I do not believe the election was stolen. But I also don't believe we had perfect election integrity either. In my mind any system involving hundreds of millions of people is bound to have some bad actors, mistakes, fraud, etc. It's important to acknowledge when and where it happens, and how to improve. But claiming any given election had near perfect integrity raises some alarm bells with me at least.
This is just your cognitive bias away from an extreme position. Actually election integrity in the US is pretty close to perfect. 10s of cases out of 100s of millions/low billions of votes cast. This has be exhaustively studied, MIT has produced papers.
The closest thing to a widespread problem is voter suppression, where states administer elections in regionally uneven ways to suppress one party's turnout. This is predominately against black citizens in the south after Shelby v Holder.
>10s of cases out of 100s of millions/low billions of votes cast
I know of at least 2 people in my friend group who voted in their "home states" that they haven't lived in for 4+ years. I don't know if this is considered voter fraud, but if it is, it certainly undermines integrity of this claim.
In any case, at the macro level, there isn't reason to believe one party participates in this more than the other.
We don't identify voters and we removed chain of custody on ballots. Instead we put unsecured boxes on street corners to collect ballots and put them in the mail. We eliminated signature validation. The list goes on. I have no idea who got the most legitimate votes, but neither does anyone else.
>The closest thing to a widespread problem is voter suppression, where states administer elections in regionally uneven ways to suppress one party's turnout. This is predominately against black citizens in the south after Shelby v Holder.
I agree with you 100% but that just means every election is illegitimate.
One important thing missing here that even without signature verification you can only cast votes for people registered to vote. That really isn't very fraudy in my book.
The other thing that Democrats and organisations like the ACLU have been campaigning to stop (with some success) is the removal of people who're no longer living in that state from the electoral register. Along with shut down any attempt to detect whether people have apparently voted in more than one state. This gives a nice pool of "registered" voters who are not in fact eligible to vote and probably don't even realise they're still registered there.
When you say a “nice” pool, how big is that pool? Are there many examples of it being exploited on a scale that affects election outcomes?
I agree there is a risk that bad actors could exploit this vulnerability, but there is also a risk purging voters prevents legitimate voters. That is especially concerning when the purges come from a government controlled by one party in an area heavily populated by voters of another party.
So it is not cut and dried. There are reasonable arguments on both sides, but my personally calculation is it is less likely someone gets away with finding people who have moved and casting votes on their behalf. It is more likely that a bunch of politicians purge voting rolls in districts that lean the other direction. Especially as we have 150 years of evidence of the latter but few examples of the former.
The risk of purging legitimate voters on a scale that could actually affect the election results is substantially overstated, from what I can tell. In particular, there was a claim which went viral after the 2016 election that this had actually happened in the swing states whose (award-winning journalist) author clearly knew it couldn't work as advertised. It compared the number of entries on the purge lists with the victory margin, pointed out it was smaller, and claimed this proved the vote was rigged that way. There were two huge issues - the first is that many people genuinely wouldn't have been eligible to vote in those states, and the second is that in at least one and probably all three states being on the purge list wouldn't actually stop the people from voting if they did turn up at a polling station, and all three were necessary for Trump to win. (People are only actually removed from the register if they don't vote for a while after being added.) The author clearly knew this, because buried in the article was an odd little disclaimer about how what happened when people were added to the purge lists varied from state to state without any further details. The ACLU and the press in general also like to run articles claiming every name removed is a "suppressed vote".
I think that may have been after just a few years of not being able to purge voters due to lawsuits from the ACLU, so there is definitely a big enough pool of registered voters who are likely no longer living in that state to potentially swing elections at least some of the time. If I remember rightly, some recent key swing states have a lot of outward migration compared to the victory margins.
You can only run credit card charges against someone with a credit card. How much credit card fraud is there in the United States?
One difference here is that everything I need to know to vote for someone is public record. Your name, address, political affiliation, whether or not you have voted in recent elections, etc. are all public record. Your credit card information is not.
1. You don't swipe your vote every time you go to the gas station
2. You only get to vote once. Unlike credit cards.
The comparison is such an insane false analogy as to render the rest of your comment meaningless.
You clearly have no clue how the system actually works if you think that comparison is reasonable at all. Go read up on why voting is secure instead of Googling more doggrel that fits your confirmation bias.
Your post shows how much disinformation has propagated.
> We don't identify voters and we removed chain of custody on ballots.
Source? Voters are identified by signature (and in some places voter ID). Re: chain of custody, as far as I'm aware, states generally require representatives from both major parties (plus independents) to be present when ballots are moved or opened. Since states generally have the power to conduct their elections as they deem appropriate, finding a national source is impossible, but I invite you to find me an example where such a chain of custody was violated.
Mail-in-ballots do not subvert this chain of custody [1].
> Instead we put unsecured boxes on street corners to collect ballots and put them in the mail.
Drop boxes are locked with keys and are monitored with video surveillance. Sometimes, people set fire to ballot boxes, but when this happens security is tightened [2] [3]. In any case, the small number of ballots damaged by arson would not change the outcome of an election.
> We eliminated signature validation.
This is not true. Give us a source. The closest thing to "eliminating signature validation" is giving voters the chance to fix signatures [4]. "Eliminating signature validation" is a false claim that Trump has spread [5].
> I have no idea who got the most legitimate votes, but neither does anyone else.
The fact is Biden got the most legitimate votes. End of story. Any other claim is refusing to accept the overwhelming evidence that there was no significant fraud. That's not to say that the vote count is accurate, but all evidence shows that any inaccuracies would not have changed the outcome of the election.
> Your link about mail in ballots says they are secure because of measures like signature validation, except we got rid of that.
I was not accurate, but you were also not accurate. Pennsylvania did not "get rid" of signature verification for absentee voting; it never had signature validation in the first place. States have the power to hold elections in the manner of their choosing, and of the last 28 years, Republicans had trifecta control of the legislature for twelve [1]. They had the full power to amend the election code as they saw fit, but they chose not to.
In any case, the absence of signature validation still does not prove fraud. The purpose of signature validation is to "prove" is the person who cast the ballot is the person who registered to vote. To take advantage of a lack of signature validation, an attacker would have to:
1. Find people who are registered to vote, but who don't intend to vote -- even in person.
2. Acquire their ballot by either:
2-a. Re-register them under a new address controlled by the
adversary (which notifies the voter).
2-b. Steal their ballot from their mailbox (and the voter may become suspicious if they don't get a ballot).
3. Fill out their ballot and mail it in.
Steps 1 and 2 each very difficult to do without raising suspicion. Step 3 is nearly impossible to do by a single person for a large number of votes. The vote difference in Pennsylvania was 81660 votes. So if Biden had 81661 fraudulent votes, then Trump should be the winner.
Let's assume that if more than a hundred people notice that their ballots were missing/voter registration changed, then there would be an investigation and the attacker would be exposed. In other words, the attacker must flip ~80,000 votes, while only alerting suspicion 100 times. Their success rate per ballot must be therefore greater than (1 - 81661 / 100) = 99.878%. A thousand? That would still require a success rate of 98.775% per ballot.
How many reports are there of missing ballots in Pennsylvania? I can't even find one person claiming such a thing, much less a hundred or a thousand.
You have a very "Mission Impossible" view of what vote fraud would have to look like. The biggest flaw is that you are assuming it would be an organized centrally planned act by some act/actors instead of just lots of people all over the place nudging things in whatever direction they want at any of a number of steps in the process.
Two simple examples: If I were a ballot harvester I could fill in any blanks that someone left on their ballot. If I were a postal worker I could just lose some mail if someone had the wrong sign in their yard.
There are very obvious centrally planned election stealing schemes - gerrymandering and voter suppression, along with the discrepancy between electoral college votes and actual population
Just because they're legal doesn't make them less bad.
Without centralized coordination, there is very little incentive for an individual to engage in voter fraud -- there is no payoff (because an individual creating ~100 votes would not meaningfully change an election's result) and the risk is too high (it's a felony with penalty of jail time and large fines).
So given the above, do you believe that 50 people each independently decided to create 1,600 votes for Biden? Or 100 people each independently created 800 votes? A thousand people each created 80? 80,000 each created one?
Remember again that all of these people have near zero incentive to commit voter fraud. Each person would also have to keep their secret and not brag -- something very hard for most humans to do.
> If I were a ballot harvester I could fill in any blanks that someone left on their ballot.
Ballot harvesting is illegal in PA [1]. Also, ballots envelopes are generally sealed by the voter and election workers would notice if a seal is broken and not count the vote [2].
> If I were a postal worker I could just lose some mail if someone had the wrong sign in their yard.
Ballots are tracked, and then the postal worker would rely on the voter not checking the status of their ballot. If there is a pattern, then the postal worker would likely be arrested or fined, so in all likelihood each postal worker could only "lose" one or two ballots.
You keep framing things as if I believe that only Biden votes would be fraudulent. I believe Republicans are just as capable of fraud as Democrats.
>Remember again that all of these people have near zero incentive to commit voter fraud.
The stakes are control over the most powerful government in the history of the planet being on your team vs the other team. And literally Hitler Putin puppet/Communist dementia man was on the ballot. The stakes couldn't be higher.
>Ballots are tracked, and then the postal worker would rely on the voter not checking the status of their ballot. If there is a pattern, then the postal worker would likely be arrested or fined, so in all likelihood each postal worker could only "lose" one or two ballots.
Your understanding of average human behavior is very different than mine.
> Your understanding of average human behavior is very different than mine.
I promise you postal workers are well aware of the implications of losing mail, and especially losing ballots. Postal workers have been prosecuted for dumping mail and ballots in the past, and I'm sure the USPS reinforces the severity of such a crime in their trainings.
But no one has ever, once (AFAIK) gotten caught doing that. Surely if this was the kind of widespread thing you're imagining SOMEONE would have put a camera on one of those boxes and caught someone?
I mean, just think about it: this is completely impractical. To "steal" any one election you need to swing thousands of ballots. Each box holds a few dozen ballots at a time at most. You'd be talking about a huge crime spree to manage to collect and resubmit all those ballots.
And yet... we've never seen it happen. The simple truth is that stealing elections doesn't happen because it's too expensive vs. just winning elections with more persuasive arguments.
I don’t like the idea of saying that this isn’t fraud because no one‘s ever been caught doing it.
Everyone, every state, every side, every ideologue should be jumping up and down for 100% transparency. and if anyone saying we really have that they are a liar.
"Transparency" isn't free, though. You take those boxes away and now a bunch of people who rely on them for easy access can't vote. Mail takes too long (and is subject to the same criticism). People with long commutes can't be at home on election day. People with hourly jobs can't take the time off. People without cars can't get there. And all those demographics have a partisan skew.
So when you say "transparency", in the absence of any proof of real fraud, is what other people hear as "suppression". We don't think you care about voter fraud at all, we think you just want more republican votes.
Is that not true? Then come to the table in good faith and find a compromise. There are many (e.g. voting day holidays, guarded drop boxes, etc...). Republicans have blocked them every time they come up.
I vote in every election. There are problems with many elections, especially ones for US President. Those problems are baked into the system we've established as a nation. States run their own elections. States elect US Presidents and not citizens.
I don't think states could coordinate a conspiracy to change citizen votes to steer elections one way or another. Too many moving parts, too many people. It is fair one state has one set of rules that differ from another? Yes. It is the way the USA is built.
It frustrates me to no end that a group of people say, "The election had no issues" just as it frustrates me when someone says, "The election was stolen." Those thoughts are always perpetuated by those who lead political parties.
> It frustrates me to no end that a group of people say, "The election had no issues" just as it frustrates me when someone says, "The election was stolen."
I think this is a strawman. Can you find me a source of a prominent* Democrat that said that this election had no issues? Most of the time, people who support the election's outcome mean that there was no fraud significant enough to change the outcome, or that this election had less fraud/was more secure than a previous election.
On the other hand, when Trump says the election was stolen [1] (along with some Congressional Republicans), he means that the outcome should have been him winning.
*Prominent being: US Senator, US Representative, Secretary of State, state election official, state governor, DNC leadership.
I don't think the election had no issues, and few would claim so. Let's start with: Where the hell is my federal election holiday? And it just goes downhill from there.
If you look for it, just about every state has had some anomalies that were noted by the officials. It's all boring.
All of it has been on a scale that wouldn't affect the outcome of elections. For example in Georgia 2 ballots were submitted in the names of dead people. In Colorado they are investigating non-matching signatures on a few hundred ballots.
This kind of stuff is routine, and happens in every election. Of course it isn't perfect, but its a decent enough system that has worked well in 100s of countries across centuries
It's all just like numerology or p-hacking. When you look super close and try hundreds of different tricks, some of them eventually show signs of working, but that doesn't mean you found something relevant.
I've seen countless videos of people taking the analysis done by some charlatan on Youtube, then applying the exact same calculation to a bunch of other Republican counties and getting the exact same anomalies.
Are there a lot of people claiming the election was near perfect?
I see people saying there isn’t evidence of wide-spread fraud sufficient to overturn the results of the election.
There do seem to be a lot of people making the mistake of trying to cast this as black and white, totally fraudulent or totally perfect. But that never made sense.
Coming out and saying that you think the election stolen gets you labeled a conservative nutter. So wise commenters won't say that, instead they will do what you've noted. Imply that folks are saying the election was perfect, and then say that they think there might have been some "imperfections" going on.
That way the listener doesn't automatically correctly categorized their point of view as nuttery, but is drawn into listening longer out of decorum. And the speaker doesn't suffer a loss of reasonableness for "wanting the truth".
What you state about "wise people framing things a particular way" being part of a known playbook for spreading Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt, is also a well known tactic for dismissing the concerns of genuinely concerned, yet inconveniently numerous people.
Not that it matters, but if you're going to try to call someone out or discredit them, try not to in the same stroke do the same thing.
concern trolling: the action or practice of disingenuously
expressing concern about an issue in order to undermine or
derail genuine discussion. (from Oxford Languages via Google)
> if you're going to try to call someone out or discredit them, try not to in the same stroke do the same thing.
I don't follow your logic.
Here's the context. x86_64Ubuntu wrote:
> Coming out and saying that you think the election stolen gets you labeled a conservative nutter. So wise commenters won't say that, instead they will do what you've noted. Imply that folks are saying the election was perfect, and then say that they think there might have been some "imperfections" going on.
>
> That way the listener doesn't automatically correctly categorized their point of view as nuttery, but is drawn into listening longer out of decorum. And the speaker doesn't suffer a loss of reasonableness for "wanting the truth".
In response, I wrote:
> Yes, this is part of a known playbook for people who want to seem credible while stoking fear, uncertainty, and doubt.
In doing so, I pointed out a pattern that involves a rhetorical technique.
With this context, perhaps you can explain what you mean by "try not to in the same stroke do the same thing?"
I totally read that context wrong. Serves me right for posting in a hurry. I must have mentally kludged both of your posts together. What I thought was being communicated was an assertion that people who do call out things in non-dismissable as nuttery ways outright are really just nutters trying to use politeness to avoid getting dismissed out of hand with the malicious intent to spread fear uncertainty, and disinformation.
With the kebashed context in mind, I think I was in a sense pointing out the perceived (on my part) dehumanization of the hypothetical speaker who could just genuinely be someone with concerns who simply desires additional scrutiny or scrutiny, closer to the topic at hand.
I apologize for the misunderstanding. Teaches me to post from the hip.
Sorry, I could have been more clear. It's another Trumpism. He's not saying these crazy things, but he's heard it from many other people. It's another way to promote conspiracy theories with plausible deniability.
I'm torn. On one hand, I wish I got the joke sooner, because I needed a laugh today. On the other, I'm glad I missed the context that would have made the joke clear. Overall, I'm thankful I can read HN comments without hearing Trump's voice reading the words.
> In my mind any system involving hundreds of millions of people
in a popular vote elections even a hundred thousand votes would be just a rounding error. In US electoral system just a few counties going wrong way could turn the elections, ie. theoretically "some bad actors, mistakes, fraud, etc." would be enough to do it. Add to that the facts like Dominion Voting Systems (whose machines were used in some of those key states and counties if i remember correctly) being a client of SolarWinds ... and one can have more than enough for a good conspiracy theory. At least i have :)
