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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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