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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

#591

Post by jbritton »

dpierce9 wrote: post #514
jbritton wrote: post #437

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tab…

Are you saying ballots were separated then transported to be counted? I don’t know of anywhere where that happens. In Detroit there were allegations that ballots were ‘left unattended under a table’ which amounted to actually meaning ‘most of the employees left a secure facility which was videotaped the entire time and live streamed’. Trump actual gained votes in Democratic Wayne County. I read all of the allegations…

I don’t claim fraud, but I do have procedural concerns.

I’m of the understanding that ballots stripped from their envelopes were transported to counting centers. Perhaps bribing one driver would be sufficient to swap 1000s of ballots and there would be no trail.

I find the following from https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2021/feb/05/gateway-pu...

“”” Only after ballots were validated were they delivered to the TCF Center for election workers to process and tabulate them.

Shane Trejo, a writer for the right-wing website Big League Politics, told the Gateway Pundit that he was at the TCF Center where he said he witnessed thousands of ballots being unloaded early Wednesday morning. "There were at least 50 boxes that I saw unloaded at 3:30 a.m.“””

It’s my understanding that the validating process results in the naked ballots being placed into boxes for delivery to a counting center.

The linked article debunks that the ballots were late, but that is not my concern.

I was going to write more about Georgia but then I came across this article which eliminated most of my concerns there. I don’t know why it took a whole year before this was printed though.

https://www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/investigators-locate-n...

I did see some of the audits, which mostly removed my concerns of cheating. However there were claims in Georgia of mail in ballots that appeared marked by computer and I knew there was going to be a court case on this, but I never saw any reporting on this case. The above article says there were never any such perfect ballots found.

I think the perfect ballot is where my fears come from. Where in the chain could you swap out ballots and put in generated ballots.

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

#592

Post by dahfizz »

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 post body was provided.

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

#593

Post by wrycoder »

oneplane wrote: post #577
extropy wrote: post #508

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That is how voting with electronics should be. It's great for entertainment/news etc to get early results but ultimately it doesn't matter if it takes a day or two with analog counting. Same day results really don't help with anything.

The printed paper "ballot" may not be what the voter intended.

There are multiple stories of electronic voting machines changing the vote on the screen. The voter corrects it, and the correct ballot is printed. But, if the voter misses the change, then an incorrect ballot is printed. Sometimes, the voter has to correct it more than once.

Here in New Hampshire, we use paper ballots marked with a felt tip pen. They are scanned with an optical reader, but it's straightforward to do a manual recount of the official paper ballots.

Electronic balloting machines are an invitation to programmatic fraud.

I attended a Free Software Foundation annual meeting some years ago. The assembled group was asked whether they preferred electronic voting systems over paper ballots. Not a single hand went up.

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

#594

Post by hef19898 »

Izkata wrote: post #550
hef19898 wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "temp…

I should have mentioned, I never talked about the US.

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

#595

Post by tomcatfish »

rootusrootus wrote: post #565
jaywalk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, it doesn’t happen often enough to undermine the integrity of elections in the aggregate. Ridiculous to just throw this out as if it's a concrete fact. Even changing the outcome of a Presidential election doesn't require any kind of sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign. Just enough well-placed ones where the vote will be close enough that the fraud doesn't have to be too large. I'm not saying it has or hasn't hap…

For all the conspiracy theorists out there who still think there were more than seven million fraudulent votes cast in 2020, I wish I could give them the opportunity to try and vote fraudulently, with no legal consequences. You can do whatever it takes (caveat: no violence) to get those fake votes in. Document everything you did, record it all, present it when you're done and there will be no legal repercussions. We'…

All you've done is add insult to a hypothetical and pretend it's a point of argument. I shouldn't be surprised though, because "talk is cheap"

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

#596

Post by r00fus »

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.

> France has FPTP

For the vast majority of it's existence, the 5th republic has had proportional representation in the legislature (only changed with Sarkozy, who instituted 2-round elections - IIRC).

Presidential has been 2-round for much longer, perhaps from the beginning of the 5th republic.

Straight FPTP as implemented in many places in the US allows plurality winners (ie, winners that don't get 50% of the votes), France's system does not.

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

#598

Post by wrycoder »

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"

It would be really bad if the voter got to keep the receipt, or even had the chance to image it.

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

#599

Post by BeFlatXIII »

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…

> a central registry of residents goes a long way in solving this.

Many US problems could be solved if Americans could get over our irrational fears about comprehensive databases. The boogeyman is already real. Let's be tracked in one auditable location instead of 36+ incomplete and contradictory databases where the contradictions can be used as "evidence" of fraud. The downsides are already here, let's acknowledge reality and then build systems to give us a chance at enjoying the benefits of centralized intelligence.

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