The USA threads the needle by simply not having verifiable voting. And it turns out it works pretty well. Despite countless hours and lawsuits dedicated to finding people who voted more than once, only a handful of cases have actually turned up.
It's not that there are no checks. You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. To vote more than once you'd have to pretend to be somebody else, in person, which means that if you're caught you will go to jail.
We could certainly do better, but thus far all efforts to defeat this non-problem are clearly targeted at making it harder for people to vote rather than any kind of election integrity.
- A front of queue, show ID of some sort (various accepted) to volunteer
- They scratch you from the list and hand you a paper scantron sheet
- Go to private booth, fill out scantron
- Go to exit, scan ballot (it scans and then drops into a locked box for manual tally later, if necessary)
The "easy" ways to vote fraudulently are also easily caught... fake ID documents, voting twice, etc.
For people who forget their ID or have address changes that haven't propagated through the voter roll, there is provisional voting - you do the same as above, but they keep the ballot in a separate pile and validate your eligibility to vote at a later time. IIRC, the voter gets a ticket # so they can check the voter portal later to see if the ballot was accepted.
As noted, the number of fraudulent votes are astonishingly small, given the amount of money spent on proving otherwise. The current GOP has spent 100s of millions or billions on proving wide-spread fraud and so far, all they've managed to prove a few voters, most of whom were actually GOP-leaning, have committed fraud (and most of them were caught day-of already).
> As noted, the number of fraudulent votes are astonishingly small, given the amount of money spent on proving otherwise
How would you even know? The fact that prosecutions for fraudulent voting are rare tells you nothing. Prosecutions for tax evasion are also rare. Does that mean nobody evades taxes? If you have a system that’s insecure, how would you even know when it’s been compromised?
Most of those 62 lawsuits were thrown out on procedural grounds, such as lack of standing (which I think was a bad reason: if the losing candidate doesn't have standing to challenge an allegedly fraudulent voting system, then who does?). But that means they never reached the fact-finding stage, so citing those cases as meaning "there was no fraud" is not supported by the evidence. The cases thrown out on procedural grounds only mean "no conclusion was reached on whether the facts alleged in the complaint were true".
They didn't give up, they appealed. Most of the appeals, as I recall, were also decided on procedural grounds, but by that time it was (IIRC) "this is moot, we're not going to overturn the result of an election that was decided last year".
If I've gotten any of my facts wrong, corrections (preferably with links) would be welcome — I don't have time right now to go dig up five-year-old news articles, I'm in the middle of a project.
> They didn't give up, they appealed. Most of the appeals, as I recall, were also decided on procedural grounds, but by that time it was (IIRC) "this is moot, we're not going to overturn the result of an election that was decided last year".
> If I've gotten any of my facts wrong, corrections (preferably with links) would be welcome
See "Post-Election Cases Decided on the Merits" in [1].
How do you reconcile the idea that voter fraud is common with the existence of so many cases decided on the merits against the plaintiffs precisely due to sheer lack of evidence? You'd think these cases with people looking so hard would've uncovered nontrivial fraud if it was common, no?
Unless there are others that reached the fact-finding stage, that's 10 out of 62, meaning 52 were not decided on the merits. So "most" being decided on procedural grounds is still correct, IMHO. But thanks for the link, that's useful info.
As for your "How do you reconcile ..." question, I'll assume that the summaries of those ten cases are correct (I don't have time to read all ten of them for myself), and look through them one by one:
First one, Trump v. Biden (Wis. Dec. 14, 2020): three out of four claims tossed for not being filed in a timely manner. Fourth claim, "that voters wrongfully declared themselves indefinitely confined", ruled against Trump because "Trump challenged the status of all voters who claimed an indefinitely confined status, rather than individual voters". Not expert enough on relevant law to know what that means, but it looks to me like this one was "your claim is overbroad and you can't prove it" rather than "your claim is false", and I don't understand how that case relates to vote fraud. (Perhaps someone more informed about relevant law can explain this one to me).
Second one, Trump v. Wis. Elecs. Comm’n (E.D. Wis. Dec. 12, 2020): Trump claimed that "Wisconsin officials violated his rights under the Electors Clause because said officials allegedly issued guidance on state election statutes that deviated significantly from the requirements of Wisconsin’s election statutes." Court ruled that "interpretations of election administration rules do not fall under the meaning of “Manner” in the Electors Clause" and even if they did, the officials had "acted consistently with, and as expressly authorized by, the Wisconsin Legislature". Again, I don't understand how this one specifically relates to vote fraud, it looks like an argument about whether laws were followed. Perhaps the laws being followed were highly relevant to vote fraud, but someone will have to explain that one to me as well.
Third, King v. Whitmer (E.D. Mich. Dec. 7, 2020): First part was a decision about whether the law was followed. "Second, the district court found the plaintiffs’ Equal Protection claim to be too speculative, finding no evidence that physical ballots were altered." This one is a case where the court said "you haven't presented evidence of fraud".
Fourth, Ward v. Jackson (Ariz. Sup. Ct., Maricopa Cnty. Dec. 4, 2020): This was a decision that the plaintiff showed insufficient evidence of fraud.
Fifth, Law v. Whitmer (Nev. Dist. Ct., Carson City Dec. 4, 2020): Plaintiffs failed to prove "that there had been either a voting device malfunction or the counting of illegal/improper votes in a manner sufficient to raise reasonable doubt as to the election’s outcome." Actual decision on the merits saying "not enough evidence of fraud".
Sixth, Donald J. Trump for President v. Boockvar (M.D. Pa. Nov. 21, 2020): Court found that Trump lacked standing, but decided on the merits of his case. "The district court held that different counties implementing different types of notice-and-cure policies (many implementing none) did not violate the Equal Protection Clause because the clause does not require complete equality in all situations—“a classification resulting in ‘some inequality’ will be upheld unless it is based on an inherently suspect characteristic or ‘jeopardizes the exercise of a fundamental right.’”" Again, unless I'm misunderstanding the case, not a decision about "you didn't show evidence of fruad", but rather about whether election law was followed correctly. (If I understand right, "notice-and-cure" policies means a voter says "Hey, something's fishy here" and the election board has been put on notice and must "cure", resolve, the alleged problem. Which is relevant to fraud, but does not mean this was a decision where the judge said "you didn't provide enough evidence".)
Seventh, Wood v. Raffensperger (N.D. Ga. Nov. 20, 2020): first claim dismissed because "there was no disparate treatment among Georgia voters". Second claim dismissed because "Secretary Brad Raffensperger had not overridden or rewritten any state law". Third claim dismissed because "there is no individual constitutional right to observe the electoral process (i.e., monitor an audit or vote recount)". Again, maybe there's something I'm missing, but this doesn't look like a decision on whether there was evidence, or lack thereof, of fraud.
Eighth, Bower v. Ducey (D. Ariz. Dec. 9, 2020): Did address claims of fraud, saying plaintiffs had not presented evidence, merely speculation that fraud "could" have occurred or was statistically likely, which the court did not find to meet evidentiary standards. So this one was indeed a decision on the evidence.
Ninth, Costantino v. City of Detroit (3d Jud. Ct. Wayne Cnty. Nov. 13, 2020): Dismissed at preliminary injunction stage; "the court found that the plaintiffs’ claims of fraud would unlikely prevail on the merits" because "many plaintiffs failed to include crucial information in their allegations, such as locations of alleged misconduct, frequency of alleged misconduct, names of those involved in alleged misconduct, and so on." So in a rushed case filed a week or so after the election, plaintiffs didn't put together enough evidence, and the judge said "We don't need to proceed to fact-finding, I can tell your case is weak before I even look at the details".
Arizona Republican Party v. Fontes (Ariz. Sup. Ct., Maricopa Cty.): "The court noted that the relief plaintiff sought—an additional hand count of ballots—was not legally available due to the suit’s numerous procedural defects. The court found that plaintiff did not adequately assess the validity of their claims before filing the suit, and thus failed to prove that the county had inappropriately applied the statute in question." Decided on procedural grounds, not actually evidentiary grounds.
So of the ten cases in that list, five (cases 1, 2, 6, 7, and 10) were not actually cases where the judge ruled on evidence of fraud, as far as I can tell. (Again, corrections on specifics welcome if I misunderstood one of these). The other five were decided on "you don't show convincing evidence of fraud", though I question whether #9 should count in that list because it was a preliminary injunction rather than reaching the fact-finding stage.
So that's five, or possibly four if you discount number nine but let's count it for the sake of argument, cases out of the 62 where the court went as far as ruling on the evidence.
And I have no trouble reconciling the idea of widespread fraud with five court cases where plaintiffs couldn't prove it. Because in many cases, the kind of fraud people are claiming happened (note that I have not actually investigated those claims) are things that would be extremely hard to prove afterwards, such as people walking up to an unguarded ballot dropoff location and stuffing 50 ballots into it. We know that happened in some places, because a few times the person was caught on video. But how do you prove, to a court's satisfaction, that that was someone committing fraud, as opposed to someone helpfully collecting ballots for friends and family so they didn't have to drive downtown?
No, if fraud is happening then the way to prevent it is by putting rules in place to make it hard, rather than court cases afterwards. It's very very hard to prove certain kinds of election fraud (such as alleged ballot-stuffing) were fraudulent. But it's a lot easier (not easy, mind you) to put rules in place, like requiring some form of official photo ID for verification, that make fraud harder to commit.
Lawsuits can’t manufacture a factual record that was never collected in the first place.
I don’t know how you can say people looked hard for fraud in 2020 when the lawsuits happened long after the ballots were counted. How would a lawsuit even reconstruct what happened in an election that happened months before where nobody was keeping detailed records?
Put simply? Statistics. Care to explain why you think we “wouldn’t know” despite repeatedly getting an accurate result every time ballots are manually recounted (since every state requires keeping the paper ballots), by members of both parties? Is it that they are all complicit in tallying illegal voting in order to elect members of the other party? Seems like a simple recount is all it has ever taken to disprove that notion..every…time…that claim has been made. And no, it isn’t prosecutions, it is the number of instances discovered to have mistakenly (or intentionally) voted as based on analysis of voting records in states that these proof-less challenges have been made. As in single digits and double-digits that are statistically irrelevant to an election. So I’m curious why you still believe that is a realistic problem, outside of elections being federalized in which case it very much would be possible with zero oversight (unlike state elections who have had 250 years to perfect their preferred methods of voting and oversight).
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?
>A front of queue, show ID of some sort (various accepted) to volunteer
This is explicitly not required, at least last time I volunteered as a polling place worker. You should NEVER be required to show ID to vote, at least in CA.
The name is on the list, so the person can vote. Why would you need them to show an id for that? You would need to establish the identity first (which everybody would have anyways, should the US not be a bunch of third world countries in a trench coat), but not eligibility.
So all you need to do is know somebody's name for that voting station. And since we're not checking IDs, when the "right" person shows up, how do we know they're the right person?
I have to show ID to get into my local zoo, but not to vote someone onto the board in charge of the zoo. That doesn't make sense.
> when the "right" person shows up, how do we know they're the right person?
That prompts an investigation. The “right” person casts an affidavit ballot and the police and courts investigate. If the count is close, the loser usually sure to recount and verify, and any of these incidents then become political kindling. It doesn’t happen because it isn’t worth it individually and difficult to coördinate en masse.
As someone who has lived outside of United States, I find it incredibly baffling, alongside the lack of national ID. Lack of such simple verification makes the potential investigations much more harder than they have to be.
It's a trade-off that many USA states make willingly. Citizens have the right to vote, period^. It's not a "right to vote but only if you have an ID." Requiring an ID to vote, to me, is as ridiculous as requiring an ID to speak or practice a religion.
[^] except for the case of felony disenfranchisement laws, which I personally believe are a travesty
And this was hard won. US history is riddled with examples where the bureaucracy of voting was explicitly used to disenfranchise rightful voters by governmental officials that wanted to keep their power over the marginalized. The skepticism is earned.
You register to vote, are assigned a polling place where your name will appear on a list of registered voters, and you go to that polling place and tell them your name.
If you're trying to fake it, you need to know what address and name someone else is registered at, what polling place they were assigned, and you have to hope they don't show up to vote too.
All of these uncertainties mean it's pretty difficult for an individual to do any serious (if any!) voter fraud.
Remember we had voting for a long time before magnetic strips and plastic.
Just to be clear, the 2024 election was indeed compromised. Salt Typhoon (China) hacked the communications of both campaigns due to massive cybersecurity failures in law enforcement portals of all major US telecommunications companies.
Limit voters to one polling location. Problem solved.
That's what we do in the US. You are assigned a polling location based on your home address. You can't vote anywhere else. If you try, they turn you away.
You can do a provisional ballot (for people who recently moved, and poll data isn't updated, etc) and they validate your ID/address/etc later.
> That's what we do in the US. You are assigned a polling location based on your home address. You can't vote anywhere else. If you try, they turn you away.
That ain't universally true. Here in Nevada you can vote at any polling station (I think within the same county).
And in Russia, it is. That's why they call it "карусель".
In the United States, it hasn't been. The article you link to doesn't even mention the United States. To do it on a large scale requires cooperation from the people running the election, and the US isn't (yet) that corrupt.
The US system isn't completely robust against it, and perhaps some day it will be a problem. But right now there is no evidence that it is a problem, and all of the attempts to "fix" it are clearly aimed at preventing some people from voting.
Famously, there have been significant issues in the past (see Tammany Hall) but I don’t think it’s anywhere near as widespread as it used to be, and especially not at the national election level. I’m sure that there’s shady stuff happening in local (county) level elections, but that’s of significantly less importance to the rest of the general public
An added point about Tammany Hall is that for much of time it was a relevant political power, the US did not have secret ballots. Arguably, it was the lack of anonymity/secrecy in voting that allowed for the types of election fraud that Tammany Hall and others were known for.
The secret ballot perhaps made a particular type of election fraud, the kind done by dedicated partisans voting multiple times themselves, theoretically easier. But it removed the mechanics that allowed far more prevalent and lucrative election fraud. In the Tammany Hall era, you could buy votes and know that your paid voters actually voted the way you wanted. You could promise that your preferred candidates, if elected, would give rewards only to people who voted for them, and actually follow through with that promise. You could physically prevent people from voting with ballots that weren't yours, rather than trying to rely on demographics.
Interesting. In Canada, for federal elections at least, you're assigned to a specific location and station. You can't vote anywhere else. There's a separate process for mail in ballots to confirm you didn't vote in advanced voting or on election day as well.
You can try voting again at other stations, especially since they don't require ID. You just need the name of somebody assigned to that station, who hasn't already voted. There is a signature check if there is a suspicion, but that's rarely done.
But that's practically never done. The risks are too high, and to have a significant impact would require enough votes to make it certain you'd get caught.
The signature check is actually not uncommon, particularly if the vote is contested or a recount done.
We had a vote thrown out of an election several years ago, the woman died right after the election, the signature on the card looked nothing like hers and was probably done by her daughter.
That said all indications are voter fraud is not any kind of wide spread problem in the United States.
At least in NY, you would have to know the name of someone else assigned to the 2nd polling site, since your name is only on the list of 1 polling location?
This is of course a very high bar to clear, as data such as people's names is highly confidential and almost impossible to get unless you're any one of these 750+ data brokers: https://privacyrights.org/data-brokers
You'd also need a fake ID. And be willing to risk a felony conviction to add a single vote. It just doesn't happen here, despite the GOP trying to prove otherwise for decades.
For what? In my state there's no requirement to show ID. When I first moved here I attempted to show mine at the poll and the poll worker told me to quickly put that away and she didn't want to see it. I'm not even sure it's legal for them to ask for ID here, given her panicked reaction to me trying to show it.
Since then I've voted in this state for around 10 years and it's always the same. I could say I'm whoever I want, and just be given a ballot.
Edit: I don't live in NY either, as the other poster used as an example. ID should be an obvious and necessary requirement, but it isn't in many states.
Yeah, it's inconsistent between states. I'm in VA and an ID is required. Despite being a bleeding heart liberal, I'm ok with that safe-guard (despite much of the left being against the notion). I'd also prefer an actual national ID (not the half-baked RealID programs, which some states still haven't adopted).
It's not really "much of the left" that is against it, just the loudest voices. Pew research says [1 sorry for the ugly URL]
Support for photo ID requirements also remains widespread in both parties. More than nine-in-ten Republicans (95%) and about seven-in-ten Democrats (71%) favor requiring all voters to show government-issued photo identification to vote.
I am p sure a lot of those that aren't for it aren't for it because of access to said ID is gated behind money (or unreasonably out of the way), which would need to be fixed first.
Without an ID, there's far more than just voting that they're not able to take advantage of. Yet I never hear of anyone having trouble living in this modern world that requires an ID for just about everything.
I'm not from the U.S. but as my country's elections work the same way, I feel compelled to weigh in on this. Here in the UK, you go to your local polling station, you give your name, they check it against the list, then cross you out and hand you a ballot. (This was tweaked in the last few years to require government ID, but the process remains the same. More on that later).
While it's true you could in theory say you were anyone on the list, you'd have to first know you were picking a name that wasn't going to be used, or hadn't already. This is already something of a reach. If someone uses a name that had already been used, or someone turns up later to vote and finds their name crossed out, it's going to set off alarm bells.
On top of the logistical challenges, this is a high-effort endeavour. A single person going to multiple polling stations repeatedly doesn't scale super well. Obviously you can try and do this en masse but the more people are involved the harder it would be to keep secret. If you're trying to rig a local council election with low turnout, it might make a meaningful difference. Does it work if you're trying to swing a congressional race or higher? I see the mentions of carousel voting, and am aware of the likes of Tammany Hall, but these are more of an open secret. What the likes of the GOP are alleging is that there's an invisible epidemic of voter fraud to engineer distrust of the system generally.
Sadly in the UK our long-established voting system was tampered with by the government of the time, who took a leaf from GOP voter intimidation and suppression tactics and mandated government-issued ID at the polls to solve a an almost non-existent issue, leading to tens of thousands of eligible voters being turned away at the polls. Thankfully this moronic and clear abuse of process is likely to be reverse before our next major election, however.
Looks like those were in states that don't require ANY ID to vote, which I find ridiculous, so I guess we agree. I live in VA, we require ID, so the problem shown in NY shouldn't be possible.
And again, you still have to be willing to commit a felony to move the needly by ONE vote, which is not likely to be very common. The risk/reward simply isn't there.
> Despite countless hours and lawsuits dedicated to finding people who voted more than once, only a handful of cases have actually turned up.
Trust in the system should always be highly valued even if the skepticism is largely unwarranted. Saying a lawsuit hasn't caught it yet won't persuade many skeptics.
> The USA threads the needle by simply not having verifiable voting. And it turns out it works pretty well.
No, no, no. January 6 is a systemic failure.
The purpose of a voting system is to select the most popular candidate in a way that is so far beyond doubt that a populist loser can't claim the results are wrong without alienating his base.
Even leaving aside the whole "Trump doesn't care if his lies are credible" thing, the US system works very poorly there. Mail-in voting, drive-in voting, voting machines, they leave room for suspicion, no matter how confident the people running the system are.
>The purpose of a voting system is to select the most popular candidate in a way that is so far beyond doubt that a populist loser can't claim the results are wrong without alienating his base.
The systemic failure is not in a voting system in this case, unfortunately.
We had front-page news about how the election was "hacked by Russia" and trump cheated for over a year after his first win in 2016 (let's not pretend that keyword was chosen accidentally); They tried to put him in jail for it. In 2020, trump did the exact same thing and went even farther with it. And in 2024, the DNC tried again to claim cheating happened.
How many cycle of this BS do we need to go through before we accept that elections need to be done properly and safely?
The entire point of a democracy is that elected leaders get their legitimacy and their acting power from the certainty that it was voted by the population. Not everyone will agree with their ideas, but the majority do and we all agree to follow their lead because that's what the population want. If the vote is compromised, everything falls apart.
If the "will of the people" turn into the "will of an intern at Dominion who fucked with the code and rigged the election" or "the will of Pakistani hacker", it breaks the entire system.
I have to seriously disagree on the particulars, here.
The Russia allegations ranged from "Russia hacked DNC servers/accounts to interfer in favor of Donald Trump" (demonstrably true in several instances) to "Russia hacked voting machines" (very probably false). And then in 2024 the DNC quickly accepted election results.
By comparison, Donald Trump still claims that he legitimately won the 2020 elections, the majority of his base still believes it, Fox News spent years spreading that message even though their own journalists thought it was bullshit, etc.
I maintain that this is a systemic problem and a better system would not have given Trump the leeway to do this, but let's not pretend it's a bipartisan issue.
Sure. And the weak evidence still isn't powerful, because so much effort had to be expended to gain it. If cheating were widespread it would have been detected much more easily.
Instead, efforts to clean up the voter rolls never cause people to get caught. But they do cause many legitimate voters to lose the ability to vote.
Also, most crimes aren't uncovered by lawsuits. They're uncovered by law enforcement. The reason people resort to lawsuits is because law enforcement does not rigorously investigate or monitor. Voting laws vary by state / municipality, and they're mostly run by well-meaning volunteers acting in good faith.
When we're not sure how well the TSA is doing, we try to send prohibited items through, and infamously get abysmal results [1]. IMO the reason we don't see more election fraud cases is because *we're not looking for it*, so we just see the obvious cases like when dead people vote or people brag about voting twice publicly.
Until we actually do some "red teaming" of elections, we won't ever know. But the reality is, if we actually did, the results would reduce credibility of numerous prior elections.
Red teaming, yes. But also, what other signals of fraud are we able to detect? What measures of validity (or signals that sending was attempted) are there? How are they distinguishable from honest voter errors?
It's going to be difficult with our current policies because we've erred on the side of making it as easy as possible for everyone to vote. We don't have a complete whitelist of citizens, it's against the law to require proof of citizenship to register to vote (unless that changed recently) and address verification in most jurisdictions isn't done more than the first time unless it's challenged.
To be clear, though, I don't think non-citizens are voting en-masse. My concern is that if you aren't even verifying they're citizens, you probably aren't really verifying that they are a real and unique person that isn't already registered.
Honestly I think if we actually wanted secure elections, we'd start with the red teaming and go from there. The signal to noise ratio of fraud is too meaningless to resolve without tightening up rules, which the results of the red teaming would give you the political capital to do.
It's not that there are no checks. You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. To vote more than once you'd have to pretend to be somebody else, in person, which means that if you're caught you will go to jail.
We could certainly do better, but thus far all efforts to defeat this non-problem are clearly targeted at making it harder for people to vote rather than any kind of election integrity.