[btilly]

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?

[js2]

I can’t figure out if you’re seriously accusing one side or the other of cheating, but fwiw, I have confidence in our elections.

All this hand-wringing about fraud when attempts at disenfranchisement of tens of thousands of votes happens in plain sight. Just one example of many:

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/04/gop-pennsylvania-bl...

(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.)

[creato]

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.

[ryathal]

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

[gwd]

> 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.

[disgruntledphd2]

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.

[Izkata]

> 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.

[jcadam]

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.

[gwd]

> 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.

[1] https://news.bloomberglaw.com/us-law-week/trump-sues-to-halt...

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jan/01/north-caroli...

[3] https://www.texastribune.org/2020/11/01/texas-drive-thru-vot...

[matwood]

> 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.

[thu2111]

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.

[rhinoceraptor]

> 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.

[hiram112]

> The only party with anything to gain from suppressing voters are the Republicans.

> And just this election, the Republicans put up fraudulent, illegal mail-in ballot drop boxes.

So which one is it?

[dragonwriter]

> 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.

[thu2111]

Isn't that a "if she floats she's a witch" type argument?