[JumpCrisscross]

> they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting

Illegal voting is so rare that almost every time folks go looking for it they come up empty handed. Examples of voter suppression, on the other hand, are trivial to fine. (And both parties do it, particularly around primaries.)

In my state, we’re trying to enact a citizenship-proof requirement which penalizes women who change their name on getting married and those who can’t afford a passport. In effect, a marriage and poll tax. Ironically, this will disenfranchise the MAGA voters who are themselves pushing for it, but I’m not really going to point that out aggressively.

(That said, a legitimate fraction of American politics right now is in convincing the other side’s likely voters that elections are rigged, the oligarchs are in charge, why even bother calling your electeds or voting, eat an ice-cream sundae and talk to your AI girlfriend.)

[prepend]

If someone mails in my absentee ballot and I don’t complain, how do you detect that voter fraud?

Or if someone knows their friend is sick and votes without an id, how do you detect that?

It seems like there are currently many ways to vote illegally that don’t get detected.

[otterley]

Perhaps so, but you still have to show that it is happening, not merely that it is possible. Moreover, you have to show that whatever cures you propose are both 1/proportional to the harm and 2/minimize undesirable side effects. (One challenge with the latter is that for some people, those side effects are actually desirable.)

[estearum]

Can you describe specifically how someone finds enough complaint-free absentee ballots and sick friends to vote at any meaningful scale?

Doing this even 10 times seems unbelievably hard.

[fragmede]

It seems less hard if you datamine the shit out of everything, exfiltrate the social security database, and feed it into a computer. Get the historical voting records. SELECT address FROM voters that haven't voted in 10 years. Send someone to follow the mailman and steal ballots from that address. Or simply don't mail them out in the first place. They're not likely to notice to complain in the first place.

Not that I think the election was rigged, but if you think it's "unbelievably hard", I think that's a failure of imagination.

[estearum]

You’re describing an attack that entails both hacking the SSN database, 1 to 50 of the state voter databases, then physically following mailmen around and stealing ballots…

[lovich]

I think he’s referencing the doge boys getting access to social security files and taking them

[JumpCrisscross]

> If someone mails in my absentee ballot and I don’t complain, how do you detect that voter fraud?

You get followed up in an audit, if anyone asks. This happened like three million times in Arizona.

> there are currently many ways to vote illegally that don’t get detected

There are. None of the proposed plans limit them. (No county requires scanning and biometrically verifying passports. You could buy a wrapper on eBay and inkjet the pages in most counties.)

There are also lots of ways to blow up public buildings. We don’t require ID to enter DC because the frequency of the harm isn’t matched by the cost of enforcement.

[gopher_space]

We already handle all of that, comrade. Every corner case floating around your brain was floating around someone else's brain a long time ago. Most of this is covered in high school in the US, and it's all enforced by volunteers from across the political spectrum.

Our documented examples of voter fraud come from a time when in-person voting was the only option, again something we teach in school, while the modern concerns from security professionals focus almost entirely on electronic voting machines.

[lazide]

You have sign the ballot, and it gets checked.

[Jiro]

Illegal voting is "rare" because the system is set up so that it is in most cases impossible to detect.

[estearum]

Can you describe the specific chain of events required to create a fraudulent vote that is "impossible" to detect?

Surely if you can confidently state the system not only is this way, but is purposely designed this way, you should have zero problem describing it exactly step by step.

Extra credit if you can describe a method that can produce 10, 100, or 1000 votes.

[pandaman]

Feds made a nice write up for you, if you are actually curious: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-woman-federally-ch...

[estearum]

Okay so in this scenario, if this woman wanted to actually vote on behalf of these people, all she had to do was pay a bunch of people to register with her address, get 10, 30, 100, or 1000 ballots mailed to her address, then fill out all of those ballots and mail them in and hope no one noticed dozens or hundreds or thousands of ballots coming from an address that would clearly and directly implicate the person who lives at/otherwise controls that address?

And the trade off here is this person gets 10, 30, 100, or 1000 votes in a single county and at the minuscule risk of the rest of her life in prison?

(To be clear, this isn’t what DOJ is alleging, they alleged she was just collecting petition signatures, but I’m extrapolating out your proposed mechanism for actual voting)

[pandaman]

>hope no one noticed dozens or hundreds or thousands of ballots coming from an address

So what? If it was illegal to register multiple voters at the same address then it could have been detected at the registration time.

>And the trade off here is this person gets 10, 30, 100, or 1000 votes in a single county and at the minuscule risk of the rest of her life in prison?

Did not you notice that this person has not been charged with voting with other people ballots (even though she was able and most likely did that) and only with paying to register? Such a charge would be very hard to stick.

[estearum]

> Did not you notice that this person has not been charged with voting with other people ballots (even though she was able and most likely did that) and only with paying to register? Such a charge would be very hard to stick.

Huh? There is literally no evidence or even allegation of that. The person was paid to collect petition signatures, so she fraudulently obtained petition signatures. Which obviously are way less closely tracked than actual votes.

> So what? If it was illegal to register multiple voters at the same address then it could have been detected at the registration time.

Well it's not illegal to register multiple voters at the same address, obviously. It's illegal to vote under someone else's name. A bunch of votes coming in from a single residence would be flagged. Should voter registrations from a single address get flagged? Sure! And they probably do! But as you say, that's not a crime. Voting fraudulently is, which is not even alleged here.