> 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.)

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prepend 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.

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otterley 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

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.)

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estearum an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

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 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		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.

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Jiro 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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

	▲	estearum an hour ago \| parent [-]
		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.