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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

#541

Post by brightball »

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…

I’m in SC. Last election the machine printed out a paper copy of my ballot that I had to drop into a locked bin on the way out the door.

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

#542

Post by mgraczyk »

Banana699 wrote: post #512
mgraczyk wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like this is worse than what I've experienced in multiple US jurisdictions. Any of the random nominees can unilaterally discard my vote without detection. In the US, I physically insert my ballot in a sealed counting machine that the poll workers cannot tamper with without detection. Nobody who has access to my ballot knows which vote is mine, so nobody can censor me without detection.

If the 4 people counting the ballots are chosen truly at random after the voting is done, and they count the votes independently from each other, and there is some punishment (even a mild one, like a moderate fine) for disagreeing with the majority count, why would a counter discard your votes ? they have 0 gaurantess that others would discard the same number of votes so why risk being the minority report and getting…

Yes if they all count everyone, then they have to collude to discard my vote.

The better system is what you described, plus a box that I insert my ballot in that counts it. The electronic machines used in SF are basically the same as an additional random poll worker, with the added benefit that the machine's count can only be manipulated by physically inserting ballots into the machine.

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

#543

Post by rootusrootus »

ohgodplsno wrote: post #138
seoaeu wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Stuffing paper ballots is infinitely harder if your election system isn't entirely fucked. Multiple assessors, both from parties and individuals who just want to ensure that everything goes right, invalidation of the entire ballot box if any cheating is found post-votes, increase the amount of voting places so that scaling this up becomes impossible. Voting has been solved centuries ago. And voting machines will neve…

> Voting has been solved centuries ago.

Yes, but then we threw in a huge wrench when we decided that votes needed to be secret, too.

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

#544

Post by ricudis »

hef19898 wrote: post #410
klipklop wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, because literally every other true democracy on Earth has found a way to keep elections safe and anonymous. You don't need to to be able to trace ballots back to voters actually I'd argue being ablr to do so is deeply undemocratic. The formula is simple: Central, automatic voter registration, easy access to ID cards (the general one, not a voter Id. You know, the thing most use to identify citizens instead of dri…

Large scale (e.g. to the point that actually matters) electoral fraud is invariably done through gerrymandering. It's also mostly legal in "literally every other true democracy on Earth", so it's usually considered as a legitimate part of the game, instead of what it really is: Fraud.

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

#545

Post by [deleted] »

thepasswordis wrote: post #139

In case you were curious for more info about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Myers_(Pennsylvania_po... >Michael Joseph "Ozzie" Myers (born May 4, 1943) is an American politician who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1976 to 1980. A member of the Democratic Party, Myers became involved in the Abscam scandal during his tenure in Congress and was later expelled from the House of Repres…

[deleted]

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

#546

Post by rootusrootus »

hef19898 wrote: post #266
tunesmith wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They didn't hack the machine. They actually voted on the machines multiple times. The same scheme would have worked with mechanical machines or paper ballots.

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…

> No idea how the US just fails at the most simple thing in a democracy, voting.

You're generalizing too far. Much of the US works just like you described for your local voting. The US has tens of thousands of voting precincts with their own rules. For better or worse.

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

#547

Post by tzs »

jandrese wrote: post #62
superb-owl wrote: post #4

Quoted post unavailable.

This is definitely going to be used as proof that Trump won in a landslide in 2020 and all of the poll watchers nationwide are in the (((Democrats))) pockets. > some straightforward cryptographic scheme Anybody who designs cryptographic systems is LOLing right now.

> Anybody who designs cryptographic systems is LOLing right now.

Ron Rivest and David Chaum are rather well known designers of cryptographic systems, and I don't think they would LOL at crytographic voting schemes considering that they have designed one [1].

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675726

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

#548

Post by rootusrootus »

hef19898 wrote: post #351
jaywalk wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would it be "impossible" to vote more than once when the volunteers who are enforcing that have been paid off to allow it to happen? That's exactly what happened in this case.

Sure, and with hundreds of those places, and at least 4 volunteers per place, just how many votes do you think you can stuff? Plus any statistically significant deviation will be spotted. But besides theory we never had more then the odd case affecting a handful of votes every handful of elections for almost 80 years, so history proofs that for all practical reasons it is 1) not happening 2) impossible to do at a sca…

You're rehashing literally the same exact argument we're having about US voting, it's not different. Some people think fraud is easy, some people say what you just did, that statistically it's very unlikely.

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

#549

Post by rootusrootus »

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.

It's fundamental to the country. We are a federal republic of states, and as such the real power lies with the states. The feds get the nukes, sure, but culturally we are reluctant to hand more power to the central government of a nation of 330 million people.

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

#550

Post by Izkata »

hef19898 wrote: post #375
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.

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…

> 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.

Nope, 8 states automatically mail ballots to all eligible voters: https://ballotpedia.org/All-mail_voting

Plus Illinois (and maybe others?) now has a permanent opt-in.

(Quick edit: More up-to-date source that removed the state labeled "temporary" from the previous source)

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