> The entire US election system is comically insecure and the thing that's surprising is how rare evidence of large scale fraud is.
The question that bothers me most is this: how would we know? What safeguards do we have, and how do we detect when they're overcome? Especially as a regular citizen.
We have the government and mainstream media and big tech all telling us that it's totally impossible for anything like this to happen and penalizing us for talking about it.
It's not that it's impossible, but that it's just not cost-effective, and even if it does happen, it's not happening at a scale that would affect even a statewide election let alone a national election. Why go through all the effort (and risk) to modify Joe Smith's vote from Team A to Team B when Team B can just buy advertisements, write newspaper op-eds, spam social media, saturate the news cycle, take over talk shows, and otherwise propaganda thousands of Joe Smiths across the whole region into voluntarily voting for Team B?
Bullshit. You’ll know when your election is routinely rigged and there’s rampant fraud. Been there and it’s difficult to hide even if you don’t have an independent media.
Doesn’t mean I agree with the election system in the US. You need both real and perceived trust in the election system. You also need very high participation. Both are essential. You can’t just keep throwing hurdles and then let only those who’re willing to pass the test to vote. You need more booths - way more - if you want to get rid of mail-in ballots so people can walk to their center and not stand in line for long hours. You have to go issue voter id cards door to door, if you want to enforce id restrictions. You can’t just do one and not the other. That’s just exclusionary. Similarly, if you want faster results you need electronic voting but you also need paper trails for validation. The way results stay unknown and media organisations “call” the elections is absurd. You need official results to come out in under a few hours after all elections are closed. It’s just not right to announce Florida while California is still voting - that’s undue influencing IMHO. The US can fix it all. I do admire how it all seem to mostly work in spite of all these issues.
The safeguard is the enormous scale of the U.S. election.
Flipping the 2020 election would’ve required 44,000 votes to have been different, and that’s with perfect knowledge of all the other votes that would be coming in.
tralene's comment is talking about safeguards. Their comment was substantive, linked to a WSJ article about deficiencies in elections.
The comment 8ytecoder is replying to is the comment by colpabar. Their comment alleges ... some shadowy conspiracy by government, mainstream media and big tech.
Right. I agree that the US has a lot of blatant deficiencies that they can resolve. Countries all over the world learnt how to do democracy from the US. Many have surpassed them in conducting free and fair elections. US is far behind there. But, like I said, it’s still mostly democratic and that amazes me.
The main safeguard of the American election system is thousands of seniors who donate their time and patriotism and enthusiasm for the process into making sure things go well. They typically take things very seriously and are rather robust, as the system is designed to bring in party representatives as well as these wise watchdogs. Most important actions have eyes and consent from every involved stakeholder. In some states, is a genuinely impressive example of distributed processing and consensus.
Well I think part of the issue is that the US (as in the federal government of the United States) cannot fix it all, because each state makes its own election rules. So for instance the federal government can't say "All election results will be released only after the very last ballot in Hawaii is cast", each state has to independently agree to only release their state's election results after a certain time that all states agree upon.
The undercover agents doing this investigation have a significant advantage; they're immune to consequences if they get caught. Malicious actors have to weigh significant criminal charges against the benefit of a single extra vote per visit to a polling place. Doing it at any scale means enormous numbers of involved persons, any one of which could be a law enforcement informant or whistleblower.
Do individual cases of this nature occur? Yes; we catch them regularly.
Do tens of thousands of cases of this nature occur all at once? Almost certainly not.
What prevents the US from having a Voter ID card like India does? A unique ID that is required to vote. That way, you only qualify to vote if you have a Voter ID, and once you turn the age of voting, you must get a Voter ID, like you got your SSN. For those who vote by mail, include a copy of your Voter ID with the ballot.
That will significantly reduce, if not eliminate, most of the fraud and put this argument to rest.
The problem with that in the US is that we have no form of ID that almost anyone who is eligible can obtain for free or very low cost.
We mostly use driver's licenses, and for people who don't drive states also offer IDs that look a lot like driver's licenses but are only for ID and are issued by the same agency that issues driver's licenses.
In many states they have closed many of the licensing offices, and cut back the hours licenses are issued at others. The closures happen disproportionately in poorer areas with a higher percentage of non-drivers. The reduced hours often leave office issuing licenses and IDs on weekdays in the middle of the day.
This can result in having to take a long trip on public transit to reach an office, and a long trip back, taking up much of your day. For many poor working people that can mean a day's wages lost.
The lost wages, transportation costs, and fees for the license or ID can come to over $100 which is a lot for many poorer people.
If we introduced an ID that is given to every citizen when they become old enough to vote, at no cost to them, and that can be obtained easily locally there would be little objection to requiring that to vote.
But most of the politicians pushing for voter ID are the ones that most benefit when poorer people cannot vote, and so tend to also be opposed to making the ID cheap and easy for eligible voters to obtain (and are also the ones closing license offices and reducing hours).
Maybe in the sense that you do not have to give any money to the agency that issues the ID.
Not free if you have to take a day of unpaid leave from work to go to that agency, or travel a great distance to get to their nearest office, or have to pay to get supporting documents (e.g., a certified copy of your birth certificate) to get the ID.
It looks like at least a few states that require an ID like Oklahoma and Michigan charge fees (initial and reoccurring) for a state ID at least. What form of accepted ID is free?
> In addition, voters may use the free voter identification card they received by mail from the County Election Board when they registered to vote. The law allows use of the voter identification card even though it does not include a photograph.
> The problem with that in the US is that we have no form of ID that almost anyone who is eligible can obtain for free or very low cost.
Wrong. Every American citizen has Social Security Card as well as Birth Certificate or Naturalization Certificate.
If you make a law that diverts 20% of election funds (and PACs) towards Social Security Administration they can make Social Security Card into a proper ID. Added benefit would be reduction in identity theft.
Functioning democracy is not cheap. But if a poor county like India with population 5x of the US could manage the voter IDs, we have no excuse for dragging our feet.
And a worry from progressives that any "Voter ID" system is being manipulated to disenfranchise black people and poor people, as has happened in the past.
I agree, and the only fix to those concerns would be a free, universally issued ID from the Federal government rather than letting states set up a mismash of confusing and difficult to access systems. No one complains much about drivers' licenses, but national ID tends to bring out the crazies.
It still wouldn't work. People will complain that either they are not properly checking people are who they say they are or they will say it is too difficult to get an id and it will disenfranchise the poor/minorities.
Ive never met a poor or ‘minority’ person that didn’t have an ID unless they were homeless. The later argument of progressives is extremely demeaning to minorities to the point where it borders on explicit racism.
> Ive never met a poor or ‘minority’ person that didn’t have an ID unless they were homeless.
It's a good thing we don't have to depend on your limited experience to make policy decisions. There are millions of Americans without any ID. One survey in 2006 put the number at 21 million.
> the later argument of progressives is extremely demeaning to minorities to the point where it borders on explicit racism.
You should probably tell that to the minorities themselves, like the Congressional Black Caucus (https://www.ibtimes.com/alabama-voting-rights-congressional-...) for example, since they don't seem to have any issue with making that same argument or speaking out against voter suppression.
It can absolutely be a burden to get a state ID or drivers license and it can cost money that people don't have to spend. There's nothing "demeaning" about acknowledging that fact. The problems are real, and they don't even only impact minorities anyway.
No, it is none of those.
Show me the money.
A voter id card required to vote is akin to a poll tax.
If we have a voter id requirement,
we have to have all voters have a place
to go get this ID.
Seven days a week, at least ten hours a day.
Who will pay for this?
Wealthy people refuse to pay their fair share of the tax.
I can't afford to pay any more tax.
Something has to give.
What government services will you cut to fund this noise?
This isn't so much of a problem since almost every other developed and even most still developing countries have a form of national ID which every citizen is encouraged and/or required to have.
It isn't a unique problem that the USA has and has been solved by almost every minimally organised country in the world.
American exceptionalism can go quite far sometimes.
Americans are weird about paying for a lot of things with taxes that other countries manage to do just fine and to their benefit. It would benefit the US to do the same and make sure that everyone can easily and without cost get a federal or state ID that they could use when voting.
Unfortunately, some Americans want the exact opposite of that and are actively working to make it harder and more expensive for the "wrong kind" of American people to get the ID they need to vote. If we all wanted more secure elections in America we'd have it already, but instead half the country just wants to prevent people who have every right to vote from being able to.
> If we have a voter id requirement, we have to have all voters have a place to go get this ID. Seven days a week, at least ten hours a day. Who will pay for this?
I agree that this is necessary; it must be Federal, free and readily obtainable.
That largely makes it unworkable; not for cost reasons (we do plenty in government that we don't pay for, including the existing free issuance of Social Security cards to everyone) but political ones.
The folks who want voter ID largely don't want this setup. They want a patchwork of confusing state-level requirements that are tough to navigate.
There is almost no adult who can navigate adulthood and responsibilities without some form of identification. Tertiary School, Alcohol, Dispensaries, Job, Phone, CC card, Military Draft, etc.
Irrelevant. What is relevant is if they have a form of ID that is acceptable for voter ID in their state. Around 10% of eligible voters in the US do not.
Yes it is. It means that adults have a state issued ID. What eligible voters do not have IDs, where are you getting 10%. If it's the elderly, I'm sure they can organize to have an ID drive. It's not a problem. There may be a lack of desire, but if even actual poor countries can accomplish this modest feat, surely the US can.
The politicians pushing voter ID are well aware of the demographics of that 10%, and have little interest in addressing their access challenges because of them.
> A recent voter-ID study by political scientists at the University of California at San Diego analyzed turnout in elections between 2008 and 2012 and found “substantial drops in turnout for minorities under strict voter ID laws.”
> Myrtle Delahuerta, 85, who lives across town from Randall, has tried unsuccessfully for two years to get her ID. She has the same problem of her birth certificate not matching her pile of other legal documents that she carts from one government office to the next. The disabled woman, who has difficulty walking, is applying to have her name legally changed, a process that will cost her more than $300 and has required a background check and several trips to government offices.
> Last week, during the federal trial on Wisconsin’s voter-ID law, a former Republican staffer testified that GOP senators were “giddy” about the idea that the state’s 2011 voter-ID law might keep Democrats, particularly minorities in Milwaukee, from voting and help them win at the polls. “They were politically frothing at the mouth,” said the aide, Todd Allbaugh.
What? Millions of Americans don’t have any government ID, and that group is disproportionately racial minorities and poor folks.
Make IDs universally available (I.e. free federal IDs handed out proactively by driving offices out to rural areas and workplaces) and I don’t think you’d see much resistance to this.
The problem is that the “you need to have ID to vote” folks would never support such an idea. Complete mystery as to why!
The question that bothers me most is this: how would we know? What safeguards do we have, and how do we detect when they're overcome? Especially as a regular citizen.
The one instance I'm familiar with when some safeguards were actually red teamed was a huge success--for the red team. https://www.wsj.com/articles/voter-fraud-a-myth-thats-not-wh...