[MagnumOpus]

You don't need to. In the US you can lose the nation by 3 million votes as long as you win 3-4 swing states in the presidential or senate vote -- be it your brother making 538 votes disappear or your staffers creating 203 ballots with your name on it...

[Schiendelman]

It’s really really difficult to do either of those things, especially in vote by mail. In Washington, for instance, I can see who is registered, who voted in a given election, and match that to the vote totals.

[GauntletWizard]

I live in Washington state. There is someone registered to vote on my street who has voted, consistently, since 2012 - The year the resident by that name moved out. We have raised the issue to the Secretary of State’s office, and they have sent out a mailer for the resident to confirm their address.

[Schiendelman]

That just means a different person is voting at worst. It’s not an extra vote.

[GauntletWizard]

You don't think that the person who's living at the address also has their name on the voter roll?

[jonfw]

There's only a handful of states that actually matter in an election. Do we have these numbers for Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania?

[athriren]

turnout is always < 1.00 in the US because voting is not mandatory and registration is not (universally on a national level) automatic—which would need to happen before mandatory voting.

so it is theoretically trivial, once you know how many votes you needed to have won that you did not, to add a number of fake votes N to the number of real votes P such that N+P < T, the total of registered voters.

however, this is actually not that easy to do en masse scale because of how discretely elections are conducted. people in the US generally vote by precinct (determined at the local level by the county board of elections) which is about the size of a census tract, which is a relatively small area. it is basically impossible to know ahead of time which specific precincts you need to flip in order to change the result in a credible way. injecting the ballots into the process would require a level of sophistication that interacting with the county election officials or volunteer election administrators would lead you to believe is not possible.

the actual way to do election fraud would be to just report vote totals that have no basis in fact. which, sure, i guess is also possible. but then, while Democrats control the urban centers so may have more registered eligible voters who do not vote to be able to fake vote totals within their cities, Republicans control the vast majority of counties in the country. so at scale, effective use of this strategy would just result in everyone reporting 100% turnout every year...which clearly doesn’t happen.

the fact that any arms race here would rapidly devolve into a situation neither side can accurately predict means that election fraud at scale not only does not occur, but also that is is actually not preferable. it is way easier to play in other margins (make it harder for people to register, kick people off voter rolls, etc).

source: worked on campaigns in another life.

[Schiendelman]

I'm pretty sure you do, yes.

[matwood]

3-4 swing states is still a national level. You're also talking about 20k-100k type numbers. This isn't someone winning by 100 votes.

What's funny about this situation is that Biden is on track to win most of these states by a larger margin than Trump did against Clinton. She did ask for a recount, but I don't remember her ever going on and on about fraud.

[jbjohns]

Not fraud but she did write an entire book blaming Russia, and a whole host of other things.

[matwood]

The big difference is that it's been clearly shown that Russia did interfere [1]. The arguable point is did Trump's campaign know and direct the interference?

And if we're really talking about shaping elections, disinformation and voter suppression is the way to get it done. Once votes are cast, it's too hard to move enough in order to have any meaningful change. There are too many checks, rechecks, and processes in place to commit fraud at the scale needed for a large election.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_interference_in_the_20...

[hiram112]

Russia has been meddling in our elections since the Cold War began[1]. China, Israel, and every other power "interferes" in our elections, too, just like we do to them.

What was disingenuous of the US media was to make a huge deal out of 2016 shenanigans by Russia without any context, making it appear to the average voter that it was both significant and unique, neither of which is true.

The intel community and major media spent 3 years and tens of millions of dollars looking for something illegal or even unethical that the Trump campaign did related to Russia, and nothing was found.

The idea that there are "too many checks, rechecks, processes ... to commit fraud at the scale needed for a large election" is absurd in the US where the whole national election can be determined at the end by a single large county in one swing state, as happened in 2000. Now realize that 45 states were required to haphazardly design and implement, in 3 months, a mail-in voting system on a scale with which they had no experience, we'd expect a lot of errors that aren't even malicious.

Add in a flurry of state governments quickly passing various laws to swing things to their favor as happened in all the swing states, and you have a recipe for disaster as we're seeing.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/17/sunday-review/russia-isnt...

[chillwaves]

Might have something to do with all the provable connections to Russia the Trump campaign had. People are sitting in jail for lying about contacts with Russia.

You really can't pretend these are similar situations.

And it's also a huge difference between undermining the entire process vs claiming that Russia conducted psyops on American voters in favor of Trump.

Trump is saying you cannot trust the vote counting. That's a big deal.

[ffdjjjffjj]

Which of course didn’t happen hear - Biden is on track to win by a clear electoral and popular margin. Florida in 2000 was decided by hundreds of votes though.

[jcadam]

People are being willfully obtuse when they say the kind of fraud being alleged isn't possible. A certain political party spent that last six months forcing rule changes on swing states vis a vis mail in voting that you can't compare this year's election to any that came before.

Most of the fraud allegations (at least the ones where the numbers would be large enough to make a significant difference) revolve around these unsolicited mail in ballots and the extended deadlines which we've never had before in this country.

And please, kicking out GOP poll watchers (and only GOP poll watchers) and blocking their ability to observe and inspect ballots might not prove fraud took place, but it does prove criminal intent in my eyes, and the eyes of millions of other Americans.

These concerns need to be addressed.

[gitrog]

> And please, kicking out GOP poll watchers (and only GOP poll watchers) and blocking their ability to observe

Could you please provide a source for this?

[ttmb]

I believe there was one where GOP poll watchers were barred from entry - because there were already GOP poll watchers in the room and the room was at capacity.

[barbacoa]

That is what is being alleged in multiple swing state lawsuits by the GOP.

https://youtu.be/DAh_stm5Bdc

[ttmb]

> "I have not yet had the benefit of reviewing the underlying proceedings..."

Ah, vloggers. Same desperate need to fill airtime as the 24-hour news channels, with even less resources for actual journalism.

[ttmb]

> these unsolicited mail in ballots and the extended deadlines which we've never had before in this country.

Many states added new procedures like these to this election, but I don't believe any state added procedures that weren't already used in one or more other states.

[gitrog]

Also, if it was organised in advance, then what exactly is the problem? This year hasn't exactly been like any before in living memory either...

[chillwaves]

Can we not go down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole? Until any of these allegations have been verified, I don't see the point in speculation.

> kicking out GOP poll watchers (and only GOP poll watchers)

Zero evidence anywhere this happened. Much evidence to the contrary.