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The people in power now are doing everything they can to make that as hard as possible by any means necessary. Good luck.

patrick451 3mo ago
No, they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting.
- JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
  > 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.)
  - Jiro 3mo ago
    Illegal voting is "rare" because the system is set up so that it is in most cases impossible to detect.
    - estearum 3mo ago
      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 3mo ago
        Feds made a nice write up for you, if you are actually curious: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-woman-federally-charged-paying-individuals-including-homeless-people-las-skid-row https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-woman-federally-ch...
        estearum 3mo ago
        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 3mo ago
        >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 3mo ago
        > 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.
  - prepend 3mo 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.
    - otterley 3mo ago
      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 3mo ago
      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 3mo ago
        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 3mo ago
        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…
        3mo ago
- JoshTriplett 3mo ago
  You should carefully examine the evidence you have supporting that belief. Start by observing that this is a partisan issue in which the official positions of the two major parties disagree on a factual claim, not merely the policy. A disagreement on policy can (sometimes) be chalked up to a difference in values, even though those do sometimes arise downstream of factual incorrectness. But a disagreement on facts is one with in which someone is right and someone is wrong. (Or, more complicatedly, someone is closer to accurate and someone is cherry-picking.) If what you believe to be true is in fact true, then you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. Either way, I hope that you desire to find the correct answer rather than the one that would be convenient for your political position, and that whatever hypothesis you have has not set itself up to be unfalsifiable.
  - SadErn 3mo ago
    > you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. The system is confidentially designed to provide little to no evidence of the fraud it allows. Even simple signature and ID checking is banned in California. The system itself is the evidence of the fraud. It is purposefully designed to hide evidence and prevent detection. You are obviously an intelligent person but you've allowed your curiosity to be subjugated by propaganda.
    - AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
      The fun part about this is that it depends on facts that nobody actually knows. If you don't check ID then anyone with a list of registered-but-unlikely voters (or who registers unlikely voters ahead of time without their knowledge) could be voting multiple times and there is nothing to detect it. If you check ID then that doesn't happen as easily, but you still have no way to know if it would have happened in the alternative. The closest thing to knowing would be if apparent turnout declines in response to checking ID, but a) different elections have different turnout anyway and b) even if you could detect a significant change, one party would then argue that it's a reduction in fraud and the other would argue that checking ID is reducing legitimate turnout, and you still don't know which one it is -- it could even be both.

patrick451 3mo ago

No, they are doing everything they can to ensure that only the people who are legally allowed to vote are the ones voting.

JumpCrisscross 3mo ago
> 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.)
- Jiro 3mo ago
  Illegal voting is "rare" because the system is set up so that it is in most cases impossible to detect.
  - estearum 3mo ago
    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 3mo ago
      Feds made a nice write up for you, if you are actually curious: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-woman-federally-charged-paying-individuals-including-homeless-people-las-skid-row https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/california-woman-federally-ch...
      - estearum 3mo ago
        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 3mo ago
        >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 3mo ago
        > 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.
- prepend 3mo 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.
  - otterley 3mo ago
    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 3mo ago
    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 3mo ago
      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 3mo ago
        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…
        3mo ago
JoshTriplett 3mo ago
You should carefully examine the evidence you have supporting that belief. Start by observing that this is a partisan issue in which the official positions of the two major parties disagree on a factual claim, not merely the policy. A disagreement on policy can (sometimes) be chalked up to a difference in values, even though those do sometimes arise downstream of factual incorrectness. But a disagreement on facts is one with in which someone is right and someone is wrong. (Or, more complicatedly, someone is closer to accurate and someone is cherry-picking.) If what you believe to be true is in fact true, then you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. Either way, I hope that you desire to find the correct answer rather than the one that would be convenient for your political position, and that whatever hypothesis you have has not set itself up to be unfalsifiable.
- SadErn 3mo ago
  > you should be able to comfortably go searching for evidence to falsify it and support the alternative, and fail to find such evidence, confident in your assumption that you won't find it. The system is confidentially designed to provide little to no evidence of the fraud it allows. Even simple signature and ID checking is banned in California. The system itself is the evidence of the fraud. It is purposefully designed to hide evidence and prevent detection. You are obviously an intelligent person but you've allowed your curiosity to be subjugated by propaganda.
  - AnthonyMouse 3mo ago
    The fun part about this is that it depends on facts that nobody actually knows. If you don't check ID then anyone with a list of registered-but-unlikely voters (or who registers unlikely voters ahead of time without their knowledge) could be voting multiple times and there is nothing to detect it. If you check ID then that doesn't happen as easily, but you still have no way to know if it would have happened in the alternative. The closest thing to knowing would be if apparent turnout declines in response to checking ID, but a) different elections have different turnout anyway and b) even if you could detect a significant change, one party would then argue that it's a reduction in fraud and the other would argue that checking ID is reducing legitimate turnout, and you still don't know which one it is -- it could even be both.