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The best evidence that we have election fraud is that no one is using any of the many tools developed to detect and prevent financial fraud. We don't white hat test fraud prevention like we do in auditing, we don't audit votes verifying that people who are reported as voting filled out their ballots in compliance with the law. We don't do any of that, even though these tools widely known and used.
The prior should be that significant fraud exists until proven otherwise, by showing that the system catches frequent, thorough tests.
Assuming arguendo that voting fraud is possible because there aren't enough safeguards, I don't see how that gets us to 1) fraud did not cancel itself out and instead favored a particular candidate then to 2) the one-sided fraud was significant enough to affect results 3) the fraud remained undetected despite significant efforts to uncover it.
If someone just wants to argue that fraud is possible, I'll take whatever I can get, but I'm looking for the strongest possible claims.
I’m not knowledgeable enough about potential electoral fraud to get into much of a debate, but it does seem to me that any fraud should tend to favor Democrats over Republicans simply because it’s easier for Democrats to cheat.
As @SwordOfOccam pointed out, “the best check on election fraud at any scale is that people of various ideologies and parties make up the officials and volunteers in any given area, and all it takes is one witness to expose something.” The trouble is, that’s just not the case in all urban districts. In 2012, for example, 59 voting precincts in Philadelphia alone voted 100% for Obama. The linked article notes that precincts in Chicago and Atlanta did the same in 2008. It would be much easier to run up the tally in those areas, either via fraudulent votes or fraudulent tallies, than it would be in even the reddist of Republican precincts, since Republicans don’t cluster up in the same way that urban Democrats do, and there are always at least a few Democrats in the strongest Republican strongholds.
Even if we assume total corruption in a given county, there’s a limit to how far the plotters could run up the numbers without it being blatantly obvious.
And it has to be done in a swing state to really matter.
In an election with high scrutiny, it’s pretty challenging to cheat enough to make a difference, but not so much to get caught.
And if the plot extends to multiple counties and states, the coordination would be incredibly difficult to conceal.
Look at Watergate, a far simpler plot than changing election tallies, and how it went off the rails.
My point was mostly that @ymeskhout’s first point was not necessarily correct—that I would expect the background level of fraud to favor Democrats in any given election due to ease of opportunity.
As for a grand, national conspiracy to change election results, while I do think that is a threat due to most states’ remarkably poor election security practices, I don’t think it’s the only, or even primary, threat model to be worried about. Instead, I would think a distributed conspiracy would be far more likely, with low-level participants each working independently and without any direction from on high, but all from the same motive.
Take sex abuse conspiracies by way of analogy. The Catholic sex abuse scandal was a grand international conspiracy, with almost all members of the hierarchy implicated in some way or another in moving priests around and preventing them from being prosecuted. The conspiracy naturally eventually leaked, and it caused a huge scandal. By contrast, every time some Baptist minister abused a girl in his church in the past 50 years, the elders just quietly removed him, sent him away to counseling, and didn’t say anything when they learned he was serving another church a year later. You had pretty much the same actions in both cases, but for the Catholics, the conspiracy was (naturally) a top-down one, while for the Baptists, it was (naturally) bottom-up, without any coordination from congregation to congregation. A bottom-up conspiracy of people individually choosing to fill out absentee ballots for their mentally incompetent relatives, poll workers in safe areas slightly inflating their numbers, and the like, would be very difficult to prove, since there would be essentially no coordination among participants or even knowledge that anyone else is doing anything similar. Just about the only thing they’d have in common would be opposition to rules that make voting more secure, which is a position that’s remarkably more common in one party than the other.
All of that bottom-up effort facilitated by media, politicians and intelligence agencies that keeps pushing lies over lies. How much harder is it to convince the average poll-worker to look the other way when somebody dumps a bunch of ballots against a candidate without a multi-year campaign to persuade them that he's a fascist who works for the Russians?
How would the poll worker know what is happening? Are they warned beforehand they will be part of a crime? Who is telling them? How many instances of this are there?
How are the observers avoided?
How are the ballots filled out so as not to arouse suspicion and match real names?
(You’re not putting forth a realistic scenario that could possibly scale without something being detected.)
My understanding is that there are entire organizations dedicated to gather votes, some of these people essentially go door-to-door to target people that would otherwise not vote, perhaps because they don't speak enough English, are too old or too cognitively-impaired to direct themselves to a polling place. Then they perform the same kind of art on these people as the door-to-door salesmen or phone scammers (2.4 millions fraud last year, a $8B business), and they make these people input their customer's information on the ballot, which they collect and then go on to drop at a ballot drop box.
Is this illegal? It may be in some places. But it should look pretty suspicious to have one person deliver hundreds or thousands of votes at once in a ballot drop-off box.
Observers are avoided through various tricks depending on the area, sometimes more obvious than others.
There is a lot of variation on how absentee votes should be processed and counted and how that process is tracked, and there were a lot of last minute changes to these rules across the country ostensibly 'due to covid'. Here is an example :
Should a poll worker discard or not discard a ballot lacking a secrecy envelope? Perhaps if it's a ballot for evil orange dictator it's okay?
If you like to defend this theory I would be eager to talk about it with you. You can email me your sources at ymeskhout[a]gmail.com
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