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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

#261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I'm not saying there aren't holes...but there is a lot of evidence shown that can't really be disputed. I'm certainly not saying to take it 100% what they say...but it should be investigated further. Why take pictures of the ballot boxes after dropping off a bunch of ballots at 3AM? Why go to so many different ballot boxes one after another after another? Why use gloves and then throw them away right next to the ballot box...all starting right after someone was charged with voting fraud by using their fingerprints? I don't believe the numbers they calculated for sure...but individually the video evidence shown is damning.

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

#262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You asked "Why didn't that sort of analysis find fraud in Philadelphia in 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018?" And I answered it. Is that a sufficient answer or not?

To your new questions, yes, there are well-established ways to detect monkey business from machine-maniputation or ballot-stuffing. Basically, you make sure that the results line up between the paper ballots and the machine counts, and that the number of paper ballots you have matches the number of voters who checked in at the precinct. https://www.vote.pa.gov/About-Elections/Pages/Post-Election-... By law, elections generate a lot of data across independent sources. Rigging an election undetected is hard because you need to make sure those data sources remain consistent.

If you're skeptical of elections, I encourage you to volunteer to be a poll worker. Learn your state's procedures and carry them out more faithfully than how you think they're otherwise done today.

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

#263
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Does political affiliation affect integrity somehow?

It certainly creates conflicts of interest with the goal of an election, or rather a mixed group decreases the motivations for collusion

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

#264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not saying there aren't holes...but there is a lot of evidence shown that can't really be disputed. I'm certainly not saying to take it 100% what they say...but it should be investigated further. Why take pictures of the ballot boxes after dropping off a bunch of ballots at 3AM? Why go to so many different ballot boxes one after another after another? Why use gloves and then throw them away right next to the ball…

The gloves one is easy - some people took Covid as a serious threat to themselves and wore gloves - I saw many people wearing gloves to shop and then throwing them away before getting to their car.

It's also interesting that the map of ballot drop boxes was wholly incorrect in 2000 mules.

Finally, one of the alleged mules was reached out to - and it transpired he was not, in fact, a mule, but was dropping off the ballots for himself, his wife, and adult children, which is entirely within the law.

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

#265

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…

[deleted]

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

#266
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The voting machines at each polling station, including in the 39th Ward, 36th Division, generate records in the form of a printed receipt documenting the use of each voting machine...Demuro would add fraudulent votes on the voting machine Sure there is

They didn't hack the machine. They actually voted on the machines multiple times. The same scheme would have worked with mechanical machines or paper ballots.

I know for a fact that where I vote it is impossible to vote more than once (or close to, Berlin managed to fuck up voting last year for some reason). How is it impossible? Everyone is centrally registered with their primary residence. Based on these records, invitations are sent out prior to elections. With that invitation, or passport or ID, you show up at your voting local (of which there are plenty, the school just across the street has three of those and it is far from the only place in our town). There volunteers check you invitation or ID, hand you your ballot, verify you drop in the ballot box and strike from the voting list for this election. Not on the list? No ballot. No documents? No ballot. Since there are thousands of those locales, preliminary results are available in the first two hours after voting closes. We have no waiting lines (most of the time, Berlin is the exception that proofs the rule but then we talk about Berlin...). Mail-in voting works just fine and without any constraints. ballots are archived (for a very long time, I'm too lazy to check the exact duration), so if there are any doubts everything can be rechecked.

No idea how the US just fails at the most simple thing in a democracy, voting. Or rather I have an idea, with gerrymandering and such shenanigans it seems to be by design to keep certain demographics from voting too much.

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

#267

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…

There's two steps to the process:

Step one, check the signature, the voter roles, and remove the envelope. Throw the ballot into the bin to be counted.

Step two, count the ballot. This ballot now has no identifiable information on it at all. There's no way to verify that a person's ballot was correctly tallied.

So if you wanted to ballot stuff, you could do so prior to step two. Recounts wouldn't identify fraud, you're just counting anonymous ballots again.

The NY Times wrote about the possibility for mail-in voter fraud back in 2012: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-...

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

#268
post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

Does political affiliation affect integrity somehow?

>"Does political affiliation affect integrity somehow?"

I'd say so, but not in a sense that the effect is only or even primarily associated with [insert political party here].

Edit: We like to envision Judges as impeccably impartial, but they have a considerable amount of leeway, ambiguity, and procedural caveats they can employ should they choose to make partisan decisions. Given that judges are often selected by, or elected with support from, a political party machine, it stands to reason that they can be swayed to help the party that is responsible for their position. Especially if there is plausible deniability of bias or wrongdoing.

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

#269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Other than speeding up voting calculations, reducing paper usage, enabling arbitrary language use at the booth, and other things. If electronic fraud is a concern, we should mitigate it, because encryption, identity, and date integrity are solved problems. Furthermore, spot auditing and paper receipts/copies are a thing, or could be. (Also, voting may be "solved" but voting systems and universal access to the ballot…

Access to polling places has also been solved, including India where officials carry voting machines through the jungle for or only a handful of voters.

And first past the goal post works, or rather can work. It is aggressive Gerrymandering, allocating senators by state and not population and the electoral college that screw it up in the US.

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

#270

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?

These where primaries, so it’s not clear why the other party would care.
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