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

551–560 of 889 posts

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

#551

Post by faddypaddy34 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #527
tomp wrote: post #518

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

Voter id laws have been shown to increase voter turn out in the United States. Most states give free IDs for voting. It is a federal law that you must show an ID to register. Stop with this misinformed nonsense that there is a crazy conspiracy to keep "brown" people from voting. Maybe once yes but not for awhile.

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

#552

Post by tzs »

anderskaseorg wrote: post #121
superb-owl wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about inventing a new method for encryption. I'm talking about something along the lines of: * Every registered voter gets an encryption key * When you vote, your vote is encrypted with the key * A list of everyone who voted, along with their encrypted vote, is semi-publicly available (like current voter registration lists [1]) * Anyone can check who they're registered as having voted for (but the enc…

The contradiction at the heart of the problem with cryptographically verifiable elections is that, if you make it possible for a voter to prove to others how they voted, you make it possible for their vote to be bought or coerced. There are zero-knowledge cryptographic constructions that may theoretically allow you to prove things to a voter without allowing them to prove it to others. But doing this in practice with…

Your mention of personal devices getting hacked and stolen suggests you are only thinking of cryptographic voting systems that use electronic devices for the cryptographic interaction with the voter.

There are paper-based cryptographic systems for end-to-end verifiable elections. There are no personal devices to hack or steal in such systems.

See the links in this comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31675726

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

#553

Post by ricudis »

WillPostForFood wrote: post #476
tptacek wrote: post #369

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It makes sense when you write it that way, but not in reality. There is a risk/reward to doing this. Part of your premise is that you can know when an election is going to come down to 6 votes. But in fact Meeks vs. Hart was newsworthy because results like that are incredibly rare. 99 times out of 100, if you try to juke the election, you're putting yourself at pretty grave legal risk and accomplishing absolutely not…

Part of your premise is that you can know when an election is going to come down to 6 votes. Assuming that's true, you just need to know when it is going to be close, and that only requires polling, not prescience. https://www.thegazette.com/article/polling-shows-iowa-2nd-di... Slightly more than two months before Iowans begin voting, polling shows the open-seat race in the U.S. House 2nd District as a dead heat. In…

In Greece, we've seen quite a lot of cases where polling failed spectacularly to detect even large vote swings. Given that those polls are usually being done by organizations closely tied to political parties, I guess they weren't just incompetent. So there's probably quite a lot of error margin there.

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

#554

Post by rootusrootus »

xienze wrote: post #438
ModernMech wrote: post #384

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US. This is not the argument people are making, so I hope you aren’t making it intentionally. No one is saying that requiring voting id is inherently racist. The argument is that requiring voting id without a commensurate effort to make sure everyone has voter id ends up disproportionately affecting minorities. These efforts are subsequently dubbed…

> The argument is that requiring voting id without a commensurate effort to make sure everyone has voter id ends up disproportionately affecting minorities. Democrats have never negotiated in good faith over the requirement to make IDs available though whenever the debate is brought up. States like Wisconsin require voter ID and will make an ID for voting available for free, through the mail, and yet there is still o…

It's a pretty standard tribal division, much like abortion and everything else. Each side refuses reasonable compromises because they perceive that it would be a slippery slope allowing the other side to ultimately prevail.

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

#555

Post by rootusrootus »

rhino369 wrote: post #131
mmaurizi wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Judge of Elections" in PA is an elected position for running the polling place for a precinct on election day. It's an extremely low-level position that only involves work on 2 days of the year. It's not a "judge" in the sense someone who oversees a criminal or civil trial.

I'm surprised it is even elected. I was an election judge when I was 18 in Illinois as part of high school project. You just sign up and attend a 2 hour class. It was fun. The other judge at my poll location was a guy who served in the Wehrmacht during WWII (was conscripted at age 14). But I easily could have stuffed the box. Most people don't vote. At 7:45pm, you could just vote for people who didn't show up. Nobody…

> But I easily could have stuffed the box.

...

> Nobody but the other judge would have the chance of stopping you.

Those ought to contradict each other. We have multiple judges for exactly this reason. It is a sincerely tall order to get even one other judge, especially when it's required to be from the opposing party, to agree to your ballot stuffing. You're likely to end up prosecuted the moment you pose the question, before you get anywhere near stuffing a box.

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

#556

Post by rootusrootus »

robocat wrote: post #331
rhino369 wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm surprised it is even elected. I was an election judge when I was 18 in Illinois as part of high school project. You just sign up and attend a 2 hour class. It was fun. The other judge at my poll location was a guy who served in the Wehrmacht during WWII (was conscripted at age 14). But I easily could have stuffed the box. Most people don't vote. At 7:45pm, you could just vote for people who didn't show up. Nobody…

The voter list should contain canaries and honeypots. Known dead people or fake people, and if they vote then fraud has been detected.

Clever idea. The problem, of course, is that this was never an issue that could be solved with more facts. Conspiracy theories are immune to that.

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

#557

Post by Izkata »

faddypaddy34 wrote: post #551
rootusrootus wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

Voter id laws have been shown to increase voter turn out in the United States. Most states give free IDs for voting. It is a federal law that you must show an ID to register. Stop with this misinformed nonsense that there is a crazy conspiracy to keep "brown" people from voting. Maybe once yes but not for awhile.

Related, this funny/sad video from 6 years ago about actually asking black people about getting IDs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3JGmKHrWKMQ (4 minutes long)

Summary: They pretty much all responded "whoever thinks we don't have / can't get IDs is ignorant and probably a bit racist".

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

#558

Post by rootusrootus »

GauntletWizard wrote: post #502
LocalPCGuy wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure on that specific claim, but every one of those type of "fraud claims" I've looked into turn out to be false and full of errors in how they used the information they had to try to prove their claims. An example from Arizona - not sure if the same one as Crowder, not going to watch YT videos on this topic - if it's important enough, write it up and publish it with references and proper proof that can be replic…

And get rejected from publications that didn't bother to do the research themselves but "know" that Voter Fraud is a myth? No thanks.

Then you correctly get identified as a conspiracy theorist, the system is working.

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

#559

Post by schnable »

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…

Philly has paper trail now, but only for the past couple years.

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

#560

Post by blackguardx »

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"

This is a weird caricature of how a union works. Unions protect workers from being fired by their employers so I’m not sure what a union “boss” could do to someone who upset them.
Post reply on HN