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Comment by blackeyeblitzar | Hacker News Reader

What’s wrong with being skeptical or speculating about election problems? What automatically makes it a “conspiracy theory”? To me these labels are intended to shut down any useful debate. It is especially odd to see this in 2024 when so many “conspiracy theories” of the last few years have turned out to be correct.

The core issue is that our election processes have limited transparency. How would someone audit an election? What evidence could even be gathered to prove the election was proper or not? It seems like the process is built on trust for the most part. The resistance to basic things like voter ID, which most Americans support, doesn’t help instill confidence.

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>What’s wrong with being skeptical

Normally nothing. But what we are seeing here looks more like an organised, astroturfed attempt to overthrow a democratic result if Kamala wins.

What, specifically, isn't transparent? The voting process? Do you vote? I go to my polling place (a school near my home), check in with the nice people working at the table reserved for my election district, sign my name, which is then compared to the signature I provided when I registered to vote, and receive my ballot.

I then fill out my ballot in a privacy area (really just a stand up desk with 2' walls on three sides), put the ballot in the manila folder provided to me with the ballot, walk over to the scanner and insert my ballot.

I then give the manila folder to another nice person stationed by the scanners.

What's more, elections are run at the county level and staffed by folks who live in that county. As such, poll workers are your neighbors.

I suggest you go and work at the polls. They'll even pay you (not all that much, but not nothing either). If you do so, I expect you won't rant online about the vanishingly small amount of voter fraud that actually happens.

The Heritage Foundation has helpfully compiled a list[0] of known voter fraud. They've found ~1600 proven cases of voter fraud since they started cataloging such things in 1979. Since then, more than 1.5 billion votes have been cast in the United States.

1600 fraudulent votes out of 1.5 billion is a fraud rate of 0.0000010666%.

And even if there are 100 times as many cases of voter fraud as the Heritage Foundation has documented, that still only 0.00010666%.

I'd note that there are 3500+ elections (since elections are administered by county) every election cycle. As such, even if there have been 100 times more fraud than documented, that's still only 160,000 votes across ~23 election cycles * 3500+ elections. That's somewhere around two or three fraudulent votes per election.

Given how our elections are administered (there are folks onsite representing every candidate at every polling site and counting center in all 3500+ elections) and the vanishingly small amount of fraud, it's pretty clear that our elections are free, fair and transparent.

Please educate yourself. Go and work the polls with your neighbors. Seriously.

[0] https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud

Identifying fraud as an outsider is nearly impossible. Fraud detection in other situations requires a lot of access and transparency, so I’m not sure those statistics on known cases of fraud mean much. You could make similar statements about elections in countries that are a lot less trustworthy on elections.

I’m also not sure why it matters that poll workers are from the same county - that doesn’t make elections secure. People in my county aren’t “neighbors” - I doubt most people would call every random person within 100 miles a “neighbor”. Even if they were, what would that prove?

> it's pretty clear that our elections are free, fair and transparent

How can you prove it though? What I see is many steps that require trust in other humans. Not real verifiable elections.

I’m curious what your thoughts are on steps like voter ID to improve election integrity. To me it seems like an obvious and necessary step, and the resistance to it seems suspicious.

Regarding registration fraud, please read this: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/mill...

Regarding voting machine fraud, Verified Voting has written extensively on the need for each voting machine or ballot to produce a "paper trail", that can be easily and accurately used if a recount is required. https://verifiedvoting.org/

Did you read the Wired article? Excellent analysis on how Republican's unbased fears are running wild and stoking paranoia. Likely in preparation to dispute the election outcome. https://www.wired.com/story/election-fraud-conspiracies-floo...

Identifying fraud in the Georgia (country near Russia) elections involves seeing youtube video of thugs stuffing extra ballots in the boxes. It's not always subtle.

The only major case of a fraud like thing in the US I know was the 2000 Florida recount when dems had more people vote for the but republican judges throught out enough for them to win. Not subtle in what they did, although it's not usually called fraud because judges did it.

You can often identify large scale fraud by the polls being out of whack with the results.

Read the court cases, where Team Trump had dozens of opportunities to present their evidence and were thrown out of court—dozens of times.

As far as I know most of those cases were dismissed on various technicalities and not decided on their merits. Although I doubt they would have altered the outcome (my personal guess), I don’t think they were actually given the chance for most of them.

Because most judges ruled them as abuse of the court, or having no legal standing, or being malpractice.

I guess you can call those technicalities, but more accurately they were trying to use the court system to wage politics and the courts both liberal and conservative all looked at what was filed and said they were absurd and baseless.

I'm not going to put any links here to avoid steering too far into politics, but I'd recommend looking up the comments many judges made about those "cases" and the lawyers presenting them.

>As far as I know most of those cases were dismissed on various technicalities and not decided on their merits. Although I doubt they would have altered the outcome (my personal guess), I don’t think they were actually given the chance for most of them.

Have you read any of the court documents from those 60+ lawsuits, or did someone tell you that?

I did. So can you. As I said before: educate yourself. Or don't. It's no skin off my nose. But you do put yourself at a disadvantage when you don't know the facts.

Go and read the court documents. They're quite accessible, both online and in their use of language.

I expect that you'll find (despite judges not agreeing) some cases that you think might have merit. I also expect you'll notice that the vast majority are hogwash. With no evidence at all.

But I'm a lying liar, right? Probably a communist too? Okay, fine.

Don't believe a word I say. Go and read the court documents.

You asked how you could be sure about (the lack of) voter fraud. How can you be so sure about fully documented lawsuits you haven't even read for yourself?

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