Comment by prepend
1 day ago
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.
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.)
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.
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.
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…
1 reply →
> 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.
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.
You have sign the ballot, and it gets checked.