> 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.
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.
[1] https://ballotpedia.org/Party_control_of_Pennsylvania_state_...