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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

#601

Post by hef19898 »

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 French presidential election got results within hours of closings, as does Germany in every election cycle. Without voring machines. How? Tons of ballot stations that count individually. Those preliminary results are recounted before it is official, usually without any deviations.

I agree so, that if a system isn't set up that way, early results should not be important.

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

#603

Post by tgb »

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…

I was a machine operator in the 2020 election in Philadelphia. It’s as you describe, everyone there (4-6 people) have to sign off at the end of the night on the totals. Two people are specifically one from each of the major parties, so it should be bipartisan. The numbers from the machine have to add up to the number of voters in the book. You’d need multiple accomplices to hide the mismatch, at least three people I think? Even then, you’d have to write down the names of who “voted” so it could come to light if any of those voters checked and saw that they had an unexpected vote. The machines did change so it may have been easier before.

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

#604

Post by hef19898 »

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.

>> Unfortunately it has yet to be demonstrated that it can be done well, let alone perfectly.

Maybe in the US, a lot of places do it just fine so.

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

#605

Post by tzs »

maxerickson wrote: post #571
tzs wrote: post #536

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a solved problem: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675726

I am no expert and so will not argue stridently, but are they really easy to use? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scantegrity looks sort of complicated.

For the voter who just wants to vote and leaves it to others to do any auditing, they simply take their ballot into the booth and fill in the bubble next to the option they want to vote for. It looks just like normal optical scan voting except filling the oval with the provided pen reveals a code instead of completely blackening the oval.

For the voter who wants to check later that their vote was included correctly in the total they have to also to note the codes that are revealed when they fill the bubbles.

Voters that wish to check that the have not received a rigged ballot can ask for two ballots, and then pick one of the two at random and reveal all the codes before going into the booth and using the other to actually vote with. They can afterwards look up all the codes on that first valid to verify they are all valid. This actually just shows that the ballot they picked to verify with instead of vote with was not rigged, but someone trying to slip in rigged ballots has a 50/50 chance of being caught each time a voter asks to do such a check.

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

#606

Post by nverno »

jessfyi wrote: post #296

Quoted post unavailable.

I don't see this as a partisan issue. The same motivations exist for anyone in their position to commit fraud. I doubt people of one political tribe are any more immune to them than the those of another. Perhaps it is more likely for fraud to occur from a minority party given they are less likely to succeed without it.

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

#607

Post by joecool1029 »

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…

>But 5 states still don't do that:

Always bugged me too, but the good news is dirty jerz just got new machines that are auditable this year. Just voted yesterday in primaries and the machines print a paper ballot with answers ready to review. Before it drops into a lockbox, it gives you a final chance to accept or reject what is printed.

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

#608

Post by BeFlatXIII »

xadhominemx wrote: post #486
the_snooze wrote: post #278

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stuffing mail ballots makes zero sense if you're actually trying to tilt elections in your favor. It requires too much effort and conspiracy to get past the procedure you describe. Your crime-ing efforts are better off throwing away your opponents' mail ballots.

No, because it’s easy to check if your vote has been registered. If someone threw away a ton of ballots, people would notice.

They're not thrown away in the dumpster instead of fed to the counting machine. They're discarded as invalid over "signature doesn't match" and legal nit-picking. It's another case of regulatory rules being used to stop competition instead of improving market/election integrity.

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

#609

Post by skissane »

mulmen wrote: post #583
skissane wrote: post #493

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Maybe this NY Times article isn't biased and is simply reporting on the data. I don't find "NY Times liberals" to be a compelling refutation of the assertion that the Republican party might be good at voter suppression. I don’t think you understand my point about bias. Let me put it this way - the fact that the conservative majority of SCOTUS failed to endorse Trump’s claims about the 2020 elections - in spite of t…

> Similarly, no doubt voter suppression sometimes happens, but it seems unlikely it happens on a sufficient scale to change national demographic trends in voting, and there is no good evidence that it does. This is where we disagree. There is longstanding evidence for exactly this. It stretches back literally centuries. There is no evidence of widespread voter fraud . There is clear, established evidence of ongoing,…

There is certainly a history in the US of voting suppression targeted at racial minorities, especially African-Americans. (And although I am indeed not an American, my own country also has a history of racial discrimination in voting, also within living memory–the US is less unique in that regard that you seem to think it is.)

However, if working class non-Hispanic whites appear to have been switching, over the last several elections, from Democrats to Republicans – it isn't clear how voter suppression explains that particular change. Your theory suggests that working class non-Hispanic whites haven't changed their collective political allegiance at all, it is simply that Republicans have managed to selectively suppress their vote, but only of those among them who vote Democrat. I don't think that's very plausible – it isn't consistent with the observed changes in turnout figures. And a history of electoral discrimination against racial minorities isn't very relevant to that theory either, since to explain this it would require, not voter suppression against a racial minority, but rather large-scale politically-selective voter suppression against the historical ethnic/racial majority, which is a rather different thing.

And, it isn't just non-Hispanic whites. The biggest swing towards Trump between 2016 and 2020 was in Laredo, Texas–27.7 percentage points. [0] And Laredo is over 95% Hispanic, indeed the most Hispanic city in the United States outside of Puerto Rico. It is also not a rich city by any measure – 30% of its population are below the poverty line. So, it looks like a significant chunk of Hispanic people in Laredo (and elsewhere in southern Texas) – many of whom would be of lower socioeconomic status – decided to switch their vote to Republican, or turnout for the first time for the GOP, in 2020. And the idea that, instead, Republicans just worked out how to suppress Democrats from voting, is inconsistent with the fact that turnout actually increased in Webb County from 2016 to 2020. [1]

[0] https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/07/upshot/trump-election-vot...

[1] https://www.sos.state.tx.us/elections/historical/webb.shtml

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

#610

Post by civilized »

blindmute wrote: post #597

Quoted post unavailable.

It's not that there was no fraud in the 2020 election; just that there was not enough for even Republican county and state officials and Trump-appointed judges to even consider overturning the results ;)
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