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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

#431

Post by hef19898 »

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #424
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.

And doing that on any kind of scale will undoubtedly end with the perpetrator in jail for voter fraud. It's easy to speculate about how, it's a lot harder to do it in a way that gets away with it without leaving a trail that eventually catches up with them.

And if the fraud is big enough the election in that polling station will be repeated. The more polling stations you have, the harder it is that a single station can impact overall results.

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

#432

Post by maerF0x0 »

slg wrote: post #394
maerF0x0 wrote: post #389

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the EROI is high enough you try it prior to knowing the outcome. Because there is a curve of investment that eats into the Return portion of the equation, they should push up the number of votes (cost) until they hit their desired (cost of capital + profit margin). That is the rational way to act at least. If someone says to you pay $1 to have a 75% chance at $2. you definitely should take it. It's the same with m…

Yes, but if the question was "did someone give you $2?" then your ROI is irrelevant. The question wasn't whether someone would want to attempt this fraud. It is whether someone could successfully execute this fraud.

> It is whether someone could successfully execute this fraud.

Wouldn't this become a certainty given enough Investment? if so then the EROI is a real factor because it tells us that someone not only could spend $ALOT but could also expect to profit from and so is likely able to fund the project.

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

#433

Post by tptacek »

dreamcompiler wrote: post #422
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…

Chicago invented sophisticated election fraud 100 years ago. It may be the case that recent Chicago administrations decided they didn't want to continue to be known as the worst place in the US for honest elections. https://blockclubchicago.org/2018/10/24/chicago-and-rigged-e...

Oh, sorry! You're right! Never mind, we don't do any of the things I said we do. I should have read Block Club instead of relying on my own EJ experiences.

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

#434

Post by hef19898 »

r00fus wrote: post #428
hef19898 wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

FPTP is a disaster. Even if you have perfectly representative elections, FPTP essentially disallows anything but 2 parties. This makes both parties more easily corruptible (less people to bribe if you're paying for specific result or legislation). Multiple parties makes gaming elections much harder for moneyed interests.

France has FPTP, and it works for a lot more than two parties. Admittedly, France has a second round run off in case no candidate has more than 50% of votes in the first round so.

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

#435

Post by [deleted] »

slg wrote: post #391
hammock wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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?

They would need to be able to mobilize tens or hundreds of thousands of votes on hours of notice. They would also need to be able to distribute those votes broadly enough not to cause suspicion when an unexpected trove of votes are added late. These votes would also need to be cast intelligently enough to match all expected down ballot elections not to draw suspicion. I don't think there is a way to do all of this wi…

[deleted]

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

#436

Post by LocalPCGuy »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #340
kevinmchugh wrote: post #316

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Re…

In addition to the other response, elections where there are razor thin margins like this garner a TON of attention, making the likelyhood of getting away with fraud much less likely.

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

#437

Post by jbritton »

nostromo wrote: post #267
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…

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'…

With respect to the 2020 election, I have wondered about the chain of custody of the ballots once separated from their envelope. In some regions boxes of ballots were transported to counting locations. Could someone swap out the entire contents of a truck. The boxes were then unloaded and brought in through back doors late at night. Could the boxes get swapped out during unload. Some boxes were left sitting under tables for later retrieval and not securely locked up. Some boxes were forgotten about in back rooms. There were reports of mail-in ballots that appeared stamped by machine, but I never saw any finished investigation of the reports.

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

#438

Post by xienze »

ModernMech wrote: post #384
xienze wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> With that invitation, or passport or ID Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US. It’s OK if you didn’t know that, lots of people from other countries are dumbfounded to learn that all you have to do in the US is show up and give the poll workers the name of a registered voter in order to vote.* * Well, in some states you have to show ID. But one political party in particular fights ve…

> Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US. This is not the argument people are making, so I hope you aren’t making it intentionally. No one is saying that requiring voting id is inherently racist. The argument is that requiring voting id without a commensurate effort to make sure everyone has voter id ends up disproportionately affecting minorities. These efforts are subsequently dubbed…

> The argument is that requiring voting id without a commensurate effort to make sure everyone has voter id ends up disproportionately affecting minorities.

Democrats have never negotiated in good faith over the requirement to make IDs available though whenever the debate is brought up. States like Wisconsin require voter ID and will make an ID for voting available for free, through the mail, and yet there is still opposition that always relies on handwavy arguments about how utterly baffling and difficult it is to obtain a photo ID, even in Wisconsin. Arguments which are ultimately disingenuous and yet still persist in light of accommodations by states that require voter ID.

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

#439

Post by a_e_k »

eschulz wrote: post #155
curiousllama wrote: post #126

> After receiving payments ranging from between $300 to $5,000 per election from Myers, Demuro would add fraudulent votes on the voting machine The most staggering thing for me is how _tiny_ the payments are

That seems to frequently be the surprising thing about these corruption cases. I'm reminded of the fascinating case where journalists in Chicago bought a bar to investigate corruption. They were shocked at $10 bribes getting things done for them (30+ years ago, but still a small sum). https://interactive.wttw.com/timemachine/mirage-tavern Many of us would assume the sums of money needed to bribe officials would be hu…

Calvin and Hobbes called this thirty years ago.

https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/04/08

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

#440

Post by mistermann »

tptacek wrote: post #369
WillPostForFood wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Re…

It makes sense when you write it that way, but not in reality. There is a risk/reward to doing this. Part of your premise is that you can know when an election is going to come down to 6 votes. But in fact Meeks vs. Hart was newsworthy because results like that are incredibly rare. 99 times out of 100, if you try to juke the election, you're putting yourself at pretty grave legal risk and accomplishing absolutely not…

> Part of your premise is that you can know when an election is going to come down to 6 votes.

Not in reality, you appended that to your local model.

It's true that there is only so much fraud you can get away with, and if the legitimate votes outnumber your ballot stuffing then your plan failed.

Presumably fraudsters do not know what the final counts are going to be (unlike how many people in this thread "know" things they have no way of knowing), so this would not necessarily alter their plans on sites that are plausibly (in their estimation) swingable.

> But in fact Meeks vs. Hart was newsworthy because results like that are incredibly rare. 99 times out of 100, if you try to juke the election, you're putting yourself at pretty grave legal risk and accomplishing absolutely nothing.

This rests on the premise of omniscience, and while this is a fairly standard convention on the internet these days, there is no scientific evidence I've seen that substantiates the phenomenon.

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