| ▲ | jfengel 3 hours ago |
| The USA threads the needle by simply not having verifiable voting. And it turns out it works pretty well. Despite countless hours and lawsuits dedicated to finding people who voted more than once, only a handful of cases have actually turned up. It's not that there are no checks. You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. To vote more than once you'd have to pretend to be somebody else, in person, which means that if you're caught you will go to jail. We could certainly do better, but thus far all efforts to defeat this non-problem are clearly targeted at making it harder for people to vote rather than any kind of election integrity. |
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| ▲ | alistairSH 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| This. The process in my precinct is roughly... - Enter queue - A front of queue, show ID of some sort (various accepted) to volunteer - They scratch you from the list and hand you a paper scantron sheet - Go to private booth, fill out scantron - Go to exit, scan ballot (it scans and then drops into a locked box for manual tally later, if necessary) The "easy" ways to vote fraudulently are also easily caught... fake ID documents, voting twice, etc. For people who forget their ID or have address changes that haven't propagated through the voter roll, there is provisional voting - you do the same as above, but they keep the ballot in a separate pile and validate your eligibility to vote at a later time. IIRC, the voter gets a ticket # so they can check the voter portal later to see if the ballot was accepted. As noted, the number of fraudulent votes are astonishingly small, given the amount of money spent on proving otherwise. The current GOP has spent 100s of millions or billions on proving wide-spread fraud and so far, all they've managed to prove a few voters, most of whom were actually GOP-leaning, have committed fraud (and most of them were caught day-of already). |
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| ▲ | rayiner an hour ago | parent [-] | | > As noted, the number of fraudulent votes are astonishingly small, given the amount of money spent on proving otherwise How would you even know? The fact that prosecutions for fraudulent voting are rare tells you nothing. Prosecutions for tax evasion are also rare. Does that mean nobody evades taxes? If you have a system that’s insecure, how would you even know when it’s been compromised? | | |
| ▲ | jfengel 39 minutes ago | parent [-] | | There have been numerous efforts to scrutinize the voting. In 2020 there were 62 lawsuits; none of them succeeded. Tax evasion is rarely prosecuted because nobody is looking very hard. People looked very, very, very hard for fraud in 2020 and found zilch. |
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| ▲ | Joker_vD 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| > You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. So you go to other stations, duh. It's called "carousel voting" [0], if done on a large, organized scale. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carousel_voting |
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| ▲ | alistairSH 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Limit voters to one polling location. Problem solved. That's what we do in the US. You are assigned a polling location based on your home address. You can't vote anywhere else. If you try, they turn you away. You can do a provisional ballot (for people who recently moved, and poll data isn't updated, etc) and they validate your ID/address/etc later. | |
| ▲ | jfengel 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | And in Russia, it is. That's why they call it "карусель". In the United States, it hasn't been. The article you link to doesn't even mention the United States. To do it on a large scale requires cooperation from the people running the election, and the US isn't (yet) that corrupt. The US system isn't completely robust against it, and perhaps some day it will be a problem. But right now there is no evidence that it is a problem, and all of the attempts to "fix" it are clearly aimed at preventing some people from voting. | |
| ▲ | _whiteCaps_ 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Interesting. In Canada, for federal elections at least, you're assigned to a specific location and station. You can't vote anywhere else. There's a separate process for mail in ballots to confirm you didn't vote in advanced voting or on election day as well. | | |
| ▲ | jfengel 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | Same in the US. You can try voting again at other stations, especially since they don't require ID. You just need the name of somebody assigned to that station, who hasn't already voted. There is a signature check if there is a suspicion, but that's rarely done. But that's practically never done. The risks are too high, and to have a significant impact would require enough votes to make it certain you'd get caught. |
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| ▲ | cj 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | At least in NY, you would have to know the name of someone else assigned to the 2nd polling site, since your name is only on the list of 1 polling location? | | |
| ▲ | drstewart 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | This is of course a very high bar to clear, as data such as people's names is highly confidential and almost impossible to get unless you're any one of these 750+ data brokers: https://privacyrights.org/data-brokers | | |
| ▲ | alistairSH 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | You'd also need a fake ID. And be willing to risk a felony conviction to add a single vote. It just doesn't happen here, despite the GOP trying to prove otherwise for decades. | | |
| ▲ | MC995 an hour ago | parent | next [-] | | > You'd also need a fake ID For what? In my state there's no requirement to show ID. When I first moved here I attempted to show mine at the poll and the poll worker told me to quickly put that away and she didn't want to see it. I'm not even sure it's legal for them to ask for ID here, given her panicked reaction to me trying to show it. Since then I've voted in this state for around 10 years and it's always the same. I could say I'm whoever I want, and just be given a ballot. Edit: I don't live in NY either, as the other poster used as an example. ID should be an obvious and necessary requirement, but it isn't in many states. | | |
| ▲ | alistairSH an hour ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, it's inconsistent between states. I'm in VA and an ID is required. Despite being a bleeding heart liberal, I'm ok with that safe-guard (despite much of the left being against the notion). I'd also prefer an actual national ID (not the half-baked RealID programs, which some states still haven't adopted). |
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| ▲ | trelane an hour ago | parent | prev [-] | | I've only ever seen one time it was tried. The experiment was wildly successful: https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/01/voter-fraud-weve-got-... | | |
| ▲ | alistairSH an hour ago | parent [-] | | Looks like those were in states that don't require ANY ID to vote, which I find ridiculous, so I guess we agree. I live in VA, we require ID, so the problem shown in NY shouldn't be possible. And again, you still have to be willing to commit a felony to move the needly by ONE vote, which is not likely to be very common. The risk/reward simply isn't there. |
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| ▲ | orthoxerox 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It only works if the people working at the polling station are in on it, because you can't normally get an absentee ballot more than once. |
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| ▲ | buckle8017 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Have you considered that in a system where proving cheating is so difficult, even weak evidence is powerful? If cheating is difficult to prove then we would expect only minimal evidence even with material amounts of cheating. |
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| ▲ | moduspol 3 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Also, most crimes aren't uncovered by lawsuits. They're uncovered by law enforcement. The reason people resort to lawsuits is because law enforcement does not rigorously investigate or monitor. Voting laws vary by state / municipality, and they're mostly run by well-meaning volunteers acting in good faith. When we're not sure how well the TSA is doing, we try to send prohibited items through, and infamously get abysmal results [1]. IMO the reason we don't see more election fraud cases is because *we're not looking for it*, so we just see the obvious cases like when dead people vote or people brag about voting twice publicly. Until we actually do some "red teaming" of elections, we won't ever know. But the reality is, if we actually did, the results would reduce credibility of numerous prior elections. [1] https://abcnews.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-ope... | | |
| ▲ | trelane an hour ago | parent [-] | | Red teaming, yes. But also, what other signals of fraud are we able to detect? What measures of validity (or signals that sending was attempted) are there? How are they distinguishable from honest voter errors? | | |
| ▲ | moduspol an hour ago | parent [-] | | It's going to be difficult with our current policies because we've erred on the side of making it as easy as possible for everyone to vote. We don't have a complete whitelist of citizens, it's against the law to require proof of citizenship to register to vote (unless that changed recently) and address verification in most jurisdictions isn't done more than the first time unless it's challenged. To be clear, though, I don't think non-citizens are voting en-masse. My concern is that if you aren't even verifying they're citizens, you probably aren't really verifying that they are a real and unique person that isn't already registered. Honestly I think if we actually wanted secure elections, we'd start with the red teaming and go from there. The signal to noise ratio of fraud is too meaningless to resolve without tightening up rules, which the results of the red teaming would give you the political capital to do. |
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| ▲ | jfengel 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Sure. And the weak evidence still isn't powerful, because so much effort had to be expended to gain it. If cheating were widespread it would have been detected much more easily. Instead, efforts to clean up the voter rolls never cause people to get caught. But they do cause many legitimate voters to lose the ability to vote. | | | |
| ▲ | archagon 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Since we’re just considering things without providing any evidence, have you considered that we don’t have such a system? |
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