Elon Musk on voting fraud: Mail-in and drop box ballots should not be allowed | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk on voting fraud: Mail-in and drop box ballots should not be allowed

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13 pointskoolba17 comments

This is so weird.

I'm Norwegian and live in Germany. Both countries allow mail-in votes, Norway also allows voting elsewhere. Both countries avoid fraud reliably and deliver reliable results on the next day.

Germany's best, I think (all votes counted twice, at low cost, etc) but really, this is so weird. Someone who understands rocket science wants to ban something despite existence proof that the ban is unnecessary. Weird.

That's a very first world view. Vote fraud occurs on a massive scale in some countries. It's not just fake votes. Two name two others types of fraud there is also vote buying and coercing people to vote a certain way. An example of the latter in patriarchal societies is the husband handling all worldly matters for his wife, including voting.

What protects Germany and Norway isn't your voting system. As Elon says it's poor. It's the other institutions and social mores you have. In countries without those safety nets, mail-in voting is truly an open invitation to by-pass the democratic process.

So lets turn the question on it's head. If you consider the integrity of the voting system to be critical to maintaining a democracy, why would you risk not having a robust voting system - even if it looks like you don't need it now?

My definition for a good voting system is it makes it impossible to buy a vote. Clearly mail in votes don't meet that. Drop boxes need some pretty good voting place security to prevent the "I give you a filled in ballot slip on your way it, you give me a blank ballot slip on the way out, and then I pay you" caper. Computerised vote casting can make that impossible.

The thing that you're ignoring is how very little voter fraud occurs in the US. The countries you refer to, likely third world backwater banana republics, tend to engage in election fraud rather than voter fraud. Trying to co-ordinate a massive conspiracy with many thousands of voters is highly visible to any sort of intelligence apparatus worth a donut, and requires buy-in from government institutions to pull off. It's simply much easier to skew counts or intercept ballot boxes than to engage in meaningful amounts of voter fraud.

Yes, it's going to be hard to prevent Putin from committing fraud, but there are lots of layers that can perpetrate fraud outside of the federal government. A local government can swing the result in ways that are hard to detect. The vote buying example I quoted above for example is virtually undetectable after the fact - a recount won't catch it. The central government insisting on voting machines that prevent such fraud (like India does) is a good defence. Australia's compulsory voting is a great way to prevent people from voting multiple times undetectably. (If it happens, the number of people voting exceeds the number of eligible voters.) I don't think Germany not needing such a defence right now is a good reason for not having it.

As for the US - it has practices that look close to voter fraud now. Disenfranchising of voters is not uncommon, gerrymander is rife in one house. So unlike Germany and Norway, it institutions don't look particularly robust to me, and worse Trump has demonstrated there are people in power willing to try and get away with it. There was a story posted here that showing but for the acts of a valiant few, he would have convinced some states to find those extra votes. Again, I'd say anything prevents that or hanging chad type problems is worth doing.

Again, there may be opportunity for voter fraud, but despite this, there is remarkably little evidence or even specific allegations of voter fraud within the US.

I think it's also important to distinguish voter fraud, which is perpetrated by individuals and is, by nature, limited to a few dozen extra or lost votes, and is typically only a handful of false or destroyed ballots per instance. Election fraud, on the other hand, is the subversion of electoral mechanisms, processes and assets at key points into the voting process, and is usually carried out by a conspiracy of several entities involved in the electoral process, either through key individuals or whole institutions. Election fraud typically skews the result by an amount many multiples of the number of people involved, in the order of hundreds through to millions.

Your examples of gerrymandering and voter suppression or disenfranchisement are great examples of actual election fraud that happen in public view in the US, and are a far greater threat to democracy than voter fraud. In fact, several measures meant to curb voter fraud (which happens very little anyway) are actually means of voter suppression: voter ID laws, residency proof requirements, exclusion of the criminally convicted, placement of polling stations in "safe" areas (read: less accessible from minority/poor neighbourhoods), etc etc. Taking away ballot drops and mail in ballots is yet another means of voter suppression in this vein, on par with a lack of public holidays for election days for people to actually be able to go to the polls.

In the France and U.K., election results are known the next day. The U.S. should be like that too, with mail-in and drop box ballots counted on election night. Getting results promptly would raise confidence in the fairness of the result.

He goes slightly more tinfoil hat than the headline here suggests:

> the system is designed to make it impossible to prove fraud.

Who designed it this way Elon? Was it the Jews again? The ones you claimed were conspiring to import inferior immigrants?

Also, worth noting this isn't a one off, he's said similar things about voting and immigrants repeatedly, echoing existing conspiracy theories.

I like this refreshingly direct take:

"Elon Musk keeps tweeting bullshit about Arizona’s elections"

> Experts like Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer are trying to teach the tech billionaire, but he doesn't want to learn

https://www.phoenixnewtimes.com/news/elon-musk-tweeting-misi...

edit to add an exhaustive factual debunking of his claims on elections:

https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2024/elon-musk-immigra...

Stephen Richer has many great tweet threads showing how the Maricopa system works.

He had one that debunked an attempt to create a misleading post about fraud (a right-wing personality intentionally changed their address on the day their ballot was mailed, got two, and tried to claim multiple ballots... To which Stephen pointed out the serial number has a suffix such that the first would not be accepted even if submitted)

Doesn't the fact that he also loves The Culture count for anything?

The people who designed it this way are the people who think that getting a voter ID is racist because somehow minorities are not as smart or capable as white people.

Also no matter how many times you call a conspiracy theory non-citizens are counted in the census which affect the electoral votes each state gets, and also the representation in the House of Representatives. Even if they don’t vote, they still overwhelmingly impact blue states and sanctuary cities by inflating their representation by the tune of about 20 electoral votes.

https://pointofview.net/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/ID-Not-Ne...

> The people who designed it this way are the people who think that getting a voter ID is racist because somehow minorities are not as smart or capable as white people.

The ACLU has a handy 2-page document [1] explaining how voter ID laws get implemented and enforced in a racist way. It's not theoretical. Here's an excerpt, but you'll need the rest of the doc for the full picture.

> The travel required is often a major burden on people with disabilities, the elderly, or those in rural areas without access to a car or public transportation. In Texas, some people in rural areas must travel approximately 170 miles to reach the nearest ID office. And a year after Alabama's strict voter ID law went into effect, state officials tried to shut down 31 driver's license offices in majority-Black counties, which would have forced rural and minority voters to travel further to access licenses.

[1] https://www.aclu.org/documents/oppose-voter-id-legislation-f...

Everyone in the US, regardless of status, is represented by Representatives. Felons can’t vote in many states, yet they’re still counted and represented in Congress.

Voter fraud is a non-issue. Or more so a racist, isolationist issue.

People who are here illegally should not be represented because they don't pay income tax. PERIOD. If you are too simple minded to not see how easy it is to commit voter fraud you are not very bright

Many illegals/undocumented do indeed pay income tax [0]. Another myth, along with the voter fraud myth. You do know that most voter fraud brought forward to trial were committed by Americans, right [1]?

Should the American-born poor also not be represented due to the amount of refunds they get year-after-year? Should those on SSDI not be represented? Felons, where restricted by State law?

The US Constitution applies to everyone, not just Green Card holders/American citizens [2]. And thank god, imagine if a political party could arbitrarily declare that eh, water9 is no longer an American citizen... jail for life without trial.

The 14th Amendment says, in part "Representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each state, excluding Indians not taxed." [3]

You cannot have a 'whole number' unless you count everyone of any status.

Your comment is inappropriate, there's no need for personal attacks.

[0] https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/18/us/undocumented-immigrants-ta...

[1] https://apnews.com/article/voter-fraud-election-2020-joe-bid...

[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-constitutional-ri...

[3] https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv

So you think that because some totally separate mechanism, which doesn't involve voter fraud, might slightly tilt the electoral college back towards everyones vote having equal weight that it's okay to tell lies about other aspects of the voting system? Tell lies that suggest the people who designed the system were planning to enable fraud? And you get upset that those lies are called a conspiracy theory?

20 electoral college votes would swing the elections in ways the Democrats would not like to see. It's a simple matter of motivation. It was a conspiracy that COVID came from Wuhan, Biden didn't have a mental decline, the vaccines weren't effective, etc. How many Ls do you want to take before you realize calling something a conspiracy theory is not a logical argument but an ad hominem due to lack of a rebuttal to evidence clear as day but contrary to your worldview? It doesn't make you dumb to change your world view after more evidence is gathered. WAKE UP

> 20 electoral college votes would swing the elections in ways the Democrats would not like to see.

The "fewer than 475" [0] fraudulent ballots across the entire United States would not have impacted the 2020 election outcome.

[0] https://apnews.com/article/voter-fraud-election-2020-joe-bid...

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