Your Papers, Please: The Voter Fraud MEGATHREAD

[Berkut]

But if people did that, then in fact there WOULD be lots of evidence of voter fraud.

If you had, say, 1,000,000 people go and vote in someone elses name, and that was 99% successful, we would see 10,000 cases of people showing up to the polls to vote only to find that someone had already voted for them.

Which would clearly raise a rather serious alarm - something is not right!

If you had a million people case ballots in dead people names, and in only 1% if those cases did someone notice, we would have massive numbers of cases, in the thousands and thousands, of people investigating clearly illegal voting activity.

Instead what we see is like 100 odd cases, and when investigated 98 of them are completely explainable (dead guy voted before dieing, mistaken identity, etc., etc.).

I don't think we have any system in place that would catch 1%.

I just described the system.

You claim that people go and vote for people they are not - what happens when that person actually then goes and votes?

The system in place would certainly catch those - unless you have faith that the system of voting for other people is so perfect that nobody ever accidently votes for someone they are not who then actually goes and tries to vote.

You have an extraordinary claim - that you KNOW that there is a system of voting fraud that is 99.9% successful - it is so incredibly good that nobody EVER catches anyone doing it.

You provide zero evidence though - this is a textbook case of the demand to prove a negative. You create a hypothesis that there is a way of voting illegally that is 99%+ foolproof, and the evidence that it is so is that nobody has caught anyone. Even though doing so is self evidently trivial.

[Razgovory]

I'm not totally convinced voter fraud is a non-issue.  The principle piece of evidence used to support that claim is that the states which have conducted studies of the issue (Ohio is the one I remember) said the number of documented fraud cases were negligible, and by negligible I mean tiny.  But AFAICT, states don't have any systematic means of going back and checking whether a person who voted was who they claimed to be.  My suspicion is states just reported the cases that managed to get caught by our very porous system. It has been bruited (and no one has attempted to refute) that there are 10 million dead people still on voter registers.  Was the old Chicago joke about voting early and voting often completely without any basis in fact?

If I were to try and game the system, I think it wouldn't be that hard.  Find out the name and last known address of a dead person, then go to a poll and claim to be that person.  Or even easier, apply for an absentee ballot in that person's name.  You could do the same thing with people who are registered but you know just can't be arsed to vote.  Also, AFAIK, there is no systematic check for citizenship at time of registration.

From where do you get the 10 million dead voters?  Trump quoted a much lower number of 1.8 million.

[Eddie Teach]

Not driving is unamerican.

[Razgovory]

Have the states that implemented ant-fraud laws actually caught a larger number of people trying to fraudulently vote?

[Admiral Yi]

I just described the system.

You claim that people go and vote for people they are not - what happens when that person actually then goes and votes?

The system in place would certainly catch those - unless you have faith that the system of voting for other people is so perfect that nobody ever accidently votes for someone they are not who then actually goes and tries to vote.

You have an extraordinary claim - that you KNOW that there is a system of voting fraud that is 99.9% successful - it is so incredibly good that nobody EVER catches anyone doing it.

You provide zero evidence though - this is a textbook case of the demand to prove a negative. You create a hypothesis that there is a way of voting illegally that is 99%+ foolproof, and the evidence that it is so is that nobody has caught anyone. Even though doing so is self evidently trivial.

You described a result, not a system.  "1% of cheaters get caught" is not a system.

I made no claim about the frequency of voting fraud.  The claim I made is that it would be relatively easy to do.

[DGuller]

I'd be okay with voter ID laws if they came in a package, along with minimum standards for voting precinct capacity, absentee ballots, early voting, and audit trail.  If you're going to improve the election process, do it wholesale, rather than do parts that selectively target black people and fail to do other parts which coincidentally also targets black people.  We certainly could use some legitimate improvements to the voting process.

[dps]

But if people did that, then in fact there WOULD be lots of evidence of voter fraud.

If you had, say, 1,000,000 people go and vote in someone elses name, and that was 99% successful, we would see 10,000 cases of people showing up to the polls to vote only to find that someone had already voted for them.

Which would clearly raise a rather serious alarm - something is not right!

If you had a million people case ballots in dead people names, and in only 1% if those cases did someone notice, we would have massive numbers of cases, in the thousands and thousands, of people investigating clearly illegal voting activity.

Instead what we see is like 100 odd cases, and when investigated 98 of them are completely explainable (dead guy voted before dieing, mistaken identity, etc., etc.).

I don't think we have any system in place that would catch 1%.

I just described the system.

You claim that people go and vote for people they are not - what happens when that person actually then goes and votes?

That's why you vote in the name of a dead person, and you coordinate it with others, so that 2 people don't try to vote in the name of the same dead person.  Or you just fraudulently register in the name of a person who doesn't actually exist (and requiring ID wouldn't necessarily catch this trick, because you could probably get fake ID with that name on it).

There's definitely voter fraud that goes on.  I don't know to what degree, and I'm reasonably certain that the extent of fraud varies from place to place around the country.  My sense is that showing up at the polls and voting in someone else's name is a very small part of it, though.

[DGuller]

That's why you vote in the name of a dead person, and you coordinate it with others, so that 2 people don't try to vote in the name of the same dead person.  Or you just fraudulently register in the name of a person who doesn't actually exist (and requiring ID wouldn't necessarily catch this trick, because you could probably get fake ID with that name on it).

Seems like on awful lot of organization is required.  And yet no one ever busts such conspiracy rings.  They must run very deep, deep enough to keep FBI off their backs.

[Razgovory]

The Elder's of Zion strike again!  If you weren't so secular DG, you could get in on this.

[Berkut]

But if people did that, then in fact there WOULD be lots of evidence of voter fraud.

If you had, say, 1,000,000 people go and vote in someone elses name, and that was 99% successful, we would see 10,000 cases of people showing up to the polls to vote only to find that someone had already voted for them.

Which would clearly raise a rather serious alarm - something is not right!

If you had a million people case ballots in dead people names, and in only 1% if those cases did someone notice, we would have massive numbers of cases, in the thousands and thousands, of people investigating clearly illegal voting activity.

Instead what we see is like 100 odd cases, and when investigated 98 of them are completely explainable (dead guy voted before dieing, mistaken identity, etc., etc.).

I don't think we have any system in place that would catch 1%.

I just described the system.

You claim that people go and vote for people they are not - what happens when that person actually then goes and votes?

That's why you vote in the name of a dead person, and you coordinate it with others, so that 2 people don't try to vote in the name of the same dead person.  Or you just fraudulently register in the name of a person who doesn't actually exist (and requiring ID wouldn't necessarily catch this trick, because you could probably get fake ID with that name on it).

There's definitely voter fraud that goes on.  I don't know to what degree, and I'm reasonably certain that the extent of fraud varies from place to place around the country.  My sense is that showing up at the polls and voting in someone else's name is a very small part of it, though.

Of course that is your sense, because I just pointed out that if it happened to any signifcant degree, even with a very high success rate, we would have ample evidence that it was occuring.

Your "sense" of what voter fraud is happening, along with Yi's (although his sense apparently adjusts based on his hypothesis being shot down), seems to be completely based on what you can imagine might happen that could not be proven.

You might as well say you sense that there is rampant voter fraud by space aliens changing the voting totals with undetectable cosmic rays.

[Admiral Yi]

   Just a matter of time.

[dps]

But if people did that, then in fact there WOULD be lots of evidence of voter fraud.

If you had, say, 1,000,000 people go and vote in someone elses name, and that was 99% successful, we would see 10,000 cases of people showing up to the polls to vote only to find that someone had already voted for them.

Which would clearly raise a rather serious alarm - something is not right!

If you had a million people case ballots in dead people names, and in only 1% if those cases did someone notice, we would have massive numbers of cases, in the thousands and thousands, of people investigating clearly illegal voting activity.

Instead what we see is like 100 odd cases, and when investigated 98 of them are completely explainable (dead guy voted before dieing, mistaken identity, etc., etc.).

I don't think we have any system in place that would catch 1%.

I just described the system.

You claim that people go and vote for people they are not - what happens when that person actually then goes and votes?

That's why you vote in the name of a dead person, and you coordinate it with others, so that 2 people don't try to vote in the name of the same dead person.  Or you just fraudulently register in the name of a person who doesn't actually exist (and requiring ID wouldn't necessarily catch this trick, because you could probably get fake ID with that name on it).

There's definitely voter fraud that goes on.  I don't know to what degree, and I'm reasonably certain that the extent of fraud varies from place to place around the country.  My sense is that showing up at the polls and voting in someone else's name is a very small part of it, though.

Of course that is your sense, because I just pointed out that if it happened to any signifcant degree, even with a very high success rate, we would have ample evidence that it was occuring.

Your "sense" of what voter fraud is happening, along with Yi's (although his sense apparently adjusts based on his hypothesis being shot down), seems to be completely based on what you can imagine might happen that could not be proven.

You might as well say you sense that there is rampant voter fraud by space aliens changing the voting totals with undetectable cosmic rays.

I think you're missing my point.  What I'm saying is that while voting fraud no doubt goes on, someone actually showing up at a polling place and voting in someone else's name doesn't happen to any significant degree.  In other words, I agree with you that it's not really a problem

My "sense" of what actually goes on is that a lot of voting fraud that does happen (or maybe I should say what used to happen) is just plain old-fashioned ballot stuffing.  Just put an extra 50 or however many ballots marked for your candidate in the ballot box without having anyone physically show up to cast those ballots.  You don't have to get nearly as many people involved.  As I said, that's how it used to happen;  with paper ballots largely a thing of the past, you can't quite do it that way anymore, I suppose, but I'm sure someone somewhere has figured out a way to do it electronically (which might be even harder to detect and probably takes even fewer people).

[Admiral Yi]

I think you're missing my point.  What I'm saying is that while voting fraud no doubt goes on, someone actually showing up at a polling place and voting in someone else's name doesn't happen to any significant degree.  In other words, I agree with you that it's not really a problem

My "sense" of what actually goes on is that a lot of voting fraud that does happen (or maybe I should say what used to happen) is just plain old-fashioned ballot stuffing.  Just put an extra 50 or however many ballots marked for your candidate in the ballot box without having anyone physically show up to cast those ballots.  You don't have to get nearly as many people involved.  As I said, that's how it used to happen;  with paper ballots largely a thing of the past, you can't quite do it that way anymore, I suppose, but I'm sure someone somewhere has figured out a way to do it electronically (which might be even harder to detect and probably takes even fewer people).

Ballot stuffing would be hard to pull off.  You need to match up total ballots cast with the same number of signed affidavits.

[Martinus]

What do you need to bring to vote in the US? The voter thingie you get in the mail?

It operates on the honor system, basically.  You give them your name and address, and if it matches a name and address on the voter register, and someone at the poll doesn't know that's not you, you can vote.

Utterly baffling from the perspective of the rest of the world.

And that's why the rest of you get a puny little portion and we run the game with the whole lot.

No wonder the Secret Masters have entrusted you with running the world - they would pick the country where election fraud is the easiest.

[Zoupa]

What do you need to bring to vote in the US? The voter thingie you get in the mail?

It operates on the honor system, basically.  You give them your name and address, and if it matches a name and address on the voter register, and someone at the poll doesn't know that's not you, you can vote.

Utterly baffling from the perspective of the rest of the world.

And that's why the rest of you get a puny little portion and we run the game with the whole lot.

Ok? Did that make you feel good little buddy?