I want to make one more point along the lines of those in my last post. A very large percentage of Americans, both Democrats and Republicans, think there was something dicey about the last presidential election. The stats I’ve read are 75% of Republicans and 25% of Democrats. That’s not to be sniffed at.
The correct approach to dealing with that is not to suppress those views as the work of conspiracy theorists but to convince them otherwise. How to go about doing that?
I don’t believe there’s any way we can sanitize the last election but that shouldn’t stop us from ensuring that the next one is above reproach. For the last twenty years I have argued that we need universal biometric national identification. Such a thing could be used to verify eligibility and could be used both to prevent the ineligible from voting as well as to ensure that the eligible only vote once. It’s an idea whose time is long overdue.
If you’ve got other ideas I’m open to suggestions.
Not so much about who votes as who counts the votes. As I understand it paid volunteers.
People who are oriented towards volunteering for that are suspect in my view.
That’s why banana republics have foreign observers, but why trust them?
Until we’re all microchiped redundant observation and certification is my best guess.
I was an election judge in Chicago for about 25 years. The way votes were counted was that when the polls closed, they were tabulated using the machines in each polling place and then the results were were conveyed (either physically carried or transmitted) to election offices in each ward and then to election central. After that the physical ballots were sealed and taken to the ward election offices.
Election judges were and are paid volunteers. The pay barely covers the cost of transportation. There are supposed to be at last one Democratic election judge and one Republican election judge working in the polling place at all times. Given the low number of registered Republicans in Chicago the Republican election judges tend to be Republicans for just that day.
The entire process typically took from 1 to 3 ours. The polls in Chicago close at 7:00pm. IMO if a precinct hasn’t reported its results by 10:00pm they’re either having equipment problems or something fishy is going on. Collusion among election judges in a precinct could allow falsification as could shenanigans in the transportation of absentee ballots to polling places (we were responsible for tallying absentee ballots, too) but otherwise it would be pretty difficult.
IMO completely electronic voting is a disaster.
Let me call BS (sort of ) here. (Used to love that card game! Learned it in boot camp.) The claims on the right about voter fraud have existed since at least when Bush was POTUS. If you will recall the (non-scandal) scandal when he replaced a bunch of state DOJ attorneys it was because they were not prioritizing looking for voter fraud. At the state level the GOP has been looking for it. The guy Trump chose to form a commission on this looked for it in Kansas for years. Didnt find any. Didnt find any when he was in charge of Trump’s commission either.
So what we know is that there is not large scale voter fraud. In particular, the kind that would be stopped by voter ID cards is almost non-existent. So what you really have here is a fixed delusion. There is no way to talk people out of this belief.
When you realize that campaign contributions and voter participation drop off for the GOP if they accept this, then I think you can better understand why they are committed to this belief and why it has persisted for so many years without finding any evidence. If this was a one time thing then maybe it is worth a big investigation, but not with this history. The GOP is not entitled to win every election, contrary to what they seem to believe.
Steve
I don’t think that anybody is entitled to win any election.
I’m open to suggestions on convincing people that our elections are beyond reproach but that’s where we seem to be at this point. I doubt that suppressing them or mocking them are effective strategies.
As suggested above I think that retail vote fraud is extremely common, very difficult to detect, and accounts for perhaps 1-2% of all votes. In close races that’s all it takes. The 1,500 some odd convictions for it over the last decade or so suggest the scale of the problem.
It would be nice if elections were a contest of abilities and ideas instead of between good and absolute evil.
Much talk about taking the high road but lately (McCain), that’s like throwing in the towel.
That’s the ideal, GS. As I see it there are two main ways of accomplishing it: either limit those running for office to Plato’s philosopher-kings (who don’t exist) or lower the stakes. That would directly oppose the plans of statists so what we will see will increasingly be battles between good and evil.
Our attempts at limited government have been running into that impediment for the last 80 years.
Struggling to understand the need to “sanitize” the last election. If ever there was a election that was observed for voter fraud, it was the last one. And the Trump campaign came up with over 60 lawsuits which were tossed for being mostly frivolous. Christopher Krebs declared it fair and lost his job for his effort.
Who watches the vote counters? Did you watch any of the election coverage? There were typically two, a republican and a democrat standing over each counter.
I think your estimate of voter fraud at 1-2% is exaggerated.
https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/Briefing_Memo_Debunking_Voter_Fraud_Myth.pdf
There’s a distinction between evidence sufficient to stand up in a court of law and reason enough to think there’s something hinky about the results.
All your link documents is that it’s hard to detect. I agree with that. Electronic voting has made it harder to detect.
Dave,
About 150 million people voted last time. You are claiming that there were 3 million fraudulent votes, bu the cant find any. Not only can we not find them, the people doing it are keeping it quiet. AND, they have been doing this for many years. In an era when we have the internet and social media. An era when people still get mad at their boyfriends or their ex-wife when they break up, except now they have the means to let the whole world now. In a world where people publish the naked pictures of their ex for revenge, where they kill that ex sometimes fo r revenge, what exactly is so unique about voter fraud that would make people never rat someone out? People in prison tell other prisoners stuff they shouldn’t. Hell, drunks at bars say stuff they shouldn’t. But no one ever blabs about their fraudulent voting? Totally not believable.
Of note, I have always said there is some voting fraud, especially at the machines. It mostly involves local elections. There just isn’t large scale organized voter fraud.
Steve
That is untrue. Plenty of evidence has been submitted of various irregularities. They were not enough to stand up in a court of law. That falls short of being unable to find any.
I think the key problem is that we need a voting system in which we can be more confident. It needs to be auditable. Today’s systems are broadly not auditable.
Let me quantify this a bit. In the precincts in which I’ve worked (3) 1% would be 4-5 votes. In every single election in which I’ve worked we had at least that many votes that we rejected and we were extremely scrupulous. Our guidelines were to ensure that every eligible person voted and their vote was counted but to do our best within the measures we were allowed to disallow the ineligible from voting. Even then we nearly always gave them the opportunity of voting provisionally (as we were required).
In one election in which I worked fully 20% of the votes cast were provisional and I sincerely believe they were all fraudulent. I don’t believe all election judges are as scrupulous as we were.
I agree. You don’t need large scale organized voter fraud to get a couple of million fraudulent votes. I think there’s lots and lots of “retail” fraud.
Let’s list some of the kinds of fraud that are taking place
– people registered in multiple jurisdictions
– people voting absentee for the dead
– ineligible people voting
– illegal assistance in voting
– ballot harvesting
I think all of those take place or at least are attempted in practically every precinct in practically every election.
Not to be too pedantic bur fraud has an actual definition.
“intentional perversion of truth in order to induce another to part with something of value or to surrender a legal right”
A lot of what you list is not intentional. Lets take dead people voting. Most of that is a spouse receiving the ballot for the other spouse who just died. They vote the way they think their deceased would have voted and most dont realize it is actually illegal, after all they got sent the ballot.
People who have homes in multiple places register in multiple places so they can vote where they are living at the time. Very rarely doe sit happen they actually vote in 2 places. Most people who are ineligible think they are eligible. And again, it is not as if this doesnt get studied and there arent people looking for it. What we dont have for sure are large organized fraudulent voting efforts. We have occasional people voting because they didnt understand the rules (half the country has an IQ less than 100 dont you know) or cut corners for convenience. And for sure, not all of those are going to just one party. A lot of these are older people.
Steve