The democratic process, other than instances where it can be independently verifiable, like a show of hands in a room, or on a blockchain, is obsolete. It is a pretense for criminals to occupy and corrupt.
Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
371–380 of 889 posts
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#372It'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'…
I am glad you pointed this out. Few seem to understand that once the envelope is open and thrown away there is no way to verify the ballot being legitimate in many states. It's sad that people think with such a system there is no chance of voter fraud. They will smugly say that a recount confirmed everything was legitimate, etc. Very frustrating that the nuance is lost on them.
Ballots need serial numbers that trace back to a person that we can pick up a phone and confirm their vote when elections are contested. Being unable to do a spot-check audit is just plain stupid. Every person should be able to look up their ballot and see how it was counted at the end of the election.
Let's say voter fraud is indeed very low in the US, why not make obvious moves to make it even more accurate and honest?
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#373Earlier 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 where the vote will be close enough that the fraud doesn't have to be too large. This only looks true when viewed retroactively. It would have taken roughly 80k votes to switch the 2016 election from Trump to Clinton. However people had no idea of that beforehand. That 80…
>It would have taken roughly 80k votes to switch the 2016 election from Trump to Clinton. However people had no idea of that beforehand. What if they paused ballot counting on the night of Election Day, assessed how many votes they needed, and worked overnight to get the votes needed, reporting new totals the next day? Wouldn’t that solve the issue you raise here?
This is a hysterical question to ask, primarily because -- if you look at the statistics of election night -- it appears that exactly what you're describing happened.
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#374It'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'…
This isn't a thread about mail-in voting.
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#375Earlier 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…
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.
See, that's why ballots are only sent out when people explicitly ask for them. otherwise you get a single-use invitation that is changed against a ballot at the polling station. Showing up with an ID but without invitation gets you struck from the voter list for that polling station, and it gets you a ballot.
So that leaves people that are coerced into asking for mail-in ballots and are then forced to vote a certain way. Without being caught doing it at a scale enough to tip an election. good luck doing that in a system that isn't gerrymandered to the point that one district in, e.g. Florida, can decide a presidential election with only a handful of votes. In a normal system not election is ever close enough that this small scale tempering has any impact on results. Which is exactly why it happens so rarely, and is almost always detected.
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#376Earlier 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.
Holes in the methodology are small enough, though, to convict January 6 rioters/protestors/whatever-they're-called-now.
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#377Earlier 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…
Republicans do offer free IDs in every state where they mandate IDs for voting. It may not always be the easiest to get since you have to go to the DMV though. Do you think Democrats would be willing to have voter ID laws if the post office offered free IDs?
> Do you think Democrats would be willing to have voter ID laws if the post office offered free IDs?
No because proximity to a Post Office isn't a reasonable criteria for suppressing a persons right to vote.
Especially because:
> It may not always be the easiest to get
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#378Why did it take so damn long to catch this?
It didn't really. The co-conspirator was already convicted years ago. It takes years for a federal case to get on the calendar even after it is fully briefed, because the productivity of the justice system is not evaluated or pursued, and because common law is an idiotic system. This is also why it's been possible for the Attorney General of Texas to be under federal indictment for 7 years without ever seeing a court…
Fair enough. I just personally feel like committed fraud five elections before getting caught is too many.
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ju…
In this case it looks like you could bribe the volunteers to simply give ballots without checking for ID, then bribe the overseers to validate the fraud. So long as the people who’s votes you are stealing don’t come in, then you are safe. There are no systems safe from fraud if you allow human judgment to be a part of the system.
elections are as fraud save as they are because you have humans in the loop. Hundreds of them, all over the place. And it is not judgement, but decentralized supervision that solves this problem for you. Not some flimsy electronic system without auditable paper trail.
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#380It'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…
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