[somenameforme]

In reality sledgehammer guy is never the threat, it's somebody fabricating votes. This can be done in a completely illegal fashion as in complete identity fraud, legally grey areas like ballot harvesting, or more socially palatable forms of identity fraud like somebody voting on behalf of family members who would not otherwise be voting.

And the biggest problem of this all is that it's basically impossible to prove because there's no meaningful identifier at any given point in the process. The only real evidence you'd have is a bad signature, yet in 2020 some states ceased comparing signatures and signature comparison was, in general, bizarrely under attack by certain interest groups.

[habinero]

This is 100%, completely absolutely untrue. Stop repeating this propaganda. The system is actually really well designed and safe, I was a poll observer.

You cannot "fabricate" votes, because all mail-in ballots are associated with a voter. Or rather, you put your ballot in an envelope and the envelope is associated with you. When your ballot is received, you are marked as voted and other ballots are invalid. The envelope is stored as proof of who voted and the ballot is kept separately to be tallied.

Ballot counting is done in public (you can go watch!) and there are a lot of safeguards and crosschecks. It's intended to make any fraud very obvious and incredibly difficult to scale.

[yonaguska]

Claims of voter fraud have shifted to mass voter registration occuring for people that are not eligible to vote, then ballots being sent out without being requested. How is this concern addressed?

[habinero]

Yeah, and those claims are made up to scare people who don't know how it works.

The government knows who is a citizen and who isn't lol, they literally have the records.

Voter rolls are very closely scrutinized. Dead people are, in fact, taken off the rolls. There is essentially ~no voter fraud and ~no instance of non-citizens voting in this country. Yes, it's audited and studied. Yes, they keep the data and you can audit it.

You're literally complaining about it being easier for people to participate in democracy, and you should stop.

Everything's a conspiracy when you don't know how anything works.

[somenameforme]

From the mail-in ballots from 2024 alone, tens of thousands were returned because somebody had already voted. If you're generous that is 'accidental attempts at voter fraud'. If you're realistic those are going to largely compose a small percent of all successful efforts at voting on behalf of other individuals.

And this for elections which are increasingly decided (in terms of flipping the electoral college one way or the other) by votes in the tens of thousands to low hundreds of thousands. So the scale of fraud in US elections is likely greater than the minimum margin of electoral college victory in them.

--

You also are substantially overstating the degree of organization of voter rolls. Voting in the US is heavily decentralized by design, which is what enables various states to have completely different electoral systems. But more specifically voter rolls are maintained by the states themselves and that, in turn, is typically further decentralized down to counties themselves.

This leaves a significant degree of inconsistency. In general I do not think that double voting or completely ineligible voting is a significant factor - nowhere near as much as voting on the behalf of others, but it certainly happens. For instance thousands of mail in votes were rejected because they came from dead people, and it is highly unlikely that 100% of these attempts were caught.