This post seems a bit off-topic for HN, but is dropping off multiple (in many cases 2) ballots simultaneously all that unusual? I can imagine many instances here in CO where a husband/wife would drop off their spouse's ballot. I understand that may be against the letter of the law in some states, but i doubt it constitutes election fraud.
Unfortunately my understanding is that election fraud if quite often just normal shit like that, regular people who are punished harshly to be made examples of for political football…
If they truly want to require one person per ballot drop them in the mailbox then yea this system is not going to work. Most people aren’t going to make their spouse come along with them in the car just to drop their ballots off unless someone there is enforcing it.
Not sure why this rule exists though. There’s no one preventing you from mailing a stack of absentee ballots in so why does it matter with the physical dropbox?
It's common enough here (Australia) for one person to drop off a bunch of signed, sealed, and seperate votes in seperate envelopes to the local post office for the household .. sometimes even for the neighbours in rural areas.
Most of these USofA lawsuits seem to be about making it harder to vote and restricting the vote to a pool of people well off enough to ride over any inconvenience introduced by gatekeepers.
I scrolled through the photos, nothing leaps out as amiss other than many different people are dropping off two or three ballots ... suggesting they drove in and dropped off votes from family members and friends.
A fair number of these are someone dropping off two envelopes from a car and you can’t really see if there is another person in the car. Honest question: is it actually illegal if two people drive together to the drop box for the person in the drop box side to drop both envelopes off? Is the other person supposed to technically open the door, walk around the car, and drop their’s off separately?
I don't think there's a single DA in this country who would prosecute someone for sitting in the passenger seat of a car while their family member, significant other, or friend puts their ballot into a drop box.
Edit: Well, maybe one or two. It's a big country. But I agree with the overall strokes of what you've said.
Probably they're supposed to each go to the box, but even this report realizes how BS that would be and none of the ~30 pictures I looked at had anyone in the passenger seat.
In other words "let's see if we can invalidate as many ballots as we can in a county where we're not happy with who they vote for based on a technicality". I'm willing to bet the majority of these pictures are of people that had no idea of this "requirement".
From a quick skim, most of them show people dropping off two ballots. Some show three or four, maybe five in one case, but it seems most show just two.
The lawsuit quotes these rules for using the drop box:
> You must only return your own ballot. You are prohibited from delivering or returning any else’s ballot, even if that person is your spouse, parent, child, grandparent, other relative, neighbor or friend.
Is there any reason to believe this is anything more than people simply bending the rules to drop off their spouses’ or other family members’ ballots?
I think some fraud happened (elsewhere), but that doesn't mean those pictures are evidence of fraud (even though maybe a violation of law). Could they just be dropping off household family members' ballots as a favor, or way to save gas?
"An obscene amount" is around 250, most of which are someone dropping off two ballots. The report itself says around 300 potentially invalid ballots. Probably less than the amount of miscounted ballots.
Did you miss the parent article? There are many, many photos of people returning multiple ballots (300 people at a minimum), which don't belong to them, something that is illegal. Are they Republicans, Democrats? I don't know. Is this a sign of a healthy election? Not really. In a country with an electoral college where a few thousand votes decide a presidential election, elections need to be a lot tighter.
Personally I had no idea it was any more illegal to deposit your spouse's mail-in ballot than it would be to drop off their mail-in rebate. I expect most people are the same and would've dropped off their partner's ballot or their family's ballots with their own.
I agree that votes should have a robust accounting system and that every ballot should be linked with a voter registration. Frankly I wish we did mandatory voting like Australia.
There was some fraud, yes, not a whole lot, and so far only on the Republican side. But to swing an election at the national level it would require millions of votes. That's a tall order.
Do you know how American presidential elections work? It would require thousands (not millions) of votes in specific states. Popular vote (where Biden beat Trump handily) is not how elections are decided here.
It would take tens of thousands of votes in a handful of specific states, but yeah, it would requires a vast conspiracy. Trump Republicans are trying to just that under the assumption that the 2020 election was stolen anyway. Which is, uh, not great.
There is fraud in every election. All polls have a margin of error, and that includes polling places.
Like all fraud, we don’t want to spend enough resources to eliminate it entirely, because this has negative effects on legitimate customers/voters. There was an article recently by patio11 about how credit cards choose a level of fraud to tolerate in the interest of the system functioning. Voting works the same way; restrictions on mail ballots and ID requirements limit more legitimate voters than fraudulent votes, so a prudent approach is to only investigate in cases where it makes a difference. We call these recounts in elections, and audits in finance.
If conservatives want to run the country more like a business, well, this is their chance.
Literally millions of dollars available to anyone who can find and prove fraud.
In a country of 150 million voters voting in dozens of local, state, and federal elections over the last 20 years, there have been less than 100 convictions for voter fraud, and almost all of those are inadvertently illegal votes by felons, new residents not correctly registered, students voting in their college town elections, et cetera.
There is NO significant fraud in American elections. ZERO.
