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Comment by mwenge | Hacker News Reader

"Doesn’t all of this talk of ‘voter suppression’ on the left sound similar to charges of ‘voter fraud’ on the right?”

The exact moment you can stop taking him seriously.

To me, that is exactly the kind of challenging question that a journalist or editorial writer should be asking and answering. You have two opposing sides essentially accusing the other of disenfranchising votes using different mechanisms.

And in a vacuum, you'd be right.

However, despite all the crowing about voter fraud, there's yet to be produced any evidence of voter fraud rising to even within a few orders of magnitude required to change an election. While there's no such thing as perfect security, a single-digit number of fraudulent votes in districts (or even whole states) accounting for hundreds of thousands to millions of votes is about as good as you can hope for.

On the other hand, voter suppression is being done quite brazenly out in the open -- the most notorious of which includes reducing the number of and moving the locations of polling stations in districts where the "wrong" people vote, resulting in many of them having to to wait hours to vote and some even having to travel long distances to get there.

In that context, treating the two as equal, opposing concerns is nothing short of propaganda.

Not to mention the blatant attempt to steal the last election using fake electors and behind-the-scenes calls to various elected officials.

That’s the point of asking the question, to clarify the difference. I’m sorry but adopting the attitude that the question itself isn’t allowed to be asked, or simply by asking the question somehow invalidates the person asking the question doesn’t get you to a clarification. You would continue to perpetuate the belief by being unwilling to have the public conversation.

>…within a few orders of magnitude required to change an election…

Bush was elected in 2000 by a margin of just over 500 votes in a state with a population at the time of 16M. So I really don’t buy into the argument that voter fraud isn’t a problem because where it has been discovered has not reached the level of actually changing an election. The right amount fraud in swing districts in a swing state could make a difference in a close election.

If somebody with a criminal history gets caught red-handed, and their response is "no, you're actually the criminal," justice is not giving equal time to both claims. (Nonetheless, the issue was indeed investigated, and there were even a few recounts, but no effect on the election was found. Of course, getting an answer was never the point. The point was FUD.)

> "no, you're actually the criminal," justice is not giving equal time to both claims

It is if both sides are doing something criminal. Which…admittedly is happening. Your argument seems to be centered around “Even though voter fraud happens, it hasn’t affected anything yet, so we should ignore it in favor of this other thing which is more important to my side.”

That argument is akin to “even though my neighbor is a burglar, he hasn’t robbed my house yet, so there is no reason to lock my doors when I go away”

Given the numbers, every single election has some degree of fraud. It is not really possible to prevent 100% within our current system, and any time it's been investigated, the number of fraudulent votes has been extremely low. Moreover, there is no concerted effort by any political party to cast illegal votes.

In contrast, the Republican party is loudly all-in on gerrymandering and other disenfranchising rat-fuckery.

Gerrymandering happens on both sides and the NPVIC alone would serve to disenfranchise more votes than anything the GOP could do with their efforts.

Both sides are trying to do everything they can to gain an advantage, let’s not pretend it’s one sided.

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