Election questions

From a comment thread:

In many cases if proper procedures are not followed it would be impossible to show fraud occurred even if it were massive. Should the plaintiffs have to prove fraud occurred when the defendants eliminated the possibility of such proof? Do you really want that to be the law of the land?

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6 thoughts on “Election questions

  1. difficult, perhaps, but not impossible.

    we need to go back to the old days, when voting was done at local precincts, with a beady eyed old demo lady and a beady eyed old repub lady manning the precinct books.

    they knew you. they knew everybody that voted there from year to year, from big elections to ones for school board and water district.
    it can be done.

    it just requires honest and people dedicated to the task. this bullshit would not have happened 30 years ago, not even in chicago.

  2. That’s what I suspect happened – it was just 10’s of thousands Donna Brazile’s doing their duty. It is, of course, still fraud and taken at scale results in massive fraud. It’s somewhat like when I went to Mexico years ago and had to hand extra $5 over to the border official – it’s systemic corruption.

    About the only evidence of this kind of fraud is statistical observations and that is a hard sell unless it is invited. Direct evidence – a few people confessing – will always be dismissed as it would not have made any difference.

    One side effect that the courts and system cannot do anything about is the growing distrust in the whole process. And we have that in spades.

    Another side effect is that we have been the envy of the world for our orderly transfer of power – no longer.

    Technical fixes are possible, as are improving procedure, and cracking down, but not with the democrats cry of ‘count every vote’. They have a long history of resisting every effort to secure the process from voter ID to machine security always claiming that it would disenfranchise voters – and they got away with it for years even under Republican administrations.

    So that leaves us the ones that are being disenfranchised both politically and socially. And to add insult to injures, at the same time the democrats have shifted from a republic to a winner take all, so we don’t even get a seat at the table.

    So what can WE do about it now that the barn doors are open and the horse is gone?

  3. Unfortunately, there is no good alternative to “you must prove what you allege”.

    Yes, the real issue is how the system has been perverted; the setup for this started many years ago, with the agitation against voter ID, or checking the voter rolls for correctness, and all that stuff. The more recent mail-in stuff is just building on that.

    At least it seems that paper is making a bit of a comeback. That’s a very positive thing, because unlike voting machines paper can be checked by Mark 1 Eyeball.

    Now what’s needed is poll watchers supervising the checking of signatures and related ballot authenticators. That, and termination of all of the dishonest rules that have been perpetrated in various states to allow invalid ballots to be accepted.

    • I’m not arguing against it, exactly. It’s a great idea for many reasons. But the secret ballot opens up lots of opportunities for electoral shenanigans. Many/most of the measures undertaken to demonstrate that ballots are legal (signature verification, unique codes for each legal ballot, etc.) serve to undermine ballot secrecy.

      It seems to me that, to a very large degree, you have to have one or the other. A secure system, or a secret ballot. We’re messing around trying to create some kind of middle ground here. I believe that these efforts may improve things somewhat over the short term, but are ultimately doomed to failure.

      • I can see some validity to your point if the subject is mail-in ballots. Then again, it’s easy to cure that. The standard pattern is double wrapped ballots, with the verification machinery on the outside and the actual ballot sealed inside that. To verify a ballot envelope you check its signature, date, affidavit, or whatnot, perhaps a serial number marked on the outer envelope too. Then you open it up and grab the inner envelope. Drop that into a ballot box. You have now verified the legality of the ballot without disclosing the vote.
        In a separate step, you take a box full of inner envelopes and open them up. That box contains anonymous but verified to be legal ballots.
        None of this is an issue for in-person voting, where you check in (verifying your legal status and receive a blank ballot. You then fill that in as you choose and drop it into the ballot box.

        In both of these schemes, the ballot itself is anonymous but its legality is verified. And the schemes I describes are easily monitored by poll watchers. For example, a poll watcher can verify that the signature checkers aren’t opening up the inner envelope to view the ballots.

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