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

justice.gov

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

#241

Post by seoaeu »

sidlls wrote: post #198
seoaeu wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Multiple assessors, both from parties and individuals who just want to ensure that everything goes right The story is literally about ballot stuffing at precincts where there weren’t observers like that watching. Which makes the electronic voting part a complete red herring

And 100% of the votes from those precincts without observers should’ve been discarded. The real problem is that we don’t fund elections properly. This sort of thing isn’t a problem in other developed democracies. It’s only one here by design.

What you’re proposing is that the official in charge of running elections can cut funding to precincts that usually vote for his opponent, and then later invalidate all ballots cast there?

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

#242

Post by the_snooze »

willcipriano wrote: post #217
javagram wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even changing the outcome of a Presidential election doesn't require any kind of sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign. Just enough well-placed ones Were that to have happened, analysis of the voting results would show a divergence in results in those “well placed” areas. For a presidential race, there are a lot of eyes on this comparing demographic data with vote totals. For instance, in 2020 there were some allegat…

> Were that to have happened, analysis of the voting results would show a divergence in results in those “well placed” areas. Why didn't that sort of analysis find fraud in Philadelphia in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018? How are you so certain of its infallibility given it's apparent inability to find fraud like this?

The analysis never found fraud? Or there was no analysis at all? According to the DOJ, the fraud centered on Democratic primary elections [1], which don't receive anywhere near as much scrunity or participation as Presidential general elections.

[1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-ele...

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

#243

Post by Vladimof »

tptacek wrote: post #194

It's weird that you can bribe individual EJ's in Philadelphia like this. In Chicagoland, every polling place has a team of 4-5 judges, and they all have to sign off on the final election result, and all the procedural steps that arrive at that number; every individual vote is recorded in the pollbook. I don't even know how you'd generate fake votes in the first place, even if you bought off all 4 EJs. You can't just…

> In Chicagoland, every polling place has a team of 4-5 judges, and they all have to sign off on the final election result

but what if they are all from the same party?

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

#244

Post by wahern »

subsubzero wrote: post #230
tptacek wrote: post #194

It's weird that you can bribe individual EJ's in Philadelphia like this. In Chicagoland, every polling place has a team of 4-5 judges, and they all have to sign off on the final election result, and all the procedural steps that arrive at that number; every individual vote is recorded in the pollbook. I don't even know how you'd generate fake votes in the first place, even if you bought off all 4 EJs. You can't just…

You are right, you can't make people up, but this has happened throughout history by unscrupulous actors using either very old people or dead people and "casting votes" in their name for certain candidates. I remember seeing a few examples of this firsthand on twitter in MI where a candidate was over 100 years old(and was dead) and voted!

"Firsthand" and "Twitter" seem more than a little incongruent. But in any event, these claims were likely false. See https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2020/11/05/did-a-dead-11... and https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54874120

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

#245

Post by probably_wrong »

wjmao88 wrote: post #196
gtirloni wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can have electronic voting machines print a paper record which can be counted in case of issues.

we could even have generated guid on the paper records that you can look up in a database to make sure your vote is being recorded correctly, without exposing any identifying information.

But how do I know that no one is correlating those GUIDs with my personal information? And more important: how do you convince a common citizen that their votes are not being tracked when there's a unique identifier right there?

The way I see it, it's a system that only works in elections when it's not needed. Otherwise, all you need to suppress people's votes is some thugs saying "we have men on the inside - if you vote for someone else, we'll know". It doesn't need to be true, just plausible enough to make people think twice before voting.

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

#246

Post by ncmncm »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #219
tptacek wrote: post #194

It's weird that you can bribe individual EJ's in Philadelphia like this. In Chicagoland, every polling place has a team of 4-5 judges, and they all have to sign off on the final election result, and all the procedural steps that arrive at that number; every individual vote is recorded in the pollbook. I don't even know how you'd generate fake votes in the first place, even if you bought off all 4 EJs. You can't just…

> I don't even know how you'd generate fake votes in the first place > You can't just make people up! > You certainly can't just make up a final tally > the paper ballots have to match up It seems you live in an area with auditable physical copies of the poll receipts. Good. That should be the standard. But 5 states still don't do that: https://www.axios.com/2018/02/16/five-states-without-paper-t... And I seem to rec…

California was one of those places until Kamala Harris fixed it.

No doubt the machines were sold off to one of those. Should have scrapped them.

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

#247

Post by guerrilla »

jokethrowaway wrote: post #191
gumby wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so easy? Apparently this demonstrates the power of the invisible hand of the marketplace.

Very true. And that's why we should decentralise power to the most local entity we can (somewhere between a central government and the individual affected by a choice) and have as few elected officials as possible.

Indeed, confederations of liquid democracies. The only people to make a decision should be the ones effected by it.

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

#249

Post by mindslight »

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…

I agree with your basic point, and it certainly applies to both political tribes. However,

> a few isolated instances of innocent people being falsely convicted or forced to plead guilty as proof that such errors are pervasive and undermine the integrity of the justice system

The justice system does not operate on a best effort "good enough" basis. When the "justice" system harms an innocent person, it takes on the exact role of a criminal attacking a victim and does so in all of our names. The victim would have been much better off if the system had not been given power in the first place! Thus, we should insist that the false positive rate for the justice system must remain extremely low, lest it effectively function as the injustice system.

Furthermore, we should insist that the people operating the justice system are held accountable under the same laws that they uphold for everyone else. Otherwise all those lofty ideals come across as quite hollow.

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

#250

Post by willcipriano »

the_snooze wrote: post #242
willcipriano wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Were that to have happened, analysis of the voting results would show a divergence in results in those “well placed” areas. Why didn't that sort of analysis find fraud in Philadelphia in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018? How are you so certain of its infallibility given it's apparent inability to find fraud like this?

The analysis never found fraud? Or there was no analysis at all? According to the DOJ, the fraud centered on Democratic primary elections [1], which don't receive anywhere near as much scrunity or participation as Presidential general elections. [1] https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-ele...

Let me put this in different terms. What algorithm should they have ran to detect this? If we have such a infallible algorithm why isn't it always used? If it's not a algorithm but instead more of a handy wavy "analysis" by "experts" how do you know for an empirical certainty they didn't just actually fill a room full of monkeys, waited a week and said the results are good?
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