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There is no election fraud in Ba Sing Se.
Many words on The Motte have been spilled about the lack of any real election fraud in the US and about the security of modern elections. The arguments against election fraud can be summarized as there being no election fraud as all audits in the election process have found no notable fraud. On the other hand, the actions of election committees, the opaque processes, strange and unexpected results, last minute rulings, and statistical anomalies has convinced many people that election fraud is much more widespread and commonplace than we are led to believe.
Recent news in Pennsylvania has shown that an election committee has caught approximately 2500 instances of fraudulent voter registration., with another 1500 fraudulent registrations in another county.
The problem about fraud investigations is that they largely focused on where the ballots end up and not on their creation and submission. Like laundering money, mixing real with illegal votes becomes impossible to distinguish when you might only need 5000-10000 fake ballots of 200000 people to flip a county. The more legitimate and illegitimate votes combine, the harder it is to prove that there were fake registrations to begin with.
Even if it is from a lazy ballot collector half-assing their work to get paid, extrapolating from this limited data set is concerning. These are just one or two counties of a 67-county state, and it is incredibly difficult to prove fraudulent registrations once these ballots pass through. Lancaster County and York are historically red counties who are probably more vigilant than, say, Philadelphia in regard to election integrity. Also, these registration submissions were quite obvious, a mass drop off of 2500 right before the deadline. What's the likelihood there were other registration submissions that weren't caught during the submission time period?
There are some real questions that need to be raised about securing failure points regarding election integrity, and there's finally some concrete evidence indicating that there are attempts to manipulate the vote through fake voter registrations. I doubt any of this would have been caught if it wasn't for Trump's fight regarding election integrity in 2020.
Wowza. Faked registration forms had correct names,addresses, DOBs, SSNs, Driver's License numbers, and phone numbers, but told detectives they didn't send it and that wasn't their signature. Detectives aren't usually coming around and asking about registration forms.
Also, they notified two other counties, who then both found forms with similar issues? Did they maybe then notify the rest of the counties, one would hope? And did the two counties catch the fakes on their own, or only after being notified? I'm curious...
Either way, scary. Even scarier that I suggested this in a comment here earlier asking about how to create disruptions.
Scary indeed, but for the sake of completeness, let’s wargame the putative fraudster’s next steps.
Plan A: Pick up a bunch of mail-in ballots from the county clerk, fill them in with the details of the “voters” whom you have fraudulently registered, and mail them in/drop them off. This plan hinges on the ability to collect an arbitrary number of blank mail-in ballots: if ballots are (for example) only mailed to the address of registration, this plan is a no-go. Does anyone know if this is the case in PA?
Plan B: On Election Day (or during the ~2 weeks prior, if early voting is a thing), hit up a bunch of different polling stations and vote multiple times, posing as a different fraudulently-registered voter each time. Obviously this is much easier in the absence of mandatory voter ID. Also, if the voter you are impersonating actually registers and votes (perhaps on the same day, in places where that is allowed—again, PA?), you risk blowing the whole operation.
I don’t mean to suggest that the potential failure modes of such a scheme mean that potential voter fraud is no big deal—it absolutely is. But simply fraudulently registering voters is only one piece of the overall theft of an election. Vigilance at other stages of the process can, in theory, head off obvious cases of fraud.
Then again, the fact that these false registrations were so sophisticated and were only caught so late in the game should perhaps be Bayesian evidence of just how much “vigilance” actually exists in practice.
In Washington state at least you can print the ballot from your home computer if you claim that the one mailed to you was lost or ruined. You can even have it printed with selections you make online: https://wa.omniballot.us/sites/53033/site/app/ob/ballot/mark
I can't find any evidence that this is the case in Pennsylvania.
But also what are the security measures? I doubt there's anything like a cryptographic signature or even a hologram, or even a ballot ID that you can't easily guess or look up. Likely you'd just need the right paper stock and a decent printer and you could create passable mail in ballots. You already have all of the identifying information you need. The only hitch is maybe the people at the addresses you used would send the ballots back and the elections office would catch on, but maybe most people just aren't so concientious that they'll return to sender rather than throw it away.
Printer manufacturers make it so that printers fingerprint themselves on anything that's printed (as requested by the feds), with a pattern of dots imperceptible to the human eye acting as the identifier. So you could see if there's a third party printer printing hundreds of ballots, and then track it to the purchaser.
You can acquire printers that don't do this, but if you found a bunch of ballots lacking the identifier, I'd consider it a strong sign of fraud.
I thought that the identifiers are only on color printers (and maybe only inkjets?). So black & white lasers are generally safe.
You can also similarly encode the printer's identity (and all the metadata associated with the print job--time, originating user, document name, local network information) into the depth of grays on the printout, edge noise, kerning, and probably a thousand other things. No confirmation by manufacturers or the government that that's done, but the yellow dot trick has been around for decades, and I would be very surprised if there haven't been significant advances implemented since then.
I wouldn't trust any printer made in the last two decades for printing anything you don't want traced back to you.
Interesting... I have to go return some videotapes.
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