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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34515 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 6, 2023

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I have no particular claims regarding the 2020 election, but the 1997 Miami mayor race in which Xavier Suarez was removed from office for ballot fraud is probably the most obvious recent memory example of what some are claiming happened. Per the wiki article:

While Suarez was not personally implicated, the prosecuting circuit court judge cited the district as ''the center of a massive, well-conceived and well-orchestrated absentee ballot voter fraud scheme.'' People working for Suarez's campaign were found forging voter signatures, including at least one of a dead citizen.

The 1997 race was particularly recent during the 2000 election controversy in Florida. I have no information regarding more recent elections, but while I'd like to think it can't happen these days it doesn't seem completely impossible.

A bit further back than 1997, but still after the purported demise of the machine politics era, the grand jury report for the 1982 Chicago election is informative on the different fraud strategies used to generate over 100,000 fraudulent votes in the midterms that year. The specific strategies included

  1. Absent voter canvassing - paid canvassers who were supposed to correct voter rolls instead used canvassing to identify voters who had died, moved, or had no intention of voting as targets for fraudulent votes.

  2. Fraudulent use of absentee registration - precinct captains and canvassers would convince residents to sign up for absentee ballots, then fill out the ballots themselves voting party line

  3. Paying drunks, homeless and aliens to vote

  4. Manually altering the vote counts

  5. Harvesting ballots from nursing homes

Of those methods, manually altering the vote counts is more difficult now. The other methods are no more difficult or much, much easier to pull off. In the 41 years since then, we have expanded the mail-in vote to be broad enough to cover everyone. Ballot harvesting is now explicitly legal in quite a few jurisdictions with minimum verifications in place to ensure that the ballots are actually cast by the person on the registration card. In jurisdictions where it is illegal, there is an awful lot of wink and nod non-enforcement.

Much of the opportunity for fraud is now outsourced to GOTV organizations tied to both the local and national parties. They conduct the registration drives, canvassing, and harvesting with a degree of separation from the party proper so that when an employee is caught being "inadequately supervised" it doesn't implicate the party.

While I assume that both parties engage in fraud to the extent they can get away with it, I would expect that Democrats benefit from it more simply due to the parties' positions on whether greater voter fraud protections are needed. I think it's unlikely but not impossible that the 2020 presidential election was within the margin of fraud.

Number one doesn't work anymore (at least in Pennsylvania) since maintaining voter rolls isn't the responsibility of the parties. In PA when someone dies the department of vital records notifies the county election board within 60 days so they can be removed from the rolls. Obviously people who recently died or died out of state can still slip through, but we aren't talking huge numbers of people. As for the fraudulent absentee registrations, I think that widespread mail-in voting actually makes it less likely for this kind of fraud to happen. Absentee balloting used to be rare enough that unscrupulous people could take advantage of the lack of familiarity with the system. If someone from your own party came to your door and told you about an easier way to vote that you weren't familiar with, it might seem okay that, yeah, just give the ballot to him, he'll mark all the Democrats for me. In the run up to the 2020 election there was a media blitz about how to properly fill out mail ballots. There were news stories on regularly, and I got tons of emails from both the party and the election commission with instructions on how to request and fill mine out, just in case I decided to vote by mail.

Much of the opportunity for fraud is now outsourced to GOTV organizations tied to both the local and national parties. They conduct the registration drives, canvassing, and harvesting with a degree of separation from the party proper so that when an employee is caught being "inadequately supervised" it doesn't implicate the party.

Registration fraud I'm not worried about because registration forms require enough verifiable information that it would be impossible to register enough fake applicants at scale to make it worthwhile. At the very least, you need to be able to match a name with a state ID# or Social and the kind of person willing to give that information to a stranger apropo of nothing probably isn't the kind of person you can rely on to provide accurate information.

That Jury Report lists the use of a computer to check whether deceased people voted or whether people voted twice as a novel investigative technique used by the FBI. They say the FBI targeted precincts where lots of people voted twice or where dead people voted and then checked the handwriting of precinct officials against the handwriting on ballots cast twice. Once that started they were able to get lots of people to flip and testify.

That's one way technology makes this all harder. Fraudulent absentee scheme and ballot harvesting are going to have some error rate where double ballots get cast and if a whole bunch of them are cast in one precinct then that suggests that a lot is going on. Just scrolling through Heritage.org's list of voter fraud convictions there's tons of people who got caught voting in two states or for their dead relatives. It's just a much harder crime to pull off in an era of digital voter rolls and databases of obituaries.

While I assume that both parties engage in fraud to the extent they can get away with it, I would expect that Democrats benefit from it more simply due to the parties' positions on whether greater voter fraud protections are needed. I think it's unlikely but not impossible that the 2020 presidential election was within the margin of fraud.

Before the 2020 election, the Republicans' campaign for tougher rules against voter fraud focussed on the rarest type of voter fraud - retail in-person voter fraud such as non-citizen immigrants registering and voting - and conspicuously ignored postal vote fraud. This doesn't necessarily mean that the Republicans expected to benefit from postal vote fraud - it is more likely that they were worried about military being tossed on technicalities as a result of harsh laws against postal vote fraud, in the same way that the Democrats are worried about Republican voter-ID laws which de facto require a driving license to vote disenfranchising poor urbanites.

If the Republicans thought that the Democrats routinely committed postal vote fraud of the type they are now complaining about, the True the Vote crowd would have spent more time talking about it.

I tried to find numbers for the magnitude of that shitshow, but this was the best I got.

Mr. Suarez won the runoff on Nov. 13, with 23,598 votes to Mr. Carollo's 20,739.

Now the invalidation was technically for the initial election, not the runoff, but I think it's safe to expect similar turnout. That suggests in an election with circa 50,000 votes, the state was not only able to find various examples, but publicize and prosecute them. But in 2020, despite having 3,000x the number of ballots, such cases were vanishingly rare.

It's not at all impossible. Just improbable.

Yes, plus you'd expect the personnel involved and the potential for whistleblowers to increase dramatically. You'd also need to avoid producing statistical irregularities by overstuffing in certain places so you'd have to coordinate between different groups. The complexity is just much higher.

How many sting operations were conducted by the FBI? How many undercover agents acted as fake poll workers in Atlanta and Miami?

No idea. It sounds like the commission relied on overwhelming witness testimony.

Why do you ask?

If you are not actively searching from within the process, almost all fraud will be invisible to you. There is a reason the only time the Chicago machine was ever caught was due to a disgruntled fraudster outing them. Its because voting is inscrutable the way it is done in urban environments.

So why didn't that apply in the very urban, very visible Miami case?

It should be strictly harder to organize a national voter fraud campaign with no leaks even in the face of considerable public and private effort.

Not national, just a lot of local things like this: friendly outreach organizations signing homeless up for the rolls using the charity's own address. Is there a plausible good faith explanation for this? Sure! Is it a gaping opportunity for vote fraud? Also yes!

Why would it be national? It would just happen every year. The people who end up getting caught typically get snitched on.

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