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PaperclipPerfector  12hr ago (text post)   1882 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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I don't feel like this is viable, you basically need to enlist an entire post office as your accomplice when you get them to put a false date in their post-marking machine and run a bunch of ballots through it for you, and post offices have security cameras.

California doesn't even require a post-mark, just a hand-written date on the ballot envelope.

Are you fucking kidding me

Everything I learn about the California elections process seems to be explicitly designed to allow as much fraudulent voting as possible

From Election Code section 3020

(2) If the ballot has no postmark, a postmark with no date, or an illegible postmark, and no other information is available from the United States Postal Service or the bona fide private mail delivery company to indicate the date on which the ballot was mailed, the vote by mail ballot identification envelope is date stamped by the elections official upon receipt of the vote by mail ballot from the United States Postal Service or a bona fide private mail delivery company, and is signed and dated pursuant to Section 3011 on or before election day.

So if you can get the ballot to the counters as-if it was delivered by the post office or "a bona fide private mail delivery company", you don't need a postmark.

So basically, I can carry one of these things into a polling place filled to the top with ballots any time within 7 days after the election and they'll be eligible to be counted.

Well, to the counting office, but yeah.

How hard would it really be to fake a postmark?

Well the basic problem I see is illustrated by the Mitchell and Webb moon landing conspiracy sketch:

"So, first off, we're going to need to build a massive rocket."
"Why would we need to do that? We're not actually going to the moon."
"Yes, but when they ask how we got them there, we're going to need to be able to say, we sent them there on that massive rocket you saw."

I would be extremely surprised if the USPS doesn't track the amount of volume through each post office. It would be insane if they didn't. So when somebody asks "where did all of these ballots come from," your conspiracy is going to need to be able to say "they were mailed from this post office, look at the postmarks," and this would become a pretty embarrassing thing to say if you can go to that post office and it turns out they didn't process nearly enough volume to account for all the ballots that supposedly passed through that post office. So that post office needs to actually process approximately enough mail-in ballots to actually account for everything that showed up at the counting location.

And that's just one logistical issue. The secret ballot doesn't mean there's no tracking of ballots sent out and returned at all. The record of who you voted for is unknown, but if you voted is public. So in order to generate a bunch of additional fake votes you have to figure out a bunch of registered nonvoters to pin it on or else you end up with a massive clump of votes received>voters who actually voted. But if you have a bunch of registered nonvoters to pin it on, then you have to coordinate them to cover up that they didn't actually vote when people check, in which case is it not easier to just have them vote if they're in on the conspiracy? So ok maybe you make up a bunch of fake people who can't expose they didn't really vote because they aren't real, but then the double check finds they aren't real so nothing has been fixed!

The easiest weak point I can think of would be in the counting process, just saying "yep this one for A is actually for B" but then you have to find a way to hide it from the other monitors and dispose of the real ballots without anyone noticing, because of course if you just mark it down wrong the double checks can find that too you have to replace real ballots with fake ones.

Election fraud can work out in countries that are already lying about all their other logistics and where no one really bothers to meaningfully contest the results anyway (since they all know it's rigged), but it's going to be way harder when numbers don't start to match and people are willing to challenge it in the US.

you have to figure out a bunch of registered nonvoters to pin it on

Homeless people. You register them to vote at the homeless shelter, getting them to sign the registration form with an X, then the party loyalists staffing the homeless shelter just fill out the ballots when they arrive at the shelter. The homeless shelter is rewarded with government funding when their party has power. There is essentially zero possibility that there is anybody working at any homeless shelter who is not a dyed-in-the-wool Democrat party loyalist, there's essentially zero chance of this operation getting ratted out. It actually feels extremely reasonable to me that this would be the explicit mechanism by which the Democrats keep their electoral majority secure in California. This also explains a great deal about how California can continue to spend billions of dollars on homelessness without actually achieving any sort of meaningful reduction in homelessness.

And yet it fails the very next part

then you have to coordinate them to cover up that they didn't actually vote when people check,

A whole bunch of people saying they were signed up at the homeless shelters and that they didn't vote yet somehow votes were submitted in their name would be noticeable. And if these homeless people were willing to lie and say they actually did vote, then it would be easy to just get them to vote to begin with.

This also explains a great deal about how California can continue to spend billions of dollars on homelessness without actually achieving any sort of meaningful reduction in homelessness.

There's already an easy and known explanation for it, spending doesn't matter. Housing supply and demand matters and California is extremely NIMBY. It's why West Virginia has some of the worst drug rates but low homelessness. Homes are cheaper (because they have a much larger supply:demand ratio) so even most of the addicts can afford a place.

high-res photo of a bunch of stamps on mail

3d-model the stamp's shape

3d-print the stamp in a rubbery material with a resin printer, so no layer lines.

gently weather/age the stamp.

...would be one obvious and probably undetectable method. You could use this to match an existing stamp's "unique" flaws/weathering, or use it to create a plausible stamp that doesn't match known stamps, whichever is more useful.

I go into more detail in another comment but this falls apart if it turns out the post office that you are pretending to have mailed this from turns out not to have handled nearly enough mail that day to account for all the ballots that were supposedly mailed through it.

Absolutely trivial, it's just an ink stamp.

Absolutely trivial, it's just an ink stamp.

I imagine it would not be too hard to find a cooperative postal worker who likes the idea of fighting Nazis.

How do you do this with a single postal worker without them getting caught by their fellow employees or the security cameras in their post office? This is why I say you would need to enlist an entire post office in this scheme.

How do you do this with a single postal worker without them getting caught by their fellow employees or the security cameras in their post office? This is why I say you would need to enlist an entire post office in this scheme.

Yes, I tend to agree with this. But how many people need to be involved? I've seen small post offices with only 2 people on duty.

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