> How would you even know?

The people who have claimed for decades that there is rampant cheating have spent years and millions of dollars and have found so little that it actually proves the case against their claims. Further, it has been shown that what sounds like reasonable checking ends up preventing 100-200 legitimate votes for every one illegal vote prevented.

HN guidelines say not to get political, but it is hard to avoid in this case because it is one party which is claiming widespread voter fraud. Let's start with a simple case. Tell me which of these facts is not true:

    * Donald Trump has claimed and continued to claim millions of illegal votes have been made against him, including millions by illegal aliens. The same claim, perhaps not using such large numbers, has been widely and frequently repeated by conservative media

    * Donald Trump became president in 2017 and had the might and resources of the full federal government to root out voter fraud

    * Donald Trump aggressively prosecutes his self-interests, and millions of illegal votes against him would be against his self-interest

    * As president, it is not just in his personal interest but is part of his duty to ensure voting is fair

    * Trump appointed Kris Kobach (more on him later), the AG of Kansas, to form a commission to get to the bottom of the rampant voter fraud

    * Nothing of note was produced by the commission ... it just kind of petered out

    (1) Trump was negligent in his duties by not investigating the issue

    (2) Trump or his subordinates were incompetent in their investigation of the issue

    (3) Voter fraud is not common. I'll leave it to speculation whether this was an honest mistake on the part of conservatives or if they were lying for political gain

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris_Kobach#Voter_fraud_claims

Quoting a bit of it:

> At that time, he "said he had identified more than 100 possible cases of double voting." Testifying during hearings on the bill, questioned by Rep. John Carmichael, Kobach was unable to cite a single other state that gives its secretary of state such authority.[153] By February 7, 2017, Kobach had filed nine cases and obtained six convictions. All were regarding cases of double voting; none would have been prevented by voter ID laws.[154][104][155] One case was dropped while two more remained pending. All six convictions involved older citizens, including four white Republican men and one woman, who were unaware that they had done anything wrong.

The rest of it is similar, and all confirmed only that voter fraud is rare. But worse than that is his tactics, which have been adopted by many states, disenfranchises 100x more legal voters than illegal voters it catches. And statistically, it disenfranchises Democrats in far greater proportion than Republican voters (35% vs 23% of the affected voters).

Here is another useful quote, along with a citation, on this topic from that same wikipedia entry:

> A Brennan Center for Justice report calculated that rates of actual voter fraud are between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent. The Center calculated that someone is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud.[156]

I’m not saying we have widespread voter fraud. My gut feeling is that we don’t. But I’m a very trusting person. I always believe people when they ask for money on the street because their car broke down. I don’t know how you can confidently say there isn’t meaningful voter fraud.

How would you even verify past elections? You can point to millions spent on commissions and lawyers, but those can’t go back and generate data that was never contemporaneously collected.

Think of it in terms of computer security. You had a telnet server exposed to the internet for years. You have no logs, and the machine got scrapped before you ever got access to it. How would you do a security audit to determine if anyone broke into the server? You could spend millions on a commission and have the commission declare there was no security breach, but that would be for show, right?

You say people don’t look too hard for tax evasion, but people don’t look very hard for voter fraud as the voting is happening. And by its nature it’s something that you can’t reliably look for after the election has happened.