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How would one prove that . . .

Not one liberal in this thread has offered a way that voter fraud can be checked. I'm SHOCKED, I tell ya'.
 
MaggieD said:
. . . ineligible people are voting?

It's always seemed so logical to me that people prove they are who they are, but the Left keeps telling us there is no evidence of voter fraud.

So I ask the Left especially -- how could voter fraud be investigated and how would one get proof that ineligible people are voting?
Click to expand...

It's convenient for the left to claim there's no real voter fraud because they want to ensure there are no significant checks on identification at the voting both. It's similar to them not wanting any kind of checks on illegals accessing social programs and municipal services, etc. But I personally believe that voter fraud, where it does happen, would be found primarily in large inner city neighbourhoods where much of the population is transient, without much in the way of identification, etc., and so is found in traditionally Democrat pockets of the country anyway. Where it could be an issue would be where there are close State wide races that are won by a few thousand votes. As an example, it's sometimes claimed that inner city Philadelphia is rife with voter fraud, but even the fraudsters didn't come out for Hillary this time around.

But it's a perfect reason why any move to elect your President based on the national popular vote would be a bad idea if it doesn't come with some pretty stringent voter eligibility and identification laws.
 
MaggieD said:
. . . ineligible people are voting?

It's always seemed so logical to me that people prove they are who they are, but the Left keeps telling us there is no evidence of voter fraud.

So I ask the Left especially -- how could voter fraud be investigated and how would one get proof that ineligible people are voting?
Click to expand...

If there were prima facie evidence that voter fraud was widespread, how come none of you people who seem to take the matter so seriously have ever presented any? Your question is disingenuous. How could 'the Left especially', which doesn't believe any such widespread fraud is occurring, have the answer as to how to prove something they don't believe exists? You are the one apparently worried about something you don't appear able to prove exists. How weird is that?
 
longview said:
Yours is a valid point, if we do not check identities, the only way to know the person who voted was not who they say they were,
is if the actual person showed up and found their ballot had already been cast.
This is not usually a problem, because the cemeteries usually don't let people leave to vote!
Seriously, someone with access to voting history, could quickly identify persons who, while registered,
have never voted. Proxies could vote in their stead, without anyone knowing.
Click to expand...

And you would have to do this on a scale of dozens to affect local small town elections, hundreds for county, thousands for state and millions for federal. Right. And all of them would have to keep it secret. My dad told me two people can keep a secret. If one of them is dead.

We tried to do real ID, a national ID system and people of all stripes freaked out. But that is what it would take. Make it free. Make it available in every DMV, Courthouse, Sheriff's office. Make the requirements to obtain, thorough enough but not ridiculous.

For example. I just renewed my GA license and I needed a passport, social security card, birth certificate and two recent bill with my name and address on them. But my current GA license, for which I had to show all of that last time, is no good as an ID for renewal. My wife had to bring the marriage license on top of the other crap. Overkill maybe?
 
MaggieD said:
I suspect every state does things their own way. In Illinois, always Dem btw, I walk into the polling place, give them my name, they look it up and hand me a ballot. How do they know I'm MaggieD? They don't.
Click to expand...
Unless two MaggieD's show up, it's not a problem.

It's not like it is all that difficult to make a fake ID, either.


Why should there by a burden of proof issue?
Click to expand...
1) Because people HAVE investigated fraud extensively for years, and not found any evidence.

2) Because politicians are using it as an excuse to disenfranchise voters.

It would be one thing if the year was 1924, when political machines sent their voters from polling station to polling station. That just doesn't happen anymore.

Another relevant link:
All This Talk of Voter Fraud? Across U.S., Officials Found Next to None
 
MaggieD said:
. . . ineligible people are voting?

It's always seemed so logical to me that people prove they are who they are, but the Left keeps telling us there is no evidence of voter fraud.

So I ask the Left especially -- how could voter fraud be investigated and how would one get proof that ineligible people are voting?
Click to expand...
You raise a valid question.

I'm left to wonder how many people this last election said that they walked into their polling place only to be told that they'd already voted earlier, were shown the signature, and said that wasn't their signature and that someone fraudulently voted using their name.

In my state, I walked into the polling place, told them my name, showed them my sample ballot that had an ID on it, they found me, had me sign in, and that was all that was needed.

There was no request to prove that I was who I said I was, just in case I had really pilfered someone else's sample ballot.

But I didn't read anything this past election where the media presented what I'm saying in my second paragraph, let alone volumes of it.

Still, an ineligible voter could learn that a "friend" of theirs who's registered isn't going to vote in the election and they can walk in, claim they're their "friend", and vote, and who would ever know.

My bigger concern is non-citizens as a class using fake or temporary SSA IDs to register to vote. Then, even for those who remain after their temporary SSA ID expires, they are still on the voter rolls, and they simply walk in and vote: http://www.debatepolitics.com/general-political-discussion/271355-approx-3-09-million-non-citizens-registered-vote-many-voted.html.

I think we could do better in validating at the polling place that people are who they are .. .. though I haven't thought about the mechanics of such and what would be the best way. A form of e-Verify would need to be employed, for sure.
 
Andalublue said:
If there were prima facie evidence that voter fraud was widespread, how come none of you people who seem to take the matter so seriously have ever presented any? Your question is disingenuous. How could 'the Left especially', which doesn't believe any such widespread fraud is occurring, have the answer as to how to prove something they don't believe exists? You are the one apparently worried about something you don't appear able to prove exists. How weird is that?
Click to expand...

So in other words, the Left has no answer. And you like I just exactly that way.
 
Visbek said:
Unless two MaggieD's show up, it's not a problem.

It's not like it is all that difficult to make a fake ID, either.

1) Because people HAVE investigated fraud extensively for years, and not found any evidence.

2) Because politicians are using it as an excuse to disenfranchise voters.

It would be one thing if the year was 1924, when political machines sent their voters from polling station to polling station. That just doesn't happen anymore.

Another relevant link:
All This Talk of Voter Fraud? Across U.S., Officials Found Next to None
Click to expand...

How did they investigate? What did they do?
 
CanadaJohn said:
It's convenient for the left to claim there's no real voter fraud....
Click to expand...
"Convenience" is irrelevant.

People have tried repeatedly to find voter fraud, and have been unable to do so. That includes people who have strong political motivations to find fraud.


I personally believe that voter fraud, where it does happen, would be found primarily in large inner city neighbourhoods where much of the population is transient, without much in the way of identification, etc., and so is found in traditionally Democrat pockets of the country anyway.
Click to expand...
No one has found any such fraud. And that's not for a lack of trying.

Oh, and with those state-wide elections? Most of those districts are gerrymandered, primarily by Republicans. Voter fraud in order to influence state elections would be pointless.

And again, coordinating even 10,000 people in a single big city to fraudulently vote, without getting caught, would be essentially impossible. You'd need someone to find 10,000 people who aren't going to vote or weren't taken off the rolls in the biannual voter roll purges, then get that information to those 10,000 fraudulent voters, who also have to vote in their own name just to, what, get a second vote? Ridiculous.
 
MaggieD said:
How did they investigate? What did they do?
Click to expand...
Read the article I linked

Then this
https://www.propublica.org/article/that-time-i-was-investigated-for-voter-fraud

And this
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-billion-ballots-cast/?utm_term=.b48f5c0794e5

Then think about the difficulty of the logistics of coordinating, say, 2000 people to vote a certain way. Do you REALLY think no one will screw up and post something to Facebook? Get discovered by a spouse? Include the wrong person in the email chain? Invite the wrong person? Feel regret over a coordinated effort to game the vote?

Seriously. It's not happening. If it did, investigators would have turned it up by now.
 
MaggieD said:
Not one liberal in this thread has offered a way that voter fraud can be checked. I'm SHOCKED, I tell ya'.
Click to expand...

And, no conservative shows that there is any more than scattered voter fraud to begin with. Funny how that happens. I am SHOCKED, I tell ya.

As for getting voter id's.. this is an article that specificlaly talks about the issues in Texas... and more broadly why many minorities don't have photo ids to begin with.

https://rewire.news/ablc/2014/10/16/well-actually-pretty-hard-people-get-photo-id-just-vote/
 
Visbek said:
Read the article I linked

Then this
https://www.propublica.org/article/that-time-i-was-investigated-for-voter-fraud

And this
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-billion-ballots-cast/?utm_term=.b48f5c0794e5

Then think about the difficulty of the logistics of coordinating, say, 2000 people to vote a certain way. Do you REALLY think no one will screw up and post something to Facebook? Get discovered by a spouse? Include the wrong person in the email chain? Invite the wrong person? Feel regret over a coordinated effort to game the vote?

Seriously. It's not happening. If it did, investigators would have turned it up by now.
Click to expand...

You know, I think you e posted the best response. It resonates with me because when people talk about conspiracy theories re 9/11, the JFK assassination and others, I've firmly believed this kind of thing would be damned near impossible to keep secret.

So although you didn't answer my question,you've really made me think. You really have. Thank you.
 
MaggieD said:
How do any of the things you listed above prove whether or not the person actually voting is the person who is eligible?
Click to expand...

If there were large numbers of people that were voting that weren't the actual registered voter that they were voting under then we would have those same registered voters come to the polls only to find that someone had already voted under their name. If 3 million inelligble votes occurred (they didn't) you'd have at the bare minimum tens of thousands of people come to the polls only to find that someone had already voted under their name.
 
Visbek said:
Read the article I linked

Then this
https://www.propublica.org/article/that-time-i-was-investigated-for-voter-fraud

And this
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...-billion-ballots-cast/?utm_term=.b48f5c0794e5

Then think about the difficulty of the logistics of coordinating, say, 2000 people to vote a certain way. Do you REALLY think no one will screw up and post something to Facebook? Get discovered by a spouse? Include the wrong person in the email chain? Invite the wrong person? Feel regret over a coordinated effort to game the vote?

Seriously. It's not happening. If it did, investigators would have turned it up by now.
Click to expand...

It's not complicated to coordinate something like that at all. It does, however, take a good bit of legwork.

First, you sign up as many people as you can. You have registrations in front of supermarkets, at soup kitchens, at public parks and at retirement homes. Come election time you start contacting the people you registered to see if they voted. If they didn't you ask them if they need help filling out the ballot or getting the ballot in the mail. It's amazing how intimidated some people are of voting. Anyway, once you get them helped you gather up the ballots for the ones that voted for your candidate to make sure they get mailed and you tell the other ones that they have to get the ballot to the mailbox. Most of the ones left on their own won't mail in the ballot and you're making sure that the other are getting mailed. Nothing you did was illegal but you damned sure played favorites and in a lot of precincts it doesn't take too many of those votes to swing the results.
 
MaggieD said:
I said it first. Nah-nah nah-nah-nah. ;)

See my Post 38.
Click to expand...

Yes.. and, I said exactly why the voter id laws are designed to stop legitiment people from voting. while redress shows multiple links that showed that investigation , even by people with political motivation, that there is no voter fraud problem. What HAS been shown is that the voter id laws are designed to marginalize the poor, and attempt to eliminate their right to vote.
 
Lutherf said:
It's not complicated to coordinate something like that at all. It does, however, take a good bit of legwork.

First, you sign up as many people as you can. You have registrations in front of supermarkets, at soup kitchens, at public parks and at retirement homes. Come election time you start contacting the people you registered to see if they voted. If they didn't you ask them if they need help filling out the ballot or getting the ballot in the mail. It's amazing how intimidated some people are of voting. Anyway, once you get them helped you gather up the ballots for the ones that voted for your candidate to make sure they get mailed and you tell the other ones that they have to get the ballot to the mailbox. Most of the ones left on their own won't mail in the ballot and you're making sure that the other are getting mailed. Nothing you did was illegal but you damned sure played favorites and in a lot of precincts it doesn't take too many of those votes to swing the results.
Click to expand...

It's not very effective, now is it? A much more effective means would be attacking the voting machines, and either misrecording the votes in the machine as they are cast, or modifying the results after the fact. Both would be able to be accomplished without any visible sign to the voter, or have any coordination of people outside just a few to make it happen. That is why I personally want all voting to be done with a paper trail (scanned in voting ballots for example). The more people who have into the scheme you suggest, the more likely it will come to light.
 
RAMOSS said:
It's not very effective, now is it? A much more effective means would be attacking the voting machines, and either misrecording the votes in the machine as they are cast, or modifying the results after the fact. Both would be able to be accomplished without any visible sign to the voter, or have any coordination of people outside just a few to make it happen. That is why I personally want all voting to be done with a paper trail (scanned in voting ballots for example). The more people who have into the scheme you suggest, the more likely it will come to light.
Click to expand...

I suppose that depends on whether you want to do things legally or not. What I suggested is completely legal even though it's totally manipulative. I suggest that some people involved in this kind of thing do cross the line into illegal territory. They might do that by actually destroying registrations and/or ballots from the opposing party. They might "lose" opposing ballots. They may encourage certain voters to choose a particular candidate by providing some form of compensation. They may collect a ballot from someone they reasonably should know is incapable of making a decision. For example, if you're "helping" a dementia patient vote and they want to vote for Truman you can't just assume that means "Democrat" and fill in the bubble. Most of that stuff would be EXTREMELY hard to detect and even harder to prove.
 
joG said:
....or someone that has respect for human nature and behavior.
Click to expand...


My theory keeps getting proven right. Conservatives naturally distrust others out of the box and therefore perscribe authority as a ruling style and liberals tend to trust people more out of the box and don't go that authoritarian route.
 
MaggieD said:
. . . ineligible people are voting?

It's always seemed so logical to me that people prove they are who they are, but the Left keeps telling us there is no evidence of voter fraud.

So I ask the Left especially -- how could voter fraud be investigated and how would one get proof that ineligible people are voting?
Click to expand...

There are numerous cases of ineligible people voting, problem is not finding out how many voters voted x amount of times, or were not eligible, but rather pinning it and convicting those who done it.

For example your ss number and your id could have you registered in 50 states, and voted in 50 states withing 30 minutes of eachother, clearly any audit would notice that is impossible for one person, so if they figure out you voted in your local area but others used your identity to register you elsewhere and vote, how would they prove who did it?

The cost associated with nonstop surveilance in voting booths and the tens of thousands of people to scour all voting records across the country to cross match them would be in the billions if not tens of billions. The cost is too much to catch them that way, so convictions are low and to what is easily obvious.
 
MaggieD said:
. . . ineligible people are voting?

It's always seemed so logical to me that people prove they are who they are, but the Left keeps telling us there is no evidence of voter fraud.

So I ask the Left especially -- how could voter fraud be investigated and how would one get proof that ineligible people are voting?
Click to expand...

I have no problem with the idea of presenting ID. However I live in Texas. Born here, never left for nothing. I have lost a wallet with social security and DL in it. There is NOTHING easy about replacing it all. There are different lists of acceptable documents, steps to go through before coming back to the office. Computers are out of date and shut down alot. And this is HOUSTON Texas. Not Longview. My college ID took 3 minutes. It took weeks to prove enough to my college that I was who I said I was. College ID should be acceptable. It is not in Texas. Make a voter ID. Bill in name compare address give it out. 3 minutes, free. Then check IDs. But that is not what these laws did. These laws were specifically drafted to hurt folks with limited access. Repub and Democrat. Many COUNTIES in Texas have no DPS. Some have nothing for hundreds of miles. That could be adressed by allowing college IDs and other forms, but the acceptable IDs were very limited.

Further, there is research on voter fraud. Bolleteros are one of the easier groups to find. They were Florida Hispanics who would send out dozens of mail in votes from one address. They voted conservative the large majority of the time. The ID laws to not even acknowledge the existence of mail in fraud. Mail in fraud has a much higher rate of occurrence than in person fraud.

Dead people voting. In person fraud has been claimed to be carried out by dead people. Most facts show dead people don't vote. Election officials tasked with keeping the rolls current fail at their job about 100% of cases. Dead people still show 0%.

Proxies voting. This is usually a mix up on handwritten documents describing names and such. There are more than two Joe Browns in Houston alone. Pretty much every time this has happened it has been paperwork error by election officials rather than malevolent intentions.

Illegals voting. What is the cost benefit. An illegal goes to the poll casts one vote. Then maybe goes home. Maybe they realize he is illegal because of paperwork. Maybe he goes to jail. Maybe he gets deported. Maybe he loses his family, but ahh... The satisfaction of that ONE vote. The CB balance does not line up. I'll go with common sense of evidence for this one.

There is proof of voter fraud, but the rate is so amazingly below 1% that it makes no difference. Like maybe 50 occurrences in 20 years of all elections from city to federal.
 
beerftw said:
There are numerous cases of ineligible people voting, problem is not finding out how many voters voted x amount of times, or were not eligible, but rather pinning it and convicting those who done it.

For example your ss number and your id could have you registered in 50 states, and voted in 50 states withing 30 minutes of eachother, clearly any audit would notice that is impossible for one person, so if they figure out you voted in your local area but others used your identity to register you elsewhere and vote, how would they prove who did it?

The cost associated with nonstop surveilance in voting booths and the tens of thousands of people to scour all voting records across the country to cross match them would be in the billions if not tens of billions. The cost is too much to catch them that way, so convictions are low and to what is easily obvious.
Click to expand...

My state has a form to fillout and you can use social number or DL. I can see this taking some time to fill out. Now my SS number is national so if I'm looking for registration in other states I might have a problem. Maybe not. So lets say I take the time to forge all the bills I need to forge to prove residency. Make sure I know if each state has a DL or resident, or a SS requirement. Have a way to get ballots from all 50 states. I may have to pick them up or drop off paperwork at all fifty states. Maybe I can do some snail and email, we'll see. Then I get all 50 ballots.

Now I go vote. Voter ID laws make it difficult for me to go from state to state casting votes. I could manage it within a month if I figure out my early voting route. But lets say Voter ID is in all 50 states as the laws are want to be drafted currently. I would have to mail them in. This is the biggest market in election fraud. Mail in votes occur more than in person by exponential numbers. When in person is like 5 numbers don't have to be too big to be exponential. These cases tend to favor republicans. These were never in discussion during voter ID. The reason the cost to police would be outrageous is because it happens so little. Have a pilot program. Go to Chicago. Find some there. report back, draft laws. Try it in Miami. There is no need to police. It doesn't occur enough to represent any threat. Should we have a jaywalking division in every department? Jaywalking is against the law. But does it constitute any real threat to anything?

If people arguing about voter fraud use numbers you can't get to in a hand or two, they are lying to inspire fear.
 
poweRob said:
My theory keeps getting proven right. Conservatives naturally distrust others out of the box and therefore perscribe authority as a ruling style and liberals tend to trust people more out of the box and don't go that authoritarian route.
Click to expand...

Nope. I don't agree. Authoritarianism is a central position of statism to which liberalism of American definition must be counted. Conservatives more often work from an individualistic set of ideas.
 
MaggieD said:
So in other words, the Left has no answer. And you like I just exactly that way.
Click to expand...
Or in other words, widespread voter fraud is a myth, and one you cannot prove so you try to place the burden of proof onto someone else. That's very poor partisan hackery.
 
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