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Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization

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Re: Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization

#431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So you are arguing for no more states. Where did I argue for that? I'm arguing for the state one lives in having no impact on how much one's vote for president counts. I never said that the US should eliminate federalism and run everything directly out of DC. > Under a popular vote we might as well disband congress. I don't follow your logic here. Based on my reasoning, it would make sense to either make Senate rep…

I don't like this example because the effectiveness of direct democracy is greater in small groups. I selected a dinner with families as representative of states with different desires but similar desires within a state. Akin to how a family has similar tastes in food. On that level I feel it is a good example. Lets say we have a group of families voting on what to have for a shared dinner. Each family gets one vote.…

In your dinner example, giving each family one vote wouldn't make things any better. Instead of the majority of people deciding what to eat every night, the majority of families would decide every night. If 25% of the families liked Thai food, but 75% liked Italian food, they would all eat Italian food every night. The only thing that would solve your example would be to let either one person or one family choose what to eat each night, on a rotating basis.

Of course, you could just let each family choose its own meal, while using a majority vote (either of people or families) to decide things that affect all the families. This is federalism.

But I submit that families choosing what to eat is different from government making laws. Many things have to be decided by a central authority, and there has to be a way of apportioning representation in that central authority. Giving certain citizens 3x as much power because they live on one side of a line vs. another violates the principle of "one person, one vote".

Re: Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization

#432
post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Twisted things being done in our elections goes back to Tammany Hall. If you know where to look in American history it's not hard to find credible instances of important elections having substantial amounts of fraud. Why do people believe that when the chips are down and vast amounts of money and power are at stake that people are simply going to play fair? Especially when the players are some of the most ruthless, n…

This "Chicago political machine" was later shown to have committed voter fraud in 1982. 26 people were convicted[1], and here's the grand jury report[2]. They had been getting away with it, until they didn't. Fortunately, as media reassure us, today voting fraud simply cannot happen: you'd need a whole conspiracy of dozens of people, a real, as one could call it, machine. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1982_Illi…

Of note:

- Despite the scope of this fraud, it didn't alter the election outcome.

- The bi-partisan checks and balances failed because the Republican party had insufficient strength in the areas of Chicago where the fraud occurred.

- They got caught.

- This was 40 years ago. It was novel for the FBI to use computers at the time to detect irregularities.

In the states that Trump is currently contesting, the GOP controls either the legislature or the legislature and the Governorship. The GOP isn't going to let any precincts go unwatched in these states.

Fraud isn't impossible, it's just impossible at a scale to change an election outcome and get away with it, especially the presidential election.

One thing I find interesting is that one of the measures the GOP regularly calls for, voter IDs, wouldn't have prevented the fraud that occurred in Chicago in 1982. Meanwhile, the sorts of measures that would've prevented that fraud (bi-partisan administration of the voting process) don't suppress the vote.

Re: Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization

#433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, accepting it can go both ways. Why would you want one small portion of the country deciding the direction of the country instead of each state having an equal say? Isn't an equal say more fair for all states?

Because state sizes are massively lopsided. Split California into 6 states and they could still each have more population than many other ones. In your system, they not have 6 times as much total power. How does THAT make sense?

Because they are 1 of 50 states. A state is a single member of a union. The influence of a state should not be determined by geographic size or population.

The compromise of quantity of electoral votes was in response to your argument. I am saying that it was a poor compromise that has resulted in eroding the protections of the electoral college as populations have grown.

What we have is like saying the fat guy in the group counts a 3 people.

Re: Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization

#434

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rendering the federal government impotent by ensuring that 10% of rurals owned it but 90% of populous states were subject to it wouldn't discourage people from getting their policy goals done at the federal level it would insure that there wouldn't BE a federal level in 10 years.

"Rendering the federal government impotent" is a good thing in the eyes of the ~50% of the US that lives outside your filter bubble. Having a strong federal government is not the settled matter you seem to imply it is.

In order to reverse the trend you have to have people who are the very representatives of the power you wish dismantled choose to dismantle it. This is even harder than it seems.

The job naturally predominantly attracts those who desire the power in the first place and they retain the support of the people who put and keep them there by giving these people things they desire. This is why you see tax cuts but no real meaningful reduction of the federal government.

You might as well consider it an axiom that no government willingly dis empowers itself.

You say its not settled but it has been moving the same direction for 244 years and shows no sign of reversing course. What suggests a reversal to you?

Re: Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization

#435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what you mean by settled matter. In discussion, I'm sure you can find a lot of people that think it's a bad idea, and I'm ambivalent myself. But as a matter of reality a strong federal government is what we now have. I think the federal government and the executive in particular is much stronger than the founders thought it would ever be.

The federal government absolutely has more power than was intended. The constitution only allows the federal government to do very specific things. This includes the power to coin money, to regulate commerce, to declare war, to raise and maintain armed forces, and to establish a Post Office. Everything else is left to the states. How many powers does the federal government have that are above those enumerated powers?…

99% of the Democrats and 98% of the republicans including present leadership disagree with your assessment.

If your position weakens any further it wont even have one seat in congress. In a democracy a position that virtually nobody cares for is dead.

Re: Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization

#436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a terrible terrible idea. To understand how large the 10 least populous states have a population put together of about 9 million people. The 10 most populous states have about 179 million. What you are suggesting is that we weigh small state voter as equal to 20 large state voter. That isn't an "equal say" its tyranny. To put it in perspective you are suggesting that say Wyoming and Vermont whose population a…

A few large cities ruling the country is tyranny to those that live outside the cities. Only by granting equal state votes can we avoid a small portion of the country having an overwhelming amount of say in electing an executive. States are members of the union. You are a member of your state not of the union. Not being a member directly of the union you should not have equal say. If you did have equal say there is n…

Its not a "few" large cities its most of your fellow citizens.

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2017/08/rural-america...

>Urban areas make up only 3 percent of the entire land area of the country but are home to more than 80 percent of the population. Conversely, 97 percent of the country’s land mass is rural but only 19.3 percent of the population lives there.

Its not tyranny for a democracy to privilege the voice of 80% over 20% its is the literal definition of the term democracy.

It is a matter of courtesy that we debate it here because back in the real world in the corridors of power it is so far from acceptable it will get no hearing now nor ever because it would literally require the 80% to support their own subjugation. You are more likely to see a cure for aging and see the shores of alien worlds with your own eyes than see this come to pass.

I understand you may feel that your views are discounted but for you and indeed everyone like you there is 4 people for each one who will not vote to be subordinated to you. Why would they? Given that they don't agree with you why would they vote to implement a scheme by which your will would be placed above them. Sooner ask for the US to be riven in 2 so that people in the "heartland" can opt to go their own way. Its not going to happen either but at least it in theory could absent the contentious challenge of slavery maybe confederacy 2.0 could work.

Re: Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization

#437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

First, we do detect a small number of voter fraud cases. People have gone to prison for it. But your premise is also broken. You assume we should see regular attempts at voter fraud, given our enormous sample size. But voter fraud, on the "retail" level, is heavily penalized and extremely unlikely to impact outcomes. There are all sorts of crimes that could occur, but don't, because there's no point.

> First, we do detect a small number of voter fraud cases. People have gone to prison for it. Fair enough, though now I'm wondering why I keep hearing "no shred of evidence of voter fraud" from so many people. > But voter fraud, on the "retail" level, is heavily penalized and extremely unlikely to impact outcomes. There are currently four states (AZ, GA, PA, WI) with less than 1% margin between the candidates. Georgi…

While I think you're arguing in bad faith, at least there's some interesting discussion in the replies. I think it's an interesting thought experiment to figure out how to do mass voter fraud though:

> How are we even detecting wholesale voter fraud? What's the method to detect when someone with access to the voter rolls slips an extra crate of ballots into the count, or fills out and mails in thousands of ballots in the names of people who never asked them to?

The mere act of bringing in a "create of ballots" is going to be incredibly tricky. You have to obtain the valid ballots somehow: steal them, get some printed, or print them yourself. If you print them, you have to perfectly replicate the design, type of paper, etc. Then you have to physically get the box into the building, into the right room, with the proper security seals or whatever is used.

But let's pretend security is crazy lax, and/or several people are involved AND somehow not one of them is caught or a whistleblower. This is already a stretch -- as the number of people involved goes up, so do the chances one gets caught and/or one is a whistleblower.

If we add the ballots without it adding up to the number of names crossed off the voter rolls list, that's going to be a giant red flag of voter fraud happening. Either this has happened and no one has noticed (one one has ever thought to check this?), or.. it hasn't happened.

With access to the voter rolls we could inject names, but of course that leaves a paper trail. Thousands of names of people that don't exist or are deceased or are from the wrong place would appear and would have all voted. We could also figure out how many deceased people are on the list and have them vote, but this too leaves a paper trail. While there's some reporting of incidences of deceased people voting, it appears to mainly be clerical errors [1] and certainly doesn't appear to be at the scale of thousands needed to sway the vote, so likely this also hasn't happened.

Casting any significant number of ballots for legitimate voters ahead of time would be likely to result in lots of people showing up to find out they've "already voted" and being turned away. Once again, this either has happened and thousands of people quietly walked away saying "oh well" and not going to the media.. or it hasn't happened.

With access to the rolls, we could look up who didn't vote, and cast votes for them. We'd need to be able to cross out names after the polling has closed, then make sure our crate has a matching number of ballots to the people that didn't vote and physically get it in to the count room. And of course, this would show up in the type of analysis this article is doing: it would look exactly like the Russian election results at the start. This also doesn't appear to be the case, at least for 2016.

All of this work would allow some fraction of voting fraud to happen at ONE polling station. If we pick the right station in the right district (where the security and scrutiny is likely to be higher) we could maybe even have a meaningful effect, but for all that work and risk (of jail time) there's no guarantees. We'd need to do it at multiple polling locations, but unfortunately most of the work involved doesn't really scale: we we just need more and more people involved in the conspiracy.

[1] https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/08/tech/michigan-dead-voter-fact...

Re: Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization

#438
post #341

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rendering the federal government impotent by ensuring that 10% of rurals owned it but 90% of populous states were subject to it wouldn't discourage people from getting their policy goals done at the federal level it would insure that there wouldn't BE a federal level in 10 years.

I think the point being made is the federal government was originally given a very limited charter, over time that charter has expanded to the point where factions are battling for control of it, because it is now the seat of power. When the republic, as it was designed, was intended to deal with things at the state level. The foundational republic looked more like 13 small countries that bound together by a federate…

The solution to "mob rule" isn't less democracy traditionally it to provide rights that require more than a simple majority to abrogate. This also means that if you believe that the document requires amendments to better protect rights NOW that also means that you will require overwhelming support for that as well.

The interesting thing is what DOES not take 2/3 is a compact by an increasing number of states to give their votes to whom ever wins the popular vote if enough states to equal 270 votes enact it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...

States worth 196 states have enacted it and states worth 60 are pending. If we push hard we can have this in the next 10 years whether people like you disagree or not.

Re: Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization

#439

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are many sworn affidavits being filed in court right now, from poll watchers claiming that they were kept too far away to validate a single ballot, or turned away entirely. We’ll see, it will definitely go to court.

Read the fact check. The too far away claim was decided days ago, and people were allowed to be within 6'. There were also live webcams setup. This has literally been one of the most transparent elections in history. Read through the lawsuits [1]. Most have already been rejected due to no proof. The others outstanding have to do with so few votes it doesn't matter or they actually go against Trump's interests, like s…

If one of the new cases filed this week makes it to SCOTUS will you admit you were wrong?

Re: Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization

#440

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> First, we do detect a small number of voter fraud cases. People have gone to prison for it. Fair enough, though now I'm wondering why I keep hearing "no shred of evidence of voter fraud" from so many people. > But voter fraud, on the "retail" level, is heavily penalized and extremely unlikely to impact outcomes. There are currently four states (AZ, GA, PA, WI) with less than 1% margin between the candidates. Georgi…

While I think you're arguing in bad faith, at least there's some interesting discussion in the replies. I think it's an interesting thought experiment to figure out how to do mass voter fraud though: > How are we even detecting wholesale voter fraud? What's the method to detect when someone with access to the voter rolls slips an extra crate of ballots into the count, or fills out and mails in thousands of ballots in…

The concept of voter rolls kills the "crate of ballots" idea just as dead as the "retail voter fraud" idea, because you need to know who's voting and who isn't to pull it off; otherwise, you make a whole mess of duplicate ballots, which is one of the most basic things the election administrators are looking for.

And, as you point out, that's what you're dealing with after you James Bond the crate of ballots into the counting facility and through the scanners.

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