It wasn't a fraudulent ballot, it was a clerical error.
Alright, assume one of those seven people who told me they didn't send in a mail ballot had never tried to vote in person. Would the fraudulent ballots have counted?
Another perfect example of the problem here.
You have no idea what the actual story is with any of these claims, yet you already assume the ballot supposedly received in their name was fraudulent.
There is no doubt that it is fraudulent. If they sent it in and then tried to vote in person that is an attempt to commit election fraud. If someone else sent in a ballot in their name... that's fraud.
It was fraud that was prevented from affecting the ballot total, which is not the problem.
If one of those 7 people didn't show up to vote then there would be one less dispute to investigate.
That's true, undetected fraud is really easy on the election workers. You can take a break, get some coffee, talk about sports instead of going through all that provisional ballot mess (which really takes a while, like 25 minutes per ballot).
Let's streamline things further by not even checking if they sent in a ballot. You really are making GP a prophet in this thread.
I'm going to assume you would eventually admit (after wasting a lot of time) "There would be undetected fraud" and move on to the next question:
If we did not know that the ballot was fraudulent until they showed up, how do we know how many other ballots are fraudulent?
The story keeps changing. Are you claiming the roommate sent in the mail ballot under a name not her own?
I'm saying that the example provided doesn't even qualify as an anecdotal example of fraud.
I'm saying if you say that you're ignoring evidence, which means you claiming "there is no evidence" really doesn't hit that hard since you can't recognize evidence.
If the kind of fraud you are claiming may be happening was actually happening, you would have far more serious examples to talk about.
How does a lot of small scale fraud get any "more serious" than lots of examples of small scale fraud and the certain knowledge that discovered examples are the result of extreme filter?
Because what actually matters is data, not anecdotes.
You have failed to answer the question. Here it is again:
How does a lot of small scale fraud get any "more serious" than lots of examples of small scale fraud and the certain knowledge that discovered examples are the result of extreme filter?
I am just as convinced by your anecdotes of alleged voter fraud as you would be convinced that the police are mistreating black people if I provided you as bunch of videos of it happening.
Well that should be very convinced because videos of mistreatment are proof of mistreatment. In fact if you went farther and said the system is failing to remedy or prevent police misconduct I would also agree with that.
To put me in the same position you hold on elections I would have to claim police misconduct almost never happens and we don't need police body cams (which would allow us to quantify and remedy it when it happens) because it almost never happens.
That is very very far from my position on police or elections. They are both high-trust institutions and anyone who even hints at opposing any possible measure to improve or maintain trust is attacking the stability of our society and probably secretly in favor of abuses.
If you had been paying attention I said there is a myth of racist cops. That is a totally different matter from establishing trust. That's like saying "They're cheating in the elections because they are evil and want satan to rule the Earth"
If police beat someone up it's most likely because they're petty tyrants with no emotional regulation. If left-tribers cheat in an election it's probably because they think they're saving American democracy from an imminent fascist dictatorship (which is peak irony).
alleged voter fraud
Let's not forget you provided for examples of confirmed voter fraud and there are plenty more.
if what you suspect to be happening was actually happening then the system would be inundated with examples of mail in ballots being wrongly cast.
You're making more than one assumption there.
Let's call "Mail ballot target inaccuracy" = MBTI = the ratio of persons (or former persons) whose name was used on a fraudulent ballot envelope who did try to vote in person or by mail divided by those who didn't.
If MBTI was 100% then everyone whose identity was stolen for mail ballot fraud would try to vote and have the double balloting investigated (in theory). If every single one of them insisted on going on to fill out a provisional ballot lets say that is "fraud challenging ratio" (FCR) = 1.0. In that case the number of provisional ballots issued for potential fraud (PBPF) would be approximately equal to the number of fraudulent ballots.
Number of mail ballot frauds from stolen identity = MBF_SI
MBF_SI * MBTI* FCR = PBPF
You are assuming MBTI* FCR is close to one and therefore PBPF is close to MBF_SI, insignificant number of PBPF means there was insignificant MBF_SI.
let's assume those investigations are real and they actually use the correct ballot in the end. In that the fraudulent swing (FS) due to MBF_SI is MBF_SI - PBPF.
If MBF_SI ~= PBPF then FS ~= 0
First of all there were real audits and real investigations then PBPF would be a number you can look up. What is it? You say we would be inundated with them so were we?
I don't know. All I can find publicly is the admission that there were a hell of a lot of provisional ballots to count.
If PBPF = 10,000 and the margin of victory (MV) is 11,000 (sound familiar?) then what does MBTI* FCR need to be in order to make the result fraudulent?
FS >= MV
MBF_SI - PBPF >= MV
(PBPF/MBTI* FCR) - PBPF >= MV
PBPF( 1/(MBTI* FCR) - 1 ) >= MV
1/(MBTI* FCR) - 1 >= MV/PBPF
1/(MBTI* FCR) >= MV/PBPF + 1
1/(MV/PBPF + 1) >= MBTI* FCR
MBTI* FCR <= 1/(11,000/10,000+ 1)
MBTI* FCR <= 0.47
That means that if half of the people whose identities were stolen didn't vote, and that out of those who tried 6% didn't correct it (out of disgust or apathy) then the fraudulent count would be greater than the margin of victory.
The PBPF I personally saw was (again) ~6%. These swing states were decided by margins much smaller than that. More than a few within 2%. If PBPF is three times as a large as the margin of victory then only 25% of people whose identities were stolen need to try to vote and challenge the fraudulent ballot.
Based on simple statistics if I was trying to cheat I think I could get a MBTI < 10%. The easiest group to target would be people who had moved to a different address, such a list can be compiled by cross referencing address forwarding with voter rolls. It goes without saying that if you fraudulently register as them, they are very unlikely to vote (having not even registered).
We quantify the fraud the same way we quantify anything else which we don't have precise numbers for; we estimate based on known examples.
I hope no one pays you to do any statistics.
Statistics revolves around the ratio between the sample and the sample space. If you can't quantify the sample space you can't do statistics.
Observe: How many planets in the galaxy currently have life on them, we have an example, extrapolate
Here is another example that the mathematically illiterate put out from time to time: Only 15% of rapes are actually reported to the police. How do you know about the ones not reported to police?
The answer? A survey. Usually anonymous. You can't do statistics about a crime that can't be confirmed in any meaningful sense except by conviction.
It's different for murder. You can count the number of murdered bodies (assuming the ones which were never found are negligible). If you get 50 convictions and there are a 100 murdered bodies you can now do statistics: Only 50% of murders are solved.
We have no bodies for these elections because they ARE UNAUDITABLE.
There is no way to quantify the exact number of people who would have voted but didn't because of twelve hour lines, that doesn't mean we cannot make reasonable estimates.
Yes, we can make reasonable estimates. My reasonable estimate is MBTI < 10%, FCR ~ 6/7
Quantifying voters who have been practically disenfranchised is not difficult to quantify at all and plenty of studies have done on this. If you pass a new voter ID law that requires particular ID types, you can easily see how many people don't have that ID and follow up to see how many of them ended up without it.
You mean didn't get it for the election? That doesn't prove "disenfranchisement" since an equally valid explanation is that they just didn't give a shit.
If you started from an election system where you have to hop over a ballot touch screen in front of your door everyday or else you voted for someone; and go to something sane; the "voter turnout" will go down. Not because voting is now too hard, but because people who didn't give a shit were doing it.
If you get rid of mail in ballots you can easily find out how many people were unable to cast ballots as a result.
I would ask how, but I really don't care. Remote voting isn't a problem that is impossible to solve and I don't care about banning it. I only care about the slim chance to prevent the ascendant digital fascist state via democracy.
A measure as simple as requiring a phone number (not some throwaway dark web number) and then texting each person who purportedly sent in a mail-in-ballot to confirm that they did indeed do such a thing before counting the ballot would have created a level of auditability which would have severely limited those reasonable estimates about potential fraud.
Alleged voter fraud is entirely different, because you have no evidence that the thing you're alleging to be happening is actually happening.
Other than the evidence you've chosen to ignore, yes.
It's a solution in search of a problem.
Trust is a problem, and I think it's going to be harder to ignore that one as time goes on.
Bitcoin is a trustworthy system. That is an objective fact (until the questionable prediction of RSA cracking comes to pass).
Some may not believe it is trustworthy
So we agree that people believing a system to be untrustworthy doesn't make it untrustworthy. Glad to hear it.
It was never contested... I said the perception of untrustworthiness is a problem in of itself and the single indispensable mitigation of that problem is to be in fact trustworthy.
You have a hypothesis: Everyone who doubts elections does so out of blind worship of Donald Trump.
Wrong. My hypothesis, along with this entire conversation, has nothing to do with the individual. This is all about looking at the big picture, and the fact of the matter is that what public officials say, particularly when that official is the president of the United States, and especially when that President has the kind of devoted following Donald Trump has - tells the public that the election results cannot be trusted, it would be absurd to expect any other result than for the public trust in elections to take a significant hit.
So when Nancy Pelosi and Maxene Waters doubts elections public trust also takes a hit. Ceded.
There is a reason why conceding the race and congratulating your opponent has always been a proud and sacred tradition in American politics. It's because everyone including and since the founding fathers understood this "hypothesis" as nothing less than common sense.
Well except for the confederacy, the contingent election after that, Al Gore, and Stacey Abrams.
Because you have chosen to believe that, you don't think having secure elections would make a difference in public trust.
I've never suggested we should strive for anything other than secure elections, my point is that they are secure by any reasonable assessment.
If they were secure then I could not present a fraud strategy, ask what the maximum possible extent of its practice is, and the answer is "shut up insurrectionist, we have your name now".