The people who have claimed for decades that there is rampant cheating have spent years and millions of dollars and have found so little that it actually proves the case against their claims. Further, it has been shown that what sounds like reasonable checking ends up preventing 100-200 legitimate votes for every one illegal vote prevented.
HN guidelines say not to get political, but it is hard to avoid in this case because it is one party which is claiming widespread voter fraud. Let's start with a simple case. Tell me which of these facts is not true:
* Donald Trump has claimed and continued to claim millions of illegal votes have been made against him, including millions by illegal aliens. The same claim, perhaps not using such large numbers, has been widely and frequently repeated by conservative media
* Donald Trump became president in 2017 and had the might and resources of the full federal government to root out voter fraud
* Donald Trump aggressively prosecutes his self-interests, and millions of illegal votes against him would be against his self-interest
* As president, it is not just in his personal interest but is part of his duty to ensure voting is fair
* Trump appointed Kris Kobach (more on him later), the AG of Kansas, to form a commission to get to the bottom of the rampant voter fraud
* Nothing of note was produced by the commission ... it just kind of petered out
One must conclude one of three things:
(1) Trump was negligent in his duties by not investigating the issue
(2) Trump or his subordinates were incompetent in their investigation of the issue
(3) Voter fraud is not common. I'll leave it to speculation whether this was an honest mistake on the part of conservatives or if they were lying for political gain
Read the wikipedia article about these issues relative to Kobach. Even before Trump, he was banging the drum as Sec of State for Kansas, claiming he knew of more than a hundred cases and asked for special powers to find the thousands of cases he knew were happening in Kansas. He was given authorization to do that investigation. How did it turn out? Start reading here:
> At that time, he "said he had identified more than 100 possible cases of double voting." Testifying during hearings on the bill, questioned by Rep. John Carmichael, Kobach was unable to cite a single other state that gives its secretary of state such authority.[153] By February 7, 2017, Kobach had filed nine cases and obtained six convictions. All were regarding cases of double voting; none would have been prevented by voter ID laws.[154][104][155] One case was dropped while two more remained pending. All six convictions involved older citizens, including four white Republican men and one woman, who were unaware that they had done anything wrong.
The rest of it is similar, and all confirmed only that voter fraud is rare. But worse than that is his tactics, which have been adopted by many states, disenfranchises 100x more legal voters than illegal voters it catches. And statistically, it disenfranchises Democrats in far greater proportion than Republican voters (35% vs 23% of the affected voters).
Here is another useful quote, along with a citation, on this topic from that same wikipedia entry:
> A Brennan Center for Justice report calculated that rates of actual voter fraud are between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent. The Center calculated that someone is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud.[156]
I’m not saying we have widespread voter fraud. My gut feeling is that we don’t. But I’m a very trusting person. I always believe people when they ask for money on the street because their car broke down. I don’t know how you can confidently say there isn’t meaningful voter fraud.
How would you even verify past elections? You can point to millions spent on commissions and lawyers, but those can’t go back and generate data that was never contemporaneously collected.
Think of it in terms of computer security. You had a telnet server exposed to the internet for years. You have no logs, and the machine got scrapped before you ever got access to it. How would you do a security audit to determine if anyone broke into the server? You could spend millions on a commission and have the commission declare there was no security breach, but that would be for show, right?
You say people don’t look too hard for tax evasion, but people don’t look very hard for voter fraud as the voting is happening. And by its nature it’s something that you can’t reliably look for after the election has happened.
I think you need to start with proposing how a person could fraudulently vote.
If you show up to the polling place, you need to list the name and address of a registered voter in that district. How do you know this information?
If you use a relative or acquaintance whose name and address you know they're registered at, when they show up to vote it will be noted that they have already voted. They can then put in their preliminary ballot, and presumably their signature will more closely match the fraudulent one and the real one will be counted.
There are enough basic hurdles to this that I don't see how it can even be done at scale.
The official website says they collect either a driver's license number, state ID number, or the last 4 digits of your Social Security number. With that it should be trivial to flag potentially fraudulent applications for further investigation.
Do you have a source that says they don't use that information for verification?
"An official list of citizens to check citizenship status against does not exist. If the required information for voter registration is included – name; address; date of birth; a signature attesting to the truth of the information provided on the application; and an indication in the box confirming the individual is a U.S. citizen – the person must be added to the voter registration file. Modifying state law would require an act of the state legislature, and federal law, an act of Congress. Neither the Secretary of State nor the county auditor has lawmaking authority."
> That does say anyone can challenge a registration.
Yes, it does. But who and how is someone going to challenge 100,000 registrations? This issue was brought up in the paper, and people objected to it saying such was an invasion of privacy.
I always wondered (Clearly Not North America) How does one get on a list anyways? I would imagine getting on a list fraudlently leaves paper trail and this would have been discovered in 5 minutes retroactively, but I'm still curious.
When you register to vote, you give your address as well as proof of eligibility to vote. That address is used to assign you a polling place, and also as an additional piece of data needed in order to filter out fakers. Your voting eligibility is checked before being added to the list, which also mitigates fakers.
If you're trying to register in someone else's name, you have to pray that they don't register themselves or show up to the polls to vote. That's a gamble which prevents systematic individual voter fraud.
Yes, it's unlikely that people are illegally voting in person in large numbers. It is relatively easy to do so, and the risk is relatively low, if you approach it intelligently (e.g. vote as someone who is registered, but highly unlikely to vote -- even if they do vote, you're highly unlikely to be caught anyway). However, there's just no incentive for individuals to do so, because the reward is very low: each individual's vote is really worth very little, and an individual fraudulent voter does not benefit from it enough to counterbalance the risk.
On the other hand, there are other ways for people to steal elections. For example, you can steal mail-in ballots from mailboxes, fill them, and covertly drop them in. It's particularly easy to do in states where all ballots are mail-in by default. The risk-reward calculation is different, because now one organized person can cast dozens, or hundreds of fraudulent votes, instead of just one.
In other states, you don't even need to steal them: you can just knock on the door, ask people for ballots (or buy them, many people will happily sell their right to vote for $20, because it's worthless to them), fill them in, and drop them off completely in the open. Of course, the stealing/buying and filling in the ballots is illegal, but since this happens in private, it's much harder to detect and prosecute. That's why most states disallow dropping off votes for third parties, but some states inexplicably allow it.
There are multiple recent cases, where people were convicted for schemes like that, e.g State of Arizona v. Guillermina Fuentes, Texas v. Monica Mendez, Michigan v. Trenae Rainey, U.S. v. Kim Phuong Taylor, and more. Since these are only the cases where conviction was secured, the true number is much higher.
Buying ballots on a large scale seems difficult to me, because you have to keep a large group of strangers from talking. They will brag to their friends and family members and the information will come out. I can only imagine people buying a few ballots from their apolitical family members.
So... For each election, I have to register anew and the agency in charge has a backoffice is cross-checking this against... something? I guess they would first look if I was voting the last time? What if my birth certificate or whatever is from a different place. Do they assume I'm not risking using a forgery over politics (it's a fair assumption I would say)?
My original birth certificate was old and had decayed, so I wanted a new one. I googled "how do I get a copy of my birth certificate", followed the instructions, and received a brand new certificate.
(I was a bit concerned because the hospital I was born in had been razed and the whole area redeveloped 50 years ago, but there was no problem.)
A couple weeks ago I went to the nearest DMV and got a RealID. It took 15 minutes. (The RealID is proof of citizenship and residency.)
The DMV people and the people in the passport office are very helpful in how to get the necessary proof.
>The DMV people and the people in the passport office are very helpful in how to get the necessary proof.
That's nice and matches my obviously-not-north-american experience. Have you considered that you are not the target audience of the voter suppression because of something ?
No. You register once and that applies to all future elections (at least until you update your registration for whatever reason, e.g. because you changed addresses).
> and the agency in charge has a backoffice is cross-checking this against... something?
Against the state's voter registration database, usually maintained by that state's Secretary of State or equivalent.
> What if my birth certificate or whatever is from a different place.
If the birth certificate is from somewhere within the US, then validating the birth certificate is usually just a matter of contacting the county clerk where you were born. If it's from somewhere outside the US, then you ain't eligible to vote anyway unless you've gone through the process of becoming a naturalized citizen — in which case you'd have more appropriate identifying documents that you'd use in place of your birth certificate.
>If it's from somewhere outside the US, then you ain't eligible to vote anyway unless you've gone through the process of becoming a naturalized citizen
It's nitpicking, but you can be a citizen by birth without either having a birth certificate from a country you are citizen of and without naturalizing, but you will have some other document in that case too.
>Against the state's voter registration database, usually maintained by that state's Secretary of State or equivalent.
Isn't it circular? To be in the database you are checked against the database?
The people who have claimed for decades that there is rampant cheating have spent years and millions of dollars and have found so little that it actually proves the case against their claims. Further, it has been shown that what sounds like reasonable checking ends up preventing 100-200 legitimate votes for every one illegal vote prevented.
HN guidelines say not to get political, but it is hard to avoid in this case because it is one party which is claiming widespread voter fraud. Let's start with a simple case. Tell me which of these facts is not true:
One must conclude one of three things: Read the wikipedia article about these issues relative to Kobach. Even before Trump, he was banging the drum as Sec of State for Kansas, claiming he knew of more than a hundred cases and asked for special powers to find the thousands of cases he knew were happening in Kansas. He was given authorization to do that investigation. How did it turn out? Start reading here:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kris_Kobach#Voter_fraud_claims
Quoting a bit of it:
> At that time, he "said he had identified more than 100 possible cases of double voting." Testifying during hearings on the bill, questioned by Rep. John Carmichael, Kobach was unable to cite a single other state that gives its secretary of state such authority.[153] By February 7, 2017, Kobach had filed nine cases and obtained six convictions. All were regarding cases of double voting; none would have been prevented by voter ID laws.[154][104][155] One case was dropped while two more remained pending. All six convictions involved older citizens, including four white Republican men and one woman, who were unaware that they had done anything wrong.
The rest of it is similar, and all confirmed only that voter fraud is rare. But worse than that is his tactics, which have been adopted by many states, disenfranchises 100x more legal voters than illegal voters it catches. And statistically, it disenfranchises Democrats in far greater proportion than Republican voters (35% vs 23% of the affected voters).
Here is another useful quote, along with a citation, on this topic from that same wikipedia entry:
> A Brennan Center for Justice report calculated that rates of actual voter fraud are between 0.00004 percent and 0.0009 percent. The Center calculated that someone is more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit voter fraud.[156]