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And yet it fails the very next part
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.
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.
Dunno about a whole bunch, but I recently saw a reporter interviewing homeless people in LA saying that they were paid to fill out ballots for/against some ballot initiative -- so what if it's both happening and noticeable, but nobody does anything about it because the people doing the fraud keep getting elected?
If there is any teeth to it, why is it kept only at "interviewing" random people? Put together a list of names who are willing to officially testify. File lawsuits. Have professional journalists (the top news media corporation in the US is conservative aligned! They have talent who could do a proper investigation). It seems remarkable that apparently the amount people want to go in evidence for it is random ground interviews, something easily and commonly staged, and then everyone is apparently happy to stop there and be satisfied. If they're real, it should be easy to do more than some guy making a YouTube or Tiktok video or something!
And if there is something going on, it should be able to be traced to top level officials (if the accusations was that they were involved). When voter fraud schemes do occur, they're often from private individuals engaged in their own misbehavior. For example we actually know of a drugs for votes scheme in Puerto Rico and we have an idea who was involved. A violent gang had connections to the Republican candidate and independently engaged in a drugs for votes scheme to support her. She was not involved, they just did it because they stood to benefit from her winning.
It wasn't some youtuber, it was like a real old-fashioned TV news reporter -- I do think a lady got charged on that one, you could look it up? But I have no reason to think it was staged.
So I did look it up, and yes a woman named Brenda Lee Brown Armstrong plead guilty to it. There doesn't seem to be any proof of connections to higher level officials, she seems to have done it of her own volition and got caught. https://www.facebook.com/SpectrumNews1SoCal/videos/a-marina-del-rey-woman-paid-homeless-individuals-on-las-skid-row-to-register-to-/1835258350765981/
This combined with the recent Puerto Rico case serve as good evidence of how hard getting away with such a widespread conspiracy would be, the homeless people will not actually engage in a cover up as alleged. If there was widespread election fraud going on, then "just go and ask people if they actually voted" seems to be an effective strategy. Even just a random person attempting it with a very small segment of homeless people got it leaked.
Even a far simpler case like someone who tried to fake signatures for a petition got easily caught https://abc7news.com/post/exclusive-team-confronts-couple-paying-san-francisco-homeless-fake-signatures-petitions/18868695/ it's really hard to get away with such fraud for an extended period.
How do you feel about the toupee fallacy? It seems like the sort of thing that you might agree with in... other contexts?
The toupee fallacy is possible, like it is true about every alleged conspiracy and secret. A successfully pulled off fake moon landing would look like a real moon landing to my eyes.
But that's why just like the moon landing, we can look at other logistics and question how feasible the coverup would be. If the moon landing was fake, that's a lot of people who would need to be silent about it, many of them who have little incentive (or even an opposite incentive like rival countries) to keep it covered.
Likewise if there was a mass fake voter scheme, that requires a lot of people with little incentive to keep it covered up. In fact, many of them would have the opposite incentive and would like the attention and money they might get from exposing such schemes or even just because some of them are conservative (I find it unlikely every single homeless person is some hardcore lefty). So like with the fake moon landing, we need an explanation as to why the USSR doesn't call out the US/many of the homeless don't expose the fake voter scheme.
As we see just with this random woman and a very tiny amount of homeless people involved, they seem perfectly willing to talk. So we can't take "the homeless won't talk about it at all" as a baseline.
What if there were a number of smaller fake voter schemes? Some of them better organized/more skillfully implemented than others?
If it's just a bunch of random people doing it without greater coordination then yes it could be theoretically possible, but this would also not be what is alleged (a greater scheme coordinated by politicians). And we would expect to see something similar, many of these schemes should be caught instead of it just being rare one of occurances.
I would not be surprised whatsoever if in every state there's been cases of someone filling out their nursing home parents ballots or sending in for a recently deceased but not yet recorded and updated nephew or even yes, a random person who pays another one to vote and don't get caught. If we're saying it's never happened, that would be absurd.
But is it large or coordinated as alleged? Well that would show a lot of signs we aren't seeing.
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If she doesn't get caught, there's no evidence of it ever happening.
If she gets caught, that's evidence of it not happening on a wider scale, because more people would be caught.
Impeccable logic.
Yes, because it's an easy thing to catch if it's happening for a number of factors.
Someone who tried getting caught so easily is evidence of how easy it is to catch, even a very small scale attempt has the people she paid willing to rat her out.
How do you know they got caught easily, rather than it being a fluke due to abnormal incompetence? Do you find nothing odd about the smooth transition from lack of examples of it happening being proof that you're right to an example of it happening being proof that you're right?
By other logistical measures and analysis.
We could say the same thing about the moon landing or 9/11 attacks. The US has engaged in multiple coverups before, so it's not impossible that those are fake. But just like how the moon landing requires a ton of people with little incentive to lie (or even counter incentive like rival nations) to all coordinate together on the coverup, a widespread voter fraud scheme like what is alleged requires a lot of people to help the coverup without the incentives or motivation to do it.
If the moon landing was fake, we need to explain why the USSR didn't call it out. If 9/11 was fake, then we need to explain why all the middle eastern countries didn't try to expose it. If there's a large mass of fake votes being done among registered homeless, we need to explain why these homeless are willing to engage in the coverup and lie and say they actually voted. The theory might still be true, but it must also be even grander than what is currently alleged.
What evidence we do have, a random woman trying to do a small scale plot, suggests that they are not willing to lie and will expose voter fraud.
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How politically active do you really think the modal homeless person is? The point is to get your hands on a bunch of ballots for a bunch of people who were never actually planning on voting, and likely aren't even aware of what you are doing when you shove a voter registration in their face and tell them to draw an X on it.
According to your theory, they are politically active enough that they would help in an active cover up and pretend to have actually voted if questioned. And if they're that motivated to lie to people double checking, then it seems reasonable enough to assume they should be motivated to just vote to begin with.
"Yeah maaaan I got $10 to sign some form, leave me alone" is not exactly a Rube Goldberg coverup.
Yeah exactly, they're not motivated to vote on their own then they aren't motivated to help you coverup either. As this woman herself learned when the people she paid ratted her out.
Therefore any conspiracy alleged must be even larger than just "they paid a bunch of people to vote" or "they voted in your name when you didn't vote", it also has to explain why the homeless would be willing to cover it up too.
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They're vagrants. How would you find them in order to question them? You show up to the address on their ballot to ask about them and the person there will just shrug and tell you they have no idea.
Just to throw in here, some random lady actually tried a scheme like this! And what happened? The homeless were willing to expose her plot. https://www.facebook.com/SpectrumNews1SoCal/videos/a-marina-del-rey-woman-paid-homeless-individuals-on-las-skid-row-to-register-to-/1835258350765981/
Pretty good evidence that if the supposed coverup would require a ton of homeless people to be silent or lie, it won't work. Random person with a very small number of people couldn't manage it, the amounts needed for the larger scale fraud alleged would be far more difficult.
What evidence would you expect to see, if there were more people trying out this scheme, and getting away with it?
There would be more cases like that of homeless people alleging they got paid to vote when questioned/testifying that they did not vote despite records showing they did.
Unless there's a reason to believe most homeless people are aligned enough to lie to coverup the voter fraud scheme but not aligned enough to just vote, we should expect attempted cases of fraud to be ratted out by them. Which is exactly what we saw when some random lady tried it for very very small fraction of homeless people. The types of people who you have to pay (or vote for secretly without them knowing) are specifically selected as people who don't care to help you hide.
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You have their name and other registration information and know what city they're in, that's more than enough for someone who wants to check to track basically anyone down. That this theory is specifically selected for people who use shelters too makes it way easier to find them as well. If people don't want to do the work of double checking, then it suggests that no one actually believes this is a method used in election fraud and thus not worth their time to investigate.
Just ask them if they voted. Sure some will tell you to fuck off because they assume you're up to something else like trying to solicit them or whatever, but if it was a widespread issue then you should be able to find a pretty sizeable verifiable number of people who are marked as having voted who will attest that they didn't actually vote.
All of these weaknesses of fraud against easy checks like this only means anything if we can be confident that the checking process can and will be done properly without people being impeded. This is why I've said since at least the 2020 election that, as a Democrat, once Trump and his cronies started throwing out (IMHO highly frivolous and malicious) accusations of voter fraud (I think 2020 wasn't the first time they did this, but it wasn't as much of an issue for 2016 due to them actually winning) that I'd want Democrats to go along with and encourage the fraud investigations with so much enthusiasm that even the most die-hard of the MAGAs would be embarrassed and call for backing things up a bit. Without something approaching that level of rooting out fraud in situations that ended up in one's side's favor, lack of fraud can't really be credibly claimed.
As I went over here https://www.themotte.org/post/3822/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/457705?context=8#context you personally can do most of the checking yourself.
Find you the John Alexander Adams (or whatever votes you think are suspicious), track them down and ask them if he voted. Maybe you stumble across some 85 year old with poor memory who says "what's that son? I boated? I can't remember" or a guy who got in a car accident after and died or someone who assumes you're up to no good and tells you to fuck off, or idk even just a guy who lies but you can even help solve for this base rate by gathering a base rate from other states that you don't think voter fraud occurs in. If the average is .5% and California has 2%, that's pretty good evidence of something going on. Although of course we can also just use our brains and ask how the fuck did the fraudsters predict who would get in a car crash or develop dementia and not even bother with most of it. Then the only problem is dealing with specifically with the base rates of idiots who forget they did vote and liars.
Is it a bunch of work? Sure. But people have done tons of work for way less important stuff. If it was truly believed to be a major avenue of fraud, "it's hard" is not an explanation. The explanation is that no one thinks it worth the effort, most likely because they don't think they'd get a result reasonably exposing fraud.
That's neither here nor there to my point, though. My point is that, for our claim of lack of fraud to be credible, we ought to be so welcoming to checks like this that the people who want to do them actually find it easier to do the checks than not (since we'd be carrying the weight for them). For that, I'd say that any claims of difficulty or obstacles in checks ought to be welcomed and encouraged, rather than minimized or even dismissed, especially when our own biased judgment tells us that they're frivolous.
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As far as I can tell having read California's laws, they do virtually no verification on any of this.
Basically they trust whoever fills it out to pinky-swear they're eligible to vote, California might check in some way that the information connects to a person that plausibly exists, but they do not have to have any connection to the address to which they are registered.
Any random Joe can do this, voter registration info is open to the public. I can look up anyone in my state and see if they're registered and what elections they voted in. The same is true of every other state as far as I can tell.
And thus if I wanted to, I could cross reference it with my own investigation into the person. Find someone with the name and birthdate.
For example I'll just look up a random person in NC. I found John Alexander Adams of Asheboro NC https://vt.ncsbe.gov/RegLkup/VoterInfo
He is a Republican who registered last year, (it seems he moved counties and registered in the new one) and his first election was the 2016 Republican primary in Montgomery county. I could, if I wanted to, find him. Having his registered address makes it easier, but it's not necessary. It's possible he's moved again since registering after all anyway. I have his name. Tracking him down might be a hassle if he has since moved multiple times or became homeless or something since, but it's possible if I truly thought he was a fake vote.
There's even a person who shares his name who lives in Fayetteville, so maybe that makes the search a little harder "I'm looking for John Alexander Adams?" "oh I know him!" and then it's the wrong one might end up happening. But still, I could find him if I wanted to.
That I don't want to suggests I don't really believe the vote is fake.
Nice.
It is unfortunate the right lacks the left's organized supply of underemployed, politically-obsessed weirdos to do things like trawl through California's voter registration databases and hunt down every homeless person in the state to question them.
If the excuse is "we're too lazy" then yeah sure maybe I don't know. But if that's the case then the response is if you can't bother yourself with gathering real evidence then don't make allegations.
And it's not like my idea is particularly clever either. That very few people even seem to put energy into figuring out and discussing real actionable double checking measures they could take on their own right now isn't excused by "that's hard work" unless the very act of thinking is too difficult. I should see way more people come up with this idea, and similar ideas, if they truly believed that voter fraud was happening in such a manner and wanted to take it seriously.
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