evidence of abuse when practically every attempt to look into it is met with refusal and/or claims that it is not probable.

[confidantlake]

Ah yes, the classic: no evidence is proof that it is being covered up.

[justin66]

When it comes to fraud, obtaining a ballot is as easy as obtaining a bank check, for example. It's legal (in my state, anyway) for various parties to distribute them, and you could print your own, if you had the right paper. (You'd be in hot water if your ballot wasn't the exact document the state distributes - it's a crime to distribute a ballot that's prepopulated with the user's data, for example)

The security features of the process do not depend on mail-in ballots being unique or scarce.

[dodobirdlord]

The important thing that has to be avoided if you want to perpetrate voter fraud is accidentally submitting a ballot for someone who actually votes themselves. Given that most registered voters do in fact vote it's not a workable approach to just print out ballots and submit them, you also need a reason to believe that the targeted voter isn't going to vote, such as having intercepted their ballot.

[justin66]

In principle you could inconvenience a lot of people by sending in fake ballots randomly, lots of them, and forcing those people to cast provisional ballots when they try to vote in person. And whoever didn't show up, you'd have a decent chance of getting the vote in if you could approximate their signature.

In practice this doesn't happen, I just assume because it's easy to detect, it's a felony that comes with a prison sentence (and a lot of people would be looking for you) and because it actually creates a lot of problems for whichever candidate receives the votes.

I think an alternate scenario, where ballots are sent to a lot of people with the voter's name and address information "helpfully" prepopulated on the form, incorrectly, is perhaps slightly more of a threat. In this case people are at risk of casting a ballot that will be rejected and their board of elections might or might not notify them there's a problem. Sending prepopulated ballots is illegal where I live because an organization trying to be helpful in this way could inadvertently disenfranchise people by mistake with a bad list, but there's the other risk as well.

Again, easy to detect and a crime, and I don't think it's been a problem here.

[ed25519FUUU]

This election came down basically to three counties in two states.

It would also explain irregularities with those counties when compared to other counties with very similar demographics.

[tiziniano]

Voting in the USA is such a joke for it being a first world country. One would expect blockchain based systems or at least a cryptographically based system to exist. The fact that they don't even have a national voter ID. Like seriously how much does it cost to have one and give it for free to every person? Poorer countries have done so with more success. The calls arguing voter suppression are the dumbest, if you are not smart enough to get a card and vote, then maybe that vote should not count.

[dodobirdlord]

It is certainly true that the US is frequently behind the curve of other first world nations on government deployment of new technology. This is largely because of 2 reasons. Reason #1, the US historically is frequently the first place technologies are deployed on a wide scale, and as a result the US generally has the earliest and thus the worst version of everything. Reason #2, the US system of federated States introduces great friction into any system requiring a central authority.

The absence of a national voter ID program perfectly exemplifies this. The US has an election system that works sufficiently well, so there’s no major impetus to overhaul how voters vote. And the US Federal government doesn’t even have a list of all US citizens. In fact, no such list even exists. Moreover, a lack of any existing documentation that a person is a citizen does not necessarily mean that they are not a citizen due to birthright citizenship or citizenship automatically inherited from parents.

Concerns about voter suppression induced by the introduction of a national voter ID are completely legitimate. The US Federal government lacks the capacity to ensure that every eligible voter is delivered an ID (lacking a list of all citizens), so the burden to acquire one falls on the individual. If this costs money, then it constitutes an unconstitutional poll tax. And in any case, since the Federal government is incapable of handling such a responsibility it would fall to the individual states, some of which have demonstrated historically that they will act to make the process arbitrarily difficult for individuals that the sitting state legislature would prefer do not vote.

[willis936]

Schoefield’s third law of computing. Elections need to be long, painful, effortful processes. Automating it is a bad idea. An optimal robot-slave humanity would minmax to humans’ only jobs being checking ballots and saying hello.