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Comment by lmg643 | Hacker News Reader

At the risk of 100 down votes - considering the theory that "Clinton outperformed where paper ballots were used" - isn't there an alternate hypothesis that extra paper ballots could have been submitted by her supporters, as a lower-tech kind of fraud?

I get that this is a tech site, and we like to think that everything is the result of smart hackers (even the Trump election! because some Russian hacker could be the only explanation), but there are low tech options here as well.

The Project Veritas videos, whatever you may think of them, had high level operatives openly discussing tactics they use to affect elections. A few extra paper ballots seems like something a motivated person with access to a photocopier could accomplish.

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It would be very difficult to introduce enough extra paper ballots to make a difference, because the chain of possession is audited in real time by a lot of people, many of whom don't know each other ahead of time and have no incentive to collude on a felony.

Perhaps you'll prove me wrong in a follow-up comment, but in my experience folks who think about paper vote fraud like what you describe, usually have little to no experience at actual polling places aside from popping in briefly to vote.

In contrast, you could have 20 people looking at an e-voting machine, and none of them could tell whether it's working correctly. It's a black box, literally in many cases.

Or there could simply be another variable.

For example, maybe rural counties are more likely to use paper ballots than urban counties. (Or any other variable: income, race, geography.)

But wouldn't highly urban counties be more likely to vote for Clinton?

Urban counties in Wisconsin use paper; rural use electronic: https://www.verifiedvoting.org/verifier/#year/2016/state/55 (Dane County, Milwaukee County, and Brown County have the three biggest cities and use paper)

As a prior, I would consider submitting lots of extra paper ballots to be much weaker than manipulating electronic voting. (To be clear, I think the prior on both is fairly weak.)

Project Veritas is not a credible source.

Edit: It seems like HN has gotten a lot more Trump and conservative since the election. I should hope that reiterating that submitting thousands of paper ballots of a lot more complicated than hacking into a computer system is obvious.

The problem with most conspiracy theories is the number of Confederates it requires to keep a secret. Subtly tilting the scale with paper ballots across the nation requires many more Confederates than hacking across a network. This makes hacking the more likely scenario, all other things being equal.

You guys all pointed out the much stronger correlation during the primaries, right? Because it seems pretty hard to believe that such intense institutional collusion for Clinton could lead to widespread hacking for Trump... in fact... it's not believable.

Easy as printing $100 bills.

> At the risk of 100 down votes

Max you get is 5.

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