[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.