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My point 4 is that a prosecutor's job isn't just to point to some circumstantial evidence of why a suspect might have done it, they need to be able to describe a reasonable chain of events of how the suspect did it. I'm asking you, how does our hypothetical fraudster perform the fraud? Does he go in as himself and vote as himself, then come in later posing as someone else and vote again? Might someone recognize him? Sure, in any individual case the odds might be low, but if the scale of fraud is large a 1% chance each time is likely to happen.
I'd add "requires being able to make fake forms of ID in many states."
The "But once it's actually done" part is assuming the conclusion, in a "but how was the play Mrs. Lincoln?" kind of way. [Many states have rules about signing an affidavit], and they can compare signatures after the fact. And you keep not addressing the part where there aren't any complaints about people being told they've already voted. Sure, you can make a safe bet about who is likely to vote and who isn't, but safe bets still sometimes lose. Consider how dumb Americans can be, and consider that criminals are usually dumber. People manage to find a way to fuck up. And Republicans want to shine a spotlight on voter fraud so they'd tell everyone if they found it.
A hurdle doesn't have to be insurmountable to be a hurdle. Why do you think gyms do things like letting you sign up easily but have to jump through hoops to cancel? Why do you think companies do mail-in rebates instead of sales? Because that extra hassle sometimes works.
I don't study the governments of other countries, but from what I've heard they have different laws on how people get IDs. But I do study pay attention to American politics, and I have seen American Republicans repeatedly target things like early voting which is primarily used by Democrats. I'm not accusing them of this in a vacuum.
It depends, someone here linked one time to a story about wide-scale fraud done by a political machine it Chicago that went on for years, and only came out because someone got cut out of a deal, and snitched. What's more, on questions where one side is strongly politically invested in a particular answer, I don't think you can assume the normal truth-seeking process will work as usual. I've seen this in the transgender issue, where the pro-trans side was knowingly and deliberately hiding studies that showed the evidence for gender affirming care is poor. Normally this would be a scandal, but there's been no professional consequences as far as I can tell. The voter-ID question seems to draw the same kind of zeal, so I'd fully expect people in a position to say something to look the other way, because doing otherwise would be inconvenient for the narrative of their tribe.
What you're saying might work in states where institutions are politically mixed, and the sides keep each other in check, though.
Are there not states that don't require any ID? The Google summarizer thing seems to be under the impression that there are quite a few.
Yes, and there's nothing wrong with that in this case. If you want to tell me "there's in no evidence for X", "what kind of evidence would you see, assuming X happened" is a perfectly valid question to ask,
It looks like you forgot to include a link. How many states, and how often are these signatures compared? How reliable is the signature comparison method to begin with?
What do I have to address here? This seems to show that unless someone loses the bet, you will not be able to show there was fraud after the fact, just like I suspected. Further, if you're particularly good at making these bets, losing a few won't even matter, because a part of your argument is "the amount of fraud is miniscule, so there's no reason to enhance integrity".
A hurdle that you only have to overcome once, is not much of a hurdle. You can even sweeten the deal. We had people people here recount the absurdity of the American approach to ID, just include in the law that whatever ID document you're proposing shall be valid in all American institutions, public and private alike, and you will have actually reduced the total amount of hurdles people have to overcome.
Well, I'd like to hear some details on what you think is so different, because I've often heard American progressives just outright lie about the state of laws in other countries (for example there were similar arguments about abortion laws, where conservatives pointed out late term abortion is illegal in Europe, and progressives tried claiming the law is dead letter, which is complete nonsense). Also, if there is some version of ID-law that Democrats would support, it's rather suspicious that they never argue try offering a counter-proposal, and instead just go on and on about how voter ID is unnecessary, racist, voter suppression.
I don't know the details of that, but I'd separate "outsider" fraud - a random civilian fraudulently voting vs. insider fraud - people working within the political system to elect a candidate. The people who tend to believe in one tend to believe in the other, but if voter ID wouldn't stop insider fraud then I see no reason to link the two. I'm generally of the opinion that in any conspiracy, someone will eventually snitch if the rewards are tempting, and I believe the Republican party will ensure the rewards are tempting.
Sure, there are states where one party wins solidly politically, but even in those the opposing party isn't completely powerless. There are people from both parties administering the election.
Apologies, here is the link.
I elaborated it more, but I did from my first response to you state that "double voting" would be what I would expect to see.
Let's look at the data. Heritage Foundation's data goes back to 1982. Filtering for "Impersonation at the polls" gives 34 results. You can click the link and read a little blurb which I did for I think all of them, and by my count exactly half of them are for mail-in ballots. Which is honestly part of my argument against voter ID, because if I were going to commit voter fraud mail-in ballots seem way smarter. The absentee ballots were found by signature matching or voting for a dead person
In these two - 1 2 they were recognized by poll workers.
In these two 1 2 the fraud was detected in the very way I said, that someone was told they already voted.
Let's say that there is a 99% chance to successfully fraudulently vote and a 1% chance to get caught. If 10,000 fraudulent votes were cast we might expect 100 failures. Yet we've found and punished either 17 or 34 (Heritage lists 34, but 17 sounded to me like they might have been mistagged) in 40 years.
I don't really like to give answers on topics I haven't studied, and as mentioned I'm focused on what American Republicans have previously done.
They do? A common refrain is that Dems say they will agree if voter ID is free and can be gotten conveniently for people who have limited time/transportation.
The reason I and I think the DNC don't push for this is because again I don't think it's really happening, plus if you take the position that your opponents are literally only doing this because they have your worst interests at heart (talking specifically about the Republican legislators) then there's no point giving them an inch because they're just going to try and find a way to take more.
Do you believe that the person who killed Kirk and the people who attempted to kill Trump, were paid by the Democrats or any other anti-Trump organization? Or do you believe what the evidence points to, that these people were willing to throw their lives away simply because of their political beliefs?
If the latter, then is it not very likely that you can find plenty of people who would be willing to forego a potential payout, just to advance their political side? Especially since taking that payout could have severe repercussions with regards to their relationships to their partner, children and community. Or even their safety.
And the assumption that the Republicans would be willing to pay is questionable as well, because the very act of paying for the information might discredit the witness, so they might be unwilling to pay, since the witness might only be of real value if the testimony is not paid. Your own argument that being paid would tempt people to snitch is of course equally valid as a motive for lying to get paid.
You yourself have presented evidence that these things do in fact happen. Your claim that Democrat voters are fine with it, but Democrat politicians oppose it, is exactly what you would expect if those politicians knew or expected that fraud was happening to their benefit.
This is rather irrational a claim/worry, because Democrat politicians fight for votes, so if allowing voter ID is in fact not opposed by most democrats, then making the fight about that seems like a rather poor way to motivate the Democrats to go vote. Why not give in and if the Republicans then demand something unreasonable in response, use that as a much more effective way to convince people to go vote and perhaps also convince some undecideds?
Or is your claim that Democrats are in pure obstruction mode where they never give an inch, no matter how reasonable the proposal is? Because at that point, no facts would matter to them, on any topic.
Individual people are capable of lots of crazy things. But conspiracy is another matter. You have to find like-minded individuals without tipping your hand to snitches. You need to gather and coordinate and preferably not leave evidence like phone logs. I said before that a very rough guess suggests that if you try to commit mass voter fraud you'd want to go to different polling stations each time, which one person could cast maybe 40 votes on election day (I suppose more if you count early voting) in person. You'd need at minimum hundreds of people coordinating to sway a presidential election by in-person voter fraud.
That's why recordings exist. And investigations. I'd also add that fame can be a form of payment.
Heritage's data goes back to 1982. According to their data in-person voter fraud has been proven to happen 34 times. According to AI, only counting presidential elections, approximately 1.2 BILLION votes have been cast in that time. We are sitting here arguing federal laws to try and better catch a crime that has provably happened less than once a year in the entire country and accomplished less than stealing a penny. The seconds that it takes to validate each person's ID each time are worth more than the actual fraud it would stop, even ignoring voter disenfranchisement. Not to mention the salaries of the members of Congress arguing over this fucking nothingburger. In person voter fraud is as much a threat to election security as a single mosquito is a threat to Godzilla.
A, I think that in terms of "reasons why I'm voting for X party" voter ID is pretty damn low on the list. The Democrats would lose more votes from legal citizens with expired licenses than they would gain. B, My claim is that if the goal of the GOP in pushing voter ID is to cause Dems to lose votes, then giving in simply gives them more flexibility. For instance, an accusation that has been levied is that after getting voter ID passed in red states, the GOP closed DMVs in poor areas, thereby making wait times longer and transportation more difficult. While that accusation could be true or could be conspiratorial thinking, it is the sort of thing you could do to effectively make a deal only to sabotage it later. It's like agreeing to a deal to let your opponent gerrymander the state slightly in their favor. C, again I don't think voter ID is a reasonable proposal for the reasons I said above. D, why even lose face by effectively admitting your opponent had a point, especially when they don't?
The 'Watergate' conspirators had no trouble finding people who were willing to go much further than this. In that case, the seriousness of the crime provided motive for the conspirators to cut a deal, but there was no spontaneous snitching. In your examples, 3 of the 4 cases ended with just a probation sentence (the other one seems to have no data about the actual sentence), so is that bad enough for people to snitch? Doubtful.
At minimum you need one, depending on how close the election is, in a state. Also, coordinating many people is one of the main activities of political campaigns (canvassing).
People may also simply worry about spontaneous behavior and want to discourage it. The level of hatred of the other side among leftists is so high that there have been multiple attempts on Trump's life and the risks of committing voter fraud are way lower than that. It is also a fact that we have seen coordinated behavior by individuals to evade checks and balances, for example, transgender activists who coach people on what to say to manipulate doctors into prescribing drugs, rather than answer the questions honestly.
What happens if this kind of voter fraud becomes a sudden (minor) hype and a bunch of people start to coordinate on how to do it with minimal risk of detection?
I think that it is factually true that there is no structural deterrence that would protect elections against this. Detecting this fraud is now either based on mistakes that can be avoided, like not going to the same polling station, or depends on post-facto research that is most likely going to be too late to allow the election result to be changed.
Earlier you referred to investigators finding a few cases of people voting for dead people or with wrong signatures, but as far as I can tell, these kinds of investigations happen only rarely, for a small sample of ballots. So it is perfectly plausible that even a fairly large operation could completely evade detection or not be detected until the election result has been set into stone.
Campaigns also do a lot of tracking of people, for canvassing, targeted ads, or other purposes, so it is also perfectly plausible that one or more data analysts could prepare lists of death people to use for fraudulent voting, without being aware that this is the purpose of the data.
I would think that the people who want any-directional fame while destroying their own lives, would generally be crazy, and would not go for such boring things like election fraud, but would try to assassinate someone, like John Hinckley Jr.
Being (self-)selected for being a partisan in one direction, seems like it would make someone very unlikely to seek fame from the opposite political party.
But if this is never seriously investigated, then we can only say that this is the minimum amount. Also, we could see a big upsurge in attempts.
Requiring an ID would, aside from making it harder to commit this kind of fraud, also provide more opportunities to detect fraud.
Your description is a bit disingenuous, because there was only one state, Alabama, that closed DMVs. The governor claims that it was a financial decision and was able to list a bunch of alternatives, like renewing online (which surely was very convenient during Covid) or government workers coming to people's house. There is also an option for a free voter ID if people are poor or such.
This kind of stuff is also on par with people forgetting how to register for voting, not knowing how, etc; which is one of the reasons why canvassing happens anyway. So if Democrats are worried about black people being more disenfranchised, they have every opportunity to combat this by asking whether people have an ID during canvassing and helping them get one if they do not. If the Democrats are right about their allegations, then this would make a big difference, so they would do it. If they don't, this suggests rather strongly that their rhetoric is false and just intended as a marketing exercise.
I'm pretty sure that Republicans are much less prone to canvassing, and there are in fact quite a few poor white people living in Alabama, that presumably would also have a relatively large percentage of no-IDers and would live far from DMVs (especially since they tend to live rurally). But these people are consistently erased from the conversation. So on the one hand we have the speculative racism from one side, but we also have the definitive racism from the other side, which also taints all the evidence from that side, because they are not even looking at poor whites as a group, even though there are a lot of similarities with poor blacks. Hmmm.
Watergate involved about 15 people according to a quick wiki check?
Here are the narrowest statewide Presidential victories in the last ~approx 80 years. In the vast majority of them it was still tens of thousands of votes. The closest 2024 victory in a state that does not already require photo ID is either New Hampshire (which requires photo ID but student ID is allowed) by 22,965 or Nevada by 46,008 votes. Imagine how many people and hours it would take to fraudulently cast 46,000 votes in person.
And again, very importantly, the would-be fraudster(s) do not have precognition and does not know how many votes he needs to cast or where in our massive country he needs to cast them! Even professional pollsters are often wrong.
Let's imagine that it takes you 15 minutes to vote and drive to another polling station. In 12 hours you could cast 48 votes. Early voting varies wildly, but let's take a rough average of states and say you can vote in person 8 hours a day M-F 2 weeks early. That puts you at about 370 fraudulent votes, with a wildly optimistic 15 minutes per vote and taking 2 weeks off your job to run around casting fraudulent votes.
So to flip the 2024 popular vote in Nevada, the closest state that does not require voter ID, you'd need at least 125 people in your conspiracy. That's 125 people running around for 2 full weeks each pretending to be 370 different people.
We're talking about getting 125+ people into a conspiracy without one of them thinking cheating is morally wrong, or wanting to be famous for any reason. Or some third party seeing the 125 people talking and getting suspicious.
30 states use ERIC which both helps identify eligible voters who have not registered and identify people who have moved or died. Though there are allegations this system has false positives.
They don't regularly check, but they sometimes do. Here's a check of 5 states where after investigating, there were no more than 200 suspected cases per state. Bush had the DOJ investigate, and they turned up with a handful of felons who claim they thought they could vote. Kris Kobach ran on alleging 100 known cases of fraud, and by the end of it scored 4 convictions of people voting in 2 districts.
It suggests nothing rather strongly, as "Why are you making me fill out this form? It's a waste of time!" is a perfectly coherent and rational response to someone trying to make you fill out an extra form that provides no useful purpose. The way I see it, removing the need extra pointless busywork is better than trying to find a way to get the pointless busywork done. At best you've explained that they could do something else, but no reason why they should feel they should do so when they feel their current method works just fine. The Democratic position is that not being able to vote because you forgot to register is bad, and that voting should be as easy as possible while still being secure (and that it is currently sufficiently secure). Your fix isn't a good fix, since people don't canvas everywhere, as you yourself acknowledge.
As far as my claim about closing DMVs was concerned, I admitted I hadn't looked into it enough and I wasn't claiming it as true. I was using it as an example of how one could do something that looks innocuous but intentionally create a catch-22.
What? That's a rather interesting attempt at a reverse UNO. First of all, according to a 2014 study voter ID reduced white turnout by 1.5% and blacks by 3.7% in some states (pages 52-54 of the report). Second of all, your argument makes no sense. Democrats are taking the side of the issue that benefits those 1.5% of whites in terms of easy voting. Democrats are neither preventing Republicans from canvassing nor are they trying to make canvassers solve the problem they created.
You are ignoring Hawaii with a 115 vote difference in 1960. With your suggested productivity per fraudster, that would require 3 people (15 minutes per vote, 12 hours) for a single day of voting. 1 person with early voting, who can take it very easy. And it regularly happens that a margin of less than 10k decides the election. That would require 28 people when using your calculation, with early voting.
Note that you are ignoring senatorial and local elections, which add up to a lot more chances for a close contest.
And voting integrity laws are often at least as much about the perception of security, both on the part of potential fraudsters and the voting public, as they are about actually preventing fraud. And I do observe that the reputation of voting without ID has a reputation of making fraud easy.
In polling, 25% of some broad groups approve of using violence for political ends: https://yougov.com/en-us/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll
I'm sure that if you zoom in, you could find groups with way higher approval ratings than that (antifa, proud boys, etc).
Surely you would agree that fraud is generally considered less morally wrong than violence? And your entire premise is flawed anyway. To get people to commit fraud, you would logically convince them that their fraud is justified, or not even fraud. Like how doping athletes tend to justify it by: 'everyone does it, so I'm just leveling the playing field.' Every election there are a lot of people who believe in fraud anyway, on both sides.
And woke people already justify racial and gender discrimination by claiming that it is just a correction for discrimination happening the other way. Even to the point where they simply deny that discrimination is even possible in one direction, no matter how similar it is to what they would call discrimination with the genders/races swapped. So if they just apply the same logic to voting fraud...
According to your link, the software is (also) used to identify people "who were eligible to cast ballots but were not registered to vote." But this is publicly available information and registering presumably doesn't require an ID check either in any states without Voter ID. So all it takes to create a list of exploitable people is to get a list of residents of a state (easy to get from data brokers) and then check whether they are registered. Then the fraudster can recheck the list in the voter registry just before the deadline, and then quickly register these people to vote, and vote in their name.
Normally, only 10-20% of the people who get mailings from ERIC actually go register to vote, but what percentage would register just before the deadline or vote despite thinking that they are not registered? Surely that would cut the risk down of the person then actually voting as well to a fraction of a percent. Then to detect this fraud (in total), a lot of other things would have to work out. It would have to be detected as fraud, the fraudster would have to be caught, and then this person would also have to admit to the entire scheme. If there is a conspiracy, the schemers would of course come up with a cover story and instructions to only talk with a lawyer present that preferably is part of the conspiracy.
Except that there is an obvious purpose, to increase trust in the system.
Yet on the other hand, you just acknowledged that ERIC is used to contact voters on what they need to do to vote. So that serves a very similar purpose to canvassing, and is not limited to rural areas. So why is the question not whether voters all get the needed information to make sure that they can get an ID in any (valid) circumstance?
Presumably this was a study that looked at the effect directly after implementing such a law? Did Democratic canvassers include information about IDs in their canvassing efforts?
I'm not ignoring it, I'm treating it as a freak occurrence. It's the closest state in the closest election in the last 80 years. That's the platonic ideal of cherry picking. I copied the chart into Excel and took the average, and the average is 56,514 (median is 28,713) of a data set already filtering for the closest elections.
I notice that you neglect responding to the part where the fraudsters don't have to cast only 115 votes. They have no idea at the time they're doing it how many they need.
I focused on the Presidential election because:
A) it's where we have the most data
B) it's what most of the people talk about, like Trump is still out here claiming he won in 2020.
C) It makes the topic even more unwieldy to discuss.
I've seen that poll before and I think the question is shit. I would say yes to "political violence can sometimes be justified?" because I'd consider a hypothetical random civilian who tried to assassinate literal, actual Hitler a hero. The question didn't ask what my limit would be.
Two problems with this. First of all, doping is a crime you perform in private. Pretending to be someone else you do in public.
Second of all, the limiting factor of conspiracy is not finding like-minded individuals. It's finding like-minded individuals without failing to recruit someone and that someone tipping off authorities.
Who is our modal fraudster anyway? To figure out who is eligible to vote you need their name and some other detail, usually birthday or partial SSN. You're talking about getting data from data brokers, but they're using it to just wander around a city casting votes in person? It's like assembling Ocean's Eleven to rob a liquor store. If you are smart enough to try to farm citizens to impersonate, I'd think you'd be smart enough to come up with a better plan than this. I think every person we have prosecuted for voter fraud at the polls was just trying to impersonate a single relative.
The lack of trust in the system is not the problem of the system. It's a problem of people distrusting the system. To put it bluntly, to the Democratic party places a very low importance on this benefit, and doubts they can earn it even by following instructions. Georgia was a big part of Trump's 2020 claims of election fraud, and Georgia already requires photo ID.
If anything, it increases distrust in the system because it just opens the doors to further claims of fraud seeming plausible. Trump has just tried to restrict mail-in voting, which I predicted Republicans would do.
I wouldn't be opposed to voters being given more info, but it doesn't remove my complaint that voter ID is a waste of time. But not all states use ERIC, and Republicans are the ones who seem to want to leave the program.
Yes, this was a government analysis done in 2014 covering the change in turnout in states before and after voter ID. It's mentioned right in that general section.
From the page right after it, it was too soon to examine the effects. But I still object to putting everything on canvassers to fix the problem. Part of voter ID isn't just "whether voters need to provide some proof vs none at all." It's that Republicans change the laws to arbitrarily reject perfectly valid ways to identify people.
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