Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges • Hacker News Board

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

#331

Post by robocat » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 8:30 PM UTC

rhino369 wrote: post #131

mmaurizi wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Judge of Elections" in PA is an elected position for running the polling place for a precinct on election day. It's an extremely low-level position that only involves work on 2 days of the year. It's not a "judge" in the sense someone who oversees a criminal or civil trial.

I'm surprised it is even elected. I was an election judge when I was 18 in Illinois as part of high school project. You just sign up and attend a 2 hour class. It was fun. The other judge at my poll location was a guy who served in the Wehrmacht during WWII (was conscripted at age 14). But I easily could have stuffed the box. Most people don't vote. At 7:45pm, you could just vote for people who didn't show up. Nobody…

The voter list should contain canaries and honeypots. Known dead people or fake people, and if they vote then fraud has been detected.

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

#332

Post by dmix » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 8:30 PM UTC

BitwiseFool wrote: post #252

thepasswordis wrote: post #139

In case you were curious for more info about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Myers_(Pennsylvania_po... >Michael Joseph "Ozzie" Myers (born May 4, 1943) is an American politician who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1976 to 1980. A member of the Democratic Party, Myers became involved in the Abscam scandal during his tenure in Congress and was later expelled from the House of Repres…

Quoted post unavailable.

If something political was in the title it would be flagged off of HN pretty quickly. This is a justice.gov article which are frequently posted to HN and election security is a common topic here, so it's pretty safe.

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

#333

Post by lp0_on_fire » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 8:33 PM UTC

adamrezich wrote: post #256

vkou wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> make it easier for everyone to get an ID. The same people that push for voter ID also make it difficult for everyone to get an ID. Those people also have a stranglehold on their state legislatures, and executive agencies that assign IDs. They also push for other laughably biased voting rules, like only allowing mail-in ballots from demographics that vote for them (65+). [1] It's not about fairness for them, it's ab…

does this notion solely come from people who live in states with ridiculous taxes on everything? here in SD it just cost me somewhere around $22 to get my driver's license renewed. when I lived in WA I went to the DMV with a friend who had to get her license renewed one day and I said screw it I might as well get a WA license while I'm here. my jaw fell to the floor when, at the end of the process, they said it would…

> $22 is not hard for anyone to save, especially with all the generous welfare programs we have. if you're impoverished, you can easily get EBT to buy food, WIC to buy baby formula, and, here at least, Section 8 housing and other programs to get a place to live. no amount of "think of the poor people whom I've never met but assume exist somewhere despite me never interacting with them directly" will ever convince me that someone who really wants to vote can't save $22 to acquire a legal ID.

You don't even need to save 22 bucks. Every state in the union has _at least_ a free "needs based" ID option and for the Voter ID states they all provide a free IDs (for the purposes of voting, not necessarily drivers licenses).

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

#334

Post by bonzini » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 8:33 PM UTC

hef19898 wrote: post #281

nostromo wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'…

And still this never happened in any other democratic country doing paper ballots. Simple reason: If there are more votes in the ballot box then registered voters (ideally this means everyone above voting and eligible to vote) you know someone tempered the ballot box. And having more than one (where I live I'm always puzzled how they find the hundreds of people to monitor the dozens of polling places since we have at…

> how they find the hundreds of people to monitor the dozens of polling places

Do they pay them?

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

#335

Post by corrral » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 8:34 PM UTC

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #330

corrral wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Republicans aren't interested in ensuring IDs are easy & free to get as part of their voter ID bills, because it defeats the purpose of why they're so enthusiastic for this to begin with. Democrats don't trust anything short of very concrete and explicit measures in that regard, for fear that the rug will be pulled later, similar to polling-place distribution/availability issues in some places. Standard, universa…

Can you name a single state with voter id laws on the books that does not offer a free form of ID suitable to vote? Reminder: a _drivers license_ and state-issued ID are _not_ one and the same.

The easy-to-get is also important. Plenty of people who absolutely are citizens, born in this country, lack things like birth certificates or social security cards, and getting one can be a huge pain, sometimes requiring significant travel and expense. Often these are older people, or the homeless.

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

#336

Post by rayiner » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 8:34 PM UTC

mindslight wrote: post #249

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 e…

All human systems operate on a “good enough” basis. You can tweak the knobs to trade off false positives versus false negatives in whatever balance is politically viable. But there will always be false positives, and in such a huge country even a systematically low false positive rate will generate many outrage-inducing stories of injustice.

Both election results and criminal verdicts are, and should be seen as, statistical determinations with error bars. All we can control is the size of the error bars, and we can control those only by trading off other things we care about (cost of the system, speed of the system, etc.)

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

#337

Post by mercy_dude » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 8:35 PM UTC

jasonlotito wrote: post #157

mercy_dude wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh there are plenty of evidences. There were even before the election. There were postal officials who were destroying ballots in one state that was well reported. We just decided to look the other way.

Why did you choose to look the other way? Pretty amazing that you'd openly admit to having proof of this and not back it up. We had a presidential candidate go to court over this and not present any evidence of this wide-scale election fraud nor would they even admit to this massive fraud in a court of law. Still, shame on you.

> not back it up

All you need to do is google. Here is one https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/usps-postal-service-employe...

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

#338

Post by hef19898 » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 8:35 PM UTC

the_snooze wrote: post #327

upsidesinclude wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You find a bunch of people that can't or wouldn't vote and collect their automatically mailed ballots, fill them out and have them dropped off in boxes. That's one way to illegally harvest votes. One that almost certainly occurred in nursing homes around the country in the last election.

The first step to processing mail ballots is checking that the signature matches the voter's known signature (usually submitted at the time of voter registration). Are you proposing a conspiracy where crooks are somehow forging hundreds (if not thousands) of signatures? And there's no paper trail of communications or money changing hands to coordinate it all?

No signatures where I live, what's next analysis of hand writing? You only get one mail in ballot, which is returned absolutely anonymous. Once you order one, you are struck from the on-site ballot list. You can exchange your mail-in ballot, I think, for a normal paper ballot. if you return the mail-in one. So your solution would mean manually following up every single mail-in ballot and steal it. Assuming you find out who ordered one.

using the "left-over" ballots of people not voting, sure, all you have o do is to convince the other 3 to 4 people present at the polling station to go along. and since we have literally thousands of those stations you have to repeat that a lot. And as soon as the participation exceeds the other places, people will investigate. The provisional count done on-site is redone before it is official, so again deviations will be found. And if they are not, congrats, you managed to stuff maybe a dozen ballots, if you are lucky.

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

#339

Post by hef19898 » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 8:36 PM UTC

bonzini wrote: post #334

hef19898 wrote: post #281

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And still this never happened in any other democratic country doing paper ballots. Simple reason: If there are more votes in the ballot box then registered voters (ideally this means everyone above voting and eligible to vote) you know someone tempered the ballot box. And having more than one (where I live I'm always puzzled how they find the hundreds of people to monitor the dozens of polling places since we have at…

> how they find the hundreds of people to monitor the dozens of polling places Do they pay them?

I think they are volunteers, not sure if they are paid a nominal amount so.

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

#340

Post by WillPostForFood » Wed, Jun 08, 2022, 8:37 PM UTC

kevinmchugh wrote: post #316

subsubzero wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

You should expect some number of dead people to have voted in every election, totally aboveboard. There's always going to be someone who dies in a car accident on the way back from the polling place. Add early or by-mail voting and the attendant micromorts from a bigger gap between votes being cast and being counted, and you'll see more dead people having cast votes. Older people are much more likely to vote and much…

Just way below the number needed to influence elections.

People say this like there are no close elections, or are only talking about Presidential elections (and ignoring Florida 2020), but pretty much every year there are razor thin votes in statewide and congressional races. Good example is Iowa 2nd district in 2020 which was decided by 6 votes:

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/democrat-rita-hart-ends-elec...

GOP Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks was certified the winner in November by a mere six votes out of 400,000 cast, marking one of the closest House races in modern history.

Given 400,000 votes, there is guaranteed more than 6 fraudulent, mistaken, or sabotages ballots. Maybe that affected the result, or just missed flipping the seat, who knows. But small time voting fraud can still be a big problem.