Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

justice.gov

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

461–470 of 889 posts

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

#461

Post by hamburglar »

hef19898 wrote: post #418
hamburglar wrote: post #409

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precisely. You can’t make something a prerequisite to voting if every voter doesn’t have it. And the US is very much against the concept of a national ID. So you can’t have a national ID requirement . And as another commenter points out, it’s not that an ID requirement is racist, it’s that the motivations for it, knowing its impact, are racist.

Man, the US is such a strange place. It is also the only country I know of, top of my head, that doesn't have national ID requirements. No idea why this can be seen as bad thing.

Yeah, I don’t completely get this one either, but the way we are raised is that national ID is somehow a slippery slope towards federal agents wandering the street demanding “papers, please.”

Interestingly enough, the intersection between those who would advocate for national voter ID requirements and those who would fundamentally oppose a national ID is very large.

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

#462

Post by mulmen »

_-david-_ wrote: post #452
mulmen wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

>No because proximity to a Post Office isn't a reasonable criteria for suppressing a persons right to vote. How does Europe do it? Do you believe the way they do it suppresses a person's right to vote? If we did it the same way as Europe would you be fine with ID laws in the US? If requiring an ID is suppressing voting rights then requiring and ID and a background check (that you may even have to pay for) to purchase…

> How does Europe do it? Do you believe the way they do it suppresses a person's right to vote?

Not sure, I assume lots of ways? Europe is a whole continent full of countries that have a long history of disagreement. I wouldn't be surprised to learn some of them do suppress votes.

> If we did it the same way as Europe would you be fine with ID laws in the US?

"Europe" is not itself a compelling reason for me to do anything so, no.

2A WARNING. My words relate to my interpretation of the Second Amendment and do not indicate support.

> If requiring an ID is suppressing voting rights then requiring and ID and a background check (that you may even have to pay for) to purchase a gun is a violation of rights.

I think the Second Amendment says I can call Boeing and buy an F/A-18 Super Hornet, with missiles. So yes, I think asking for a background check or a name or literally anything other than "paper or plastic?" is a violation of my Second Amendment rights.

> Do you support removing the background check cost and ID requirement?

I think it is unconstitutional to impose a background check on the purchase of any weapon of war.

> If not then I don't really care if you think requiring an ID is suppressing voting since you support suppressing other rights with ID requirements.

Please don't put words in my mouth. Let's keep this civil.

> There are two hardships currently

You forgot "you have to actually get to the place to get the ID". This may not be the DMV but it may be deliberately chosen to reduce your personal likelihood to try. You may be harassed on the way. The reasons for this may be racial, religious, or political. There is a long, established history of this behavior in the United States specifically. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite... for inspiration.

You are still overlooking the part where the voter ID doesn't actually do anything useful. Making it easier to get doesn't change the fact that it provides no meaningful benefit while also infringing constitutional rights.

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

#463

Post by tptacek »

mistermann wrote: post #440
tptacek wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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" thin…

I'm not sure I understand what you're saying here. Which part of the risk/reward equation I've presented do you disagree with? That the reward is higher than I think it is? Can you be specific as to how many votes you think you'd be able to swing with a scheme targeting e-day voting? Or is it that you think the risk is lower?

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

#464

Post by ellopoppit »

daenz wrote: post #31

They make it sound so simple: Bribe the Judge of Elections who oversees everything. Dilute the vote tallies by using the voting machines to increment the votes for specific candidates. Certify that the fake results are correct. Lie if anybody asks. This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so easy?

>This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so easy?

Why does a conspiracy involving only 3 people seem so impossible to you?

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

#465

Post by giantg2 »

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 don't have to make people up. There there plenty of dead people on rhe registry. Although they are supposedly doing better about that lately.

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

#466

Post by giantg2 »

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…

With registered voter turnout typically around 50% or less, you wouldn't need to exceed 100%.

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

#467

Post by dismantlethesun »

hef19898 wrote: post #379
dismantlethesun wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Hundreds of humans who can all work for a single individual or organization. Without any additional rules, adding more people to supervise is simply security theater.

Note, I am not a general proponent of electronic voting machines either. They can easily make fraud easier by reducing the number of people to bribe to the few engineers with access to the blackbox code and the few officials who certify that the code is valid and was used on Election Day.

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

#468

Post by happyopossum »

tptacek wrote: post #393
darawk wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Myers acknowledged in court that on almost every Election Day, Myers transported Beren to the polling station to open the polls. During the drive to the polling station, Myers would advise Beren which candidates he was supporting so that Beren knew which candidates should be receiving fraudulent votes. Inside the polling place and while the polls were open, Beren would advise actual in-person voters to support Myer…

and also cast fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates on behalf of voters she knew would not or did not physically appear at the polls. Obviously, I believe this actually happened. But: how? What is Philadelphia not doing that we do in Chicago? You couldn't do this here; it's hard for me to even imagine how someone could walk into a precinct and cast multiple votes. And how would they cast their se…

Unless you're checking IDs, yeah - a single person could drop in a dozen signatures that all look different enough to fool a poll taker. I don't see how you're so incredulous here - a person with access to ballots filled them out and literally stuffed them in a box, it's not difficult!

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

#469

Post by the_cat_kittles »

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…

you just said a bunch of stuff in what you probably think is a "fair and balanced" voice, but you didnt offer anything in the way of support. not to mention empirically wrong on the justice system.

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

#470

Post by happyopossum »

tptacek wrote: post #349
shkkmo wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From an earlier press release: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/former-philadelphia-judge-ele... > Demuro fraudulently stuffed the ballot box by literally standing in a voting booth and voting over and over, as fast as he could, while he thought the coast was clear TFA explains the other case was nepotism enabled conspiracy: > Beren, who was charged separately and pleaded guilty in October 2021, was the de facto Judge…

That's something else you couldn't do in a Chicagoland election. You could take a big stack of ballots to a booth and fill them out and file them, but at the end of the day when the polls closed, those ballots would have to match the number of pollbook registrations that used paper ballots. You can't just make those up; you can't vote provisionally with paper ballots, so all those ballots would require pollbook regis…

I don't follow your problem here - there are a ton of people who are registered who never vote, you simply log the votes under the names of people who didn't show up.
Post reply on HN