ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud • Hacker News Board

Re: ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud

#111

Post by luxuryballs » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 6:05 PM UTC

HEmanZ wrote: post #53

luxuryballs wrote: post #26

Well there's obviously at least some amount of fraud and a lot of people with eyes on it so finding it seems like the best course of action at the moment, mostly due to the latter since millions of people trusting the elections is pretty important AND if they are verifiably secure it prevents people from running their mouth about it and swaying anyone to distrust them (had to get ahead of it). But really if you compa…

So much of this noise tho bakes in the assumption that we weren’t already doing voter fraud detection. If my parents are a decent gauge, this is the entire lie the right wing is trying to push: that there has never been rails against voter fraud. That there isn’t a massive amount of machinery already preventing it. And, by acting like “oh now we’re doing something” and ignoring prior work it allows them to put on a c…

for the sake of the smart ones can we at least check? or how much intelligence does one need in order to qualify as a citizen worthy of trustable elections?

Re: ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud

#112

Post by [deleted] » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 6:08 PM UTC

SauciestGNU wrote: post #105

harimau777 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At this point I think they are already screwed. Just collaborating with MAGA has destroyed their credibility.

Anecdotally I was considering dropping my Washington Post subscription and instead paying for Reuters. Now I'm definitely not doing that.

[deleted]

Re: ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud

#113

Post by dweinus » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 6:16 PM UTC

Why is this flagged?

Re: ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud

#114

Post by ceejayoz » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 6:21 PM UTC

Covzire wrote: post #104

epistasis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making up things, and then saying others are being disinformed? California's elections are widely audited, observed, and secure. Stop spreading lies.

Really? How do you audit or control for who shows up to vote? Do you check some kind of government ID or can anyone simply vote by claiming they are who they say they are?

I can't speak for California, but here in my area of NY you show up, give your name and address, which they find in the registered voters list, and you sign on an iPad that gets checked against the signature on file. Then you get handed a ballot. By the local volunteers who are mostly people from the neighborhood, plus observers from both major parties. Your neighbors are there checking in alongside you.

Getting past all this risks years in jail for... an extra vote in a safely blue state.

None of this requires an ID, in part because in the US, there's no law that you have to have an ID in the first place. "Papers, please!" used to be a derogatory thing about totalitarian regimes.

(More practically, if we Dems were rigging elections, we'd win more often.)

Re: ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud

#115

Post by Forgeties79 » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 6:24 PM UTC

wrs wrote: post #63

Forgeties79 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not sure what you’re asking. All I’m saying is they keep saying they’re “going to prove it” and when they find no evidence, they don’t stop acting like they’re going to solve the problem that they know doesn’t exist. The investigations are a waste of time and money because they already decided it’s true. They don’t care what the results are.

I’m responding to the “quietly disbanded” part. Neither is true; they continue to loudly come up with new initiatives. I don’t even know that they “decided it’s true”, as that’s irrelevant to the strategy, which is just to maintain a continuous atmosphere of loud uncertainty.

The groups established to investigate. Not all initiatives related to it. Clearly the save act exists. Clearly they legislate based off this issue.

It seems you’re looking for the most binary, worst possible interpretation of my comment. I feel like what I’m saying is plenty clear at this point.

Re: ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud

#116

Post by FireBeyond » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 6:25 PM UTC

jzebedee wrote: post #28

croes wrote: post #21

Is ICE the correct agency for voter fraud?

No, of course not. They have zero domestic police authority for US citizens.

Meanwhile they run around pulling people over for "traffic violations" and then pulling a "Your taillights are out, and papers, please."

Re: ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud

#117

Post by epistasis » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 6:32 PM UTC

RajT88 wrote: post #108

epistasis wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(We're not supposed to talk about downvotes, but boy have I seen my comments fluctuate up and down at the top, which is highly unusual. In most web open forums I take part in, anything connected to this brings in lots of "new" users, some or many of which end up being bots. I upvoted you, for the record.)

Talking about social media strangeness. I've noticed on Facebook that when you make a comment on a political article, you will sometimes - within a minute or two - start getting failed login attempts or password reset attempts on your account. Given that your email address and phone are not visible unless you explicitly share them (and I use a pseudonym on FB), the implications are frankly chilling.

Could be coincidence, could be a data leak from Meta that wasn't reported, could be outside groups using LLMs to match profiles of text to external sources that do have your name...

It's a wild world out there in political technology, and I probably can't even guess what's going on with half of it.

Way back in the early 2010s I went to a data science meetup, way before facial recognition and face processing was easy, and found out that Facebook was tracking the faces in every photo, building databases of locations, times, and people out of it all, even for people without accounts, etc. And that was just a side project! 15 years ago!

For motivated groups operating without the usual bounds of being part of the US government, the sky is the limit in what they can do. Buying data from Thompson Reuters is really mild compared to what I'm sure is going on inside of PACs within the US. When you add in the state groups operating outside the US on US social networks with the goal of spreading distrust and disunity, I have zero doubt that it's possible somebody is scraping the replies to political articles and trying to take control of accounts that show any interest in politics, to use those accounts for other purposes because they appear to be valid accounts instead of bots.

Re: ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud

#118

Post by colpabar » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 6:46 PM UTC

cosmicgadget wrote: post #109

ktm5j wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This may be an unpopular opinion, but is this really the best way to respond here? Won't this just give them the opportunity to claim that California is doing this specifically to hide fraud? $125 mil is a drop in the bucket compared to ICE's budget, if they want to spend it like this why not just let them? Thomson Reuters has an excellent track record of being impartial/non-partisan.. maybe we could finally get past…

California passes a law to protect consumers from data brokers amidst the destruction of the CFPB. Californians individually make use of these protections. Magas: "That just confirms voter fraud!" At this point it is simply best to ignore what they are saying or would say.

nice zinger, but they can still vote, and ignoring them does not seem to be working.

Re: ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud

#119

Post by epistasis » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 6:49 PM UTC

Covzire wrote: post #104

epistasis wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are making up things, and then saying others are being disinformed? California's elections are widely audited, observed, and secure. Stop spreading lies.

Really? How do you audit or control for who shows up to vote? Do you check some kind of government ID or can anyone simply vote by claiming they are who they say they are?

Each California county maintains a list of registered voters. Every voter gets sent a ballot in the mail, but is also allowed to vote in person. The consequences of this are that every single ballot and voter are tracked carefully.

Additionally, a person can vote anywhere in a county, so all in-person voting sites maintain connectivity to that somebody doesn't go to multiple voting sites and vote multiple times, in addition to tracking the mail-in ballots.

When voting in person, you provide your name, address, and sometimes age, etc. in order to disambiguate you as the particular person.

Mail-in vote counting happens with outside observers watching, with verified signatures.

So the system protects against each registered voter only voting once.

Registration of voters is usually tied to driver's licenses, when you file a change of address you can check a box to have your registration updated. If you're a new voter, you can provide or drivers license, or if not, the county will follow up with you to obtain other information to ensure that you're not registered by other means and are in fact a real person with that name and address.

> anyone simply vote by claiming they are who they say they are?

Of course they can! That's only just and fair.

If you tried to steal somebody else's identity and vote as them, that would get flagged for multiple voting. Additionally, local political campaigns get lists of every registered voter, as well as which elections they voted in and party affiliation (if they chose one), which they use to campaign and knock on doors. Campaigns have sophisticated information systems to ensure that they don't bother the same voter multiple times, to indicate likelihood of voting and whether the canvasser thought the voter was going to vote for their candidate, etc. If there were a batch of fake voters somewhere, that would show up pretty quickly in these campaigning efforts.

Re: ICE to Pay Thomson Reuters $125M to Find Voter Fraud

#120

Post by wat10000 » Tue, Jul 21, 2026, 6:50 PM UTC

quickthrowman wrote: post #76

wat10000 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem is that everyone doesn't know this to be false. A substantial portion of the population "knows" it to be true.

> The problem is that everyone doesn't know this to be false. A substantial portion of the population "knows" it to be true. If they choose to believe a histrionic liar, that’s their problem. The rest of us don’t have to entertain their credulousness and ignorance. Repeating lies doesn’t make them true, it only makes credulous people believe it. Once the aggrieved-in-chief victim of the century is out of office, the…

To paraphrase a popular saying: if one of your countrymen believes a bunch of bullshit, they have a problem. If tens of millions of our countrymen believe a bunch of bullshit, we all have a problem.