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

521–530 of 889 posts

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

#521

Post by rootusrootus »

upsidesinclude wrote: post #306
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…

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.

My state is exclusively postal voting, and checks signatures. If the deviation is too great, the reject the ballot. Has happened to my wife. Inconvenient, but it's a non-trivial hurdle.

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

#522

Post by tptacek »

happyopossum wrote: post #470
tptacek wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All at the end of the evening? If you do it in the middle of the day, and the actual voter shows up, there's a good chance you're spending the night in Cook County Jail.

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

#523

Post by tzs »

serf wrote: post #497
unclebucknasty wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

it's a tasty option when done perfectly, in a perfect world, in a vacuum and the voters are perfectly spherical cows. Counting ballots by hand sucks. Moving paper ledgers physically sucks. Unfortunately it has yet to be demonstrated that it can be done well, let alone perfectly.

It is possible to have paper ballots that can be counted by machine for fast results, but that can also be published afterwards so that anybody can check the count, and that allow individual voters to check to see if their vote was counted correctly (but not to prove to someone else how they voted--this is called coercion-resistance), using "fill in the bubble" ballots that can be counted by widely available inexpensive optical scanner with the only new equipment needed at the polling place being special pens for marking the ballots, with all the cryptographic magic that that allows the verifiability and public counting being in the ballots themselves and put their when they are printed. For voters that aren't interested in verifying later that their own vote was correctly counted, they can ignore all that and it appears just like a regular "fill in the bubbles" process that many places have used for decades.

Here's a paper with details in PDF form [1], and here it is in HTML [2]. Here's a paper proving that it is coercion-resistant [3]. Here's a Wikipedia article [4] on it.

Voting systems with these kind of verification/auditing capabilities are called "end-to-end auditable" or "end-to-end voter verifiable" systems, and here is some information on them in general [5].

[1] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...

[2] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/event/evt08/tech/full_papers/c...

[3] https://eprint.iacr.org/2010/502.pdf

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity

[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/End-to-end_auditable_voting_sy...

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

#524

Post by rootusrootus »

mistermann wrote: post #427
LocalPCGuy wrote: post #413

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All told those cases total less than 200 votes. No one (edit: to be clear - no reasonable folk) claims fraud doesn't happen. Just not on the scale that has been claimed at times, and not enough to tip an election with millions of votes. Could a coordinated attack swing a local race, maybe. But as seen by the links you provided, there are people watching for these kinds of fraud, and people get caught all the time, ev…

> No one claims fraud doesn't happen. False. I've encountered easily thousands of people who make such claims on the internet. You might then say "No officials make such claims" - here you're technically correct, but somewhat misinformative: the people in such situations have public relations professionals at their disposal, and also tend to have years of experience (or at least observation) of how to do PR. When ele…

Nobody likes to get down to the details of actual fraud events, really. Neither side. Democrats because they don't believe it happens often. Republicans because when it does happen, 9 times out of 10 the perp turns out to be a Republican. This has been the amusing reality for years now.

I personally think that fraud of a significant scale in a country with thousands of different voting systems is basically impossible to hide, and a lot of people are looking for it. We take many steps to reduce that risk. And when we catch someone trying, we should slap them down hard as an example to others.

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

#525

Post by vxNsr »

rlewkov wrote: post #516
unclebucknasty wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Assuming your a member of a union Before election Union boss: "we expect everyone to vote for candidate X" After election Union boss: "show me your vote receipt"

The receipt is kept with the machine. I’ve never been anywhere where they give you proof of who YOU voted for.

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

#526

Post by [deleted] »

serf wrote: post #497
unclebucknasty wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

it's a tasty option when done perfectly, in a perfect world, in a vacuum and the voters are perfectly spherical cows. Counting ballots by hand sucks. Moving paper ledgers physically sucks. Unfortunately it has yet to be demonstrated that it can be done well, let alone perfectly.

[deleted]

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

#527

Post by rootusrootus »

tomp wrote: post #518
rootusrootus wrote: post #513

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the US would stop using photo IDs as a bludgeon to keep "the wrong people" from voting, everyone could get on board with requiring it. That has always been the real blocker. I do like postal mail. I've yet to see a convincing argument that the coercion risk is substantial enough to offset the other benefits. Voting slowly at my living room table is awesome .

Keeping “wrong people” from voting is essentially half of election “security”. It’s not just coercion risk. It’s the whole chain of custody.

I meant brown people, but I expect you know that.

Give the FEC the power to issue photo ID for voting. Legislate that it is only valid for that purpose and any other use is illegal. Send out census-style teams to track down every citizen and issue them a card, free of charge.

Of course, there are all sorts of problems with this that are entirely self-inflicted. Someone will oppose a national ID, even if we already have that. Someone else will point out that the states legally get to make their own voting rules, and they're right. This isn't a problem anyone actually wants to solve. Democrats want to make it easier to vote, Republicans want to make it harder. It's like every other tribal issue, neither side will give an inch because they fear the other side will take a mile.

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

#528

Post by larkost »

all2 wrote: post #373
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?

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.

You mean that as absentee ballots started to be counted (after the in-person ones, as required by Republican officials), that the polls started to swing just as everyone (including then-President Trump) had expected before the election? Is that what you mean?

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

#529

Post by AustinDev »

sgarman wrote: post #415
AustinDev wrote: post #368

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's some anecdata for you... I went to a relatively elite private high school on the east coast. Where I and several other people fixed elections through various methods for clubs and school offices. 2 of 5 people that were in on it now hold public elected office one at the state level and one at the federal level the other three, myself included, do not hold public office. I believe this behavior is the norm. I g…

So out them?

I have no proof they're still doing that now. That'd be insane and reputation ruining for myself if they are indeed legitimately elected. Dynasties work in American politics especially at the local level.

I've been asked to work on at least 2 of their campaigns at different times but It's not been something I'm interested in anymore. Me and the other folks not in public office now all came from families that could barely afford to send their children to that school, I nearly got pulled out twice due to financial strain. I think we were used as the fall people if the group ever got caught because the anointed ones would never get in trouble.

Since then, I've served in the military for the US for 6 years (to pay for college) and feel I've done my part to pay back my debts to society.

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

#530

Post by rootusrootus »

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...

> 100 years ago

Pretty sure that quite a lot has changed since 1922, including damn near every single adult alive.

Post reply on HN