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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.
Leftists have never bothered gathering evidence for anything, they just shout people down. Much more effective and conveniently doesn't rely on reality!
But yeah Hanania's right about precisely one thing, and it's that the right is too lazy.
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