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

justice.gov

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

#501

Post by girvo »

LAC-Tech wrote: post #495
kortilla wrote: post #459

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is it possible that the solutions in other countries are not optimal?

No, every other country outside the US is the best at everything. That's why every American is desperate to make a better life for themselves in the EU, Australia, New Zealand and Canada while the reverse almost never happens.

You’re right, the reverse, ie “every Australian (etc)” wanting to make a better life for themselves in the US does never happen.

You can’t start your topic broad “every American” and then use the much less broad amount of immigrants to “prove” your point.

Because “every American” means I can’t bring up the non-zero amount of Americans that do emigrate elsewhere.

Your entire argument is in bad faith.

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

#502

Post by GauntletWizard »

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #444
all2 wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are people who did this for the 2020 elections. They found voters registered to empty lots all over Arizona. Steven Crowder, I think the guys name was.

Not sure on that specific claim, but every one of those type of "fraud claims" I've looked into turn out to be false and full of errors in how they used the information they had to try to prove their claims. An example from Arizona - not sure if the same one as Crowder, not going to watch YT videos on this topic - if it's important enough, write it up and publish it with references and proper proof that can be replic…

And get rejected from publications that didn't bother to do the research themselves but "know" that Voter Fraud is a myth? No thanks.

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

#503

Post by seoaeu »

hef19898 wrote: post #434
r00fus wrote: post #428

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Having two rounds is by definition not first past the post. And in fact that is the difference that makes it possible in France for third and fourth parties to get non-trivial support in the first round.

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

#504

Post by hef19898 »

tomp wrote: post #500
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…

Most other democratic countries (1) require photo IDs for voting, and (2) don’t support postal voting at scale. Either (1) or (2) not being true makes elections way less secure.

Germany has pretty liberal mail im voting, we had a bunch electuons during Covid with obvious increases of mail in voting. And we don't need IDs. We do have automatic and central "voter registration" (as basis to get the mandatory ID among other things).

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

#505

Post by eropple »

lp0_on_fire wrote: post #333
adamrezich wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Now consider the intentional difficulty of actually getting to offices that can issue those documents, during working hours, and so on and so forth. Many people in many low-wage jobs can't just leave for the afternoon to catch the correct bus to catch the connecting bus to go get identification to vote.

The money is part of it, but the time is another, and the (intentional) roadblocks put into place to hinder citizens are never being argued for in good faith.

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

#506

Post by speeder »

unclebucknasty wrote: post #488
dangoor wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Georgia replaced their machines with ones that have paper trails.

Good. I never understood a rationale for not having a paper trail.

I am from Brazil, our current president been trying for years to introduce a paper trail, but the congress politicians (of all parties mind you, it is not a partisan thing) and the election judges are happy to find more and more reasons to block the effort.

Meanwhile the few politicians that DID attempt to do go along with this effort... died. Maybe they "died", who knows.

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

#507

Post by gnfurlong »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #219
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…

> I don't even know how you'd generate fake votes in the first place > You can't just make people up! > You certainly can't just make up a final tally > the paper ballots have to match up It seems you live in an area with auditable physical copies of the poll receipts. Good. That should be the standard. But 5 states still don't do that: https://www.axios.com/2018/02/16/five-states-without-paper-t... And I seem to rec…

Delaware definitely replaced their voting machines after that article was published. I think in 2020.

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

#508

Post by extropy »

stretchwithme wrote: post #419
ncmncm wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

California was one of those places until Kamala Harris fixed it. No doubt the machines were sold off to one of those. Should have scrapped them.

How did she fix it?

The machine prints a paper ballot that is considered the actual vote. Any electronic copy is just a counting optimization.

https://www.wired.com/2003/11/e-votes-must-leave-a-paper-tra...

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

#509

Post by [deleted] »

dmix wrote: post #332
BitwiseFool wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#510

Post by csee »

seoaeu wrote: post #108
routerl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dilute the vote tallies by using the voting machines to increment the votes for specific candidates > Why is it so easy? I don't know, it doesn't seem easy to me. I mean, it seems like the result of a ton of long-term planning to implement processes that allow each instance of this to be easy. But the fight against electronic voting machines was fierce, and took a long time. We lost, by the way.

Stuffing paper ballots into a box or tapping the screen of an electronic voting machine are both very easy. This stuff has to be fixed at a higher level, like by making sure the folks running the precinct aren’t corrupt or by having a neutral observer present

It's not about actual vulnerabilities (although it may also be), it is about the general public's confidence in the legitimacy of the election. Voting machines do not instill confidence, and that is a bad thing for a democracy. I don't care about the microcosm of improved efficiency. That's not the thing to try to make ultra efficient at the cost of legitimacy.
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