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Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

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Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#201

Post by pyronik19 »

shadowgovt wrote: post #142
jaywalk wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s because the people who want voter ID also want to make it harder to get an ID BS. > and won’t accept student IDs. Nor should they. > Banning mail in ballots doesn’t sound like much of a good policy. Why? Do you disagree that fraud is easier with mail-in ballots?

Perhaps worth noting: the fraud perpetrated in this story was completely independent of mail-in ballots. In Pennsylvania, mail-in ballots don't even pass through the level of the bureaucracy that was bribed to compromise the in-person vote totals. "Do mail-in ballots make fraud easier" is a multi-dimensional question. At some level of resolution, everything that makes exercising the right to vote easier makes fraud e…

No post body was provided.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#202

Post by abeyer »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #138
seoaeu wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuffing paper ballots into a box or tapping the screen of an electronic voting machine are both very easy. This stuff has to be fixed at a higher level, like by making sure the folks running the precinct aren’t corrupt or by having a neutral observer present

Stuffing paper ballots is infinitely harder if your election system isn't entirely fucked. Multiple assessors, both from parties and individuals who just want to ensure that everything goes right, invalidation of the entire ballot box if any cheating is found post-votes, increase the amount of voting places so that scaling this up becomes impossible. Voting has been solved centuries ago. And voting machines will neve…

> invalidation of the entire ballot box if any cheating is found post-votes

That seems to just introduce a new vulnerability where you could intentionally get caught cheating in precincts that leaned contrary to your beliefs to invalidate everyone there who voted legitimately.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#204

Post by yonaguska »

klyrs wrote: post #185
JamesSwift wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was done by the election officials in charge of certifying the count. Read the article and it explains the whole thing. They went to great lengths to keep it "within the bounds" of the existing system, to make it harder to detect.

The US has a perpetually low rate of voter turnout. Seems like that would give a pretty big margin to play around in.

And updating voter rolls to capture only active voters is a contentious issue.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#205

Post by mikeyouse »

jl6 wrote: post #147
mikeyouse wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was changing on the order of 40 votes at a single precinct for local judgeships in primary elections.. It could have swung things but only for very small races when there's exceptionally low turnout.

Makes you wonder what the point was if it was so lacking in impact.

The plea agreement makes it sound like he was trying to get local judges elected who were using his consulting services -- so he was bribing some small fish with a few thousand dollars to get people elected to local office to get further consulting business. Gross and obviously illegal but not remotely relevant to the broader election security discussion.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#206

Post by JoeAltmaier »

daenz wrote: post #31

They make it sound so simple: Bribe the Judge of Elections who oversees everything. Dilute the vote tallies by using the voting machines to increment the votes for specific candidates. Certify that the fake results are correct. Lie if anybody asks. This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so easy?

And for so little money! $300 to $5000.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#207

Post by daenz »

anderskaseorg wrote: post #174
daenz wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a fair point. Though I would argue that improving controls around voters make it easier to detect election fraud. If you can tie each vote to a real person, it becomes very difficult to add an arbitrary number of anonymous votes to a candidate, like how Michael “Ozzie” Myers was doing. If we're looking at it from a cost-benefit perspective, the ability to ensure that election fraud isn't happening (which disen…

We already have a public list of people who voted. In order for a corrupt election official to undetectably add a large number of votes, they may need to add people to that list (perhaps registered voters who didn’t vote). Election transparency measures and audits might make that harder; voter restrictions do not.

Huh, the DoJ article didn't make it clear that they were using existing identities for the padded votes, only that they were incrementing tallies. From the way it is written, it sounds like they don't need any existing identities at all. Do you believe it impossible to accomplish what Michael Myers did without re-using existing identities?

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#208

Post by anderskaseorg »

heftig wrote: post #133
anderskaseorg wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contradiction at the heart of the problem with cryptographically verifiable elections is that, if you make it possible for a voter to prove to others how they voted, you make it possible for their vote to be bought or coerced. There are zero-knowledge cryptographic constructions that may theoretically allow you to prove things to a voter without allowing them to prove it to others. But doing this in practice with…

I think existing systems like Helios have already solved this problem?

From the Helios paper: “With Helios, we do not attempt to solve the coercion problem. Rather, we posit that a number of settings—student government, local clubs, online groups such as open-source software communities, and others—do not suffer from nearly the same coercion risk as high-stakes government elections. Yet these groups still need voter secrecy and trustworthy election results, properties they cannot currently achieve short of an in-person, physically observable and well orchestrated election, which is often not a possibility. We produced Helios for exactly these groups with low-coercion elections.”

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/sec08/tech/full_papers/a...

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#209

Post by philjohn »

j_walter wrote: post #187
rayiner wrote: post #30

Americans have a really tough time with the notion of materiality. America is such a big country that, as a matter of statistics, anything that can happen is happening. That doesn’t mean it happens often enough to call into question our basic systems. In this case it’s the right that fails to grasp materiality. Yes, people vote illegally, ballot boxes get stuffed, their is collusion, etc. No, it doesn’t happen often…

>No, it doesn’t happen often enough to undermine the integrity of elections in the aggregate. Are you sure about that? After watching 2000 Mules, even with some skepticism about the evidence presented it certainly appears there is an effort to undermine elections in very specific places that were key to the 2020 election. Video evidence is hard to argue with. Can't say if it actually affected the outcome because I do…

Have you read the discussion D'Souza has with someone at the WaPo?

There are holes in 2000 mules you could drive a big rig through.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#210

Post by the_snooze »

hunterb123 wrote: post #112
the_snooze wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Location data is nowhere near fine-grained enough to determine if an individual has gone to a ballot dropbox vs. the coffee shop next to it. And dropboxes are intentionally placed in convenient high-traffic areas. I would be very suspicious of these fraud claims just on how unreliable the data naturally is. Besides, if you really wanted to rig elections with mail ballots, it's way more effective to throw away ballots…

The qualification was device ids that went to 10+ dropboxes, comparing the routes and stops, not the location point by itself. For your explanation to be valid they would have to have stopped at 10 specific locations each by a dropbox. Those devices did those routes 30~ times each on avg. Those routes include exiting off of highways, going down specific streets, then going to the next dropbox in a specific area. All…

I haven't seen the video myself, but I'm interested in knowing more. Can you point to the timestamp where it makes these claims and how the analysis was conducted? Maybe there's something I'm missing.
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