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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   34275 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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There is no election fraud in Ba Sing Se.

Many words on The Motte have been spilled about the lack of any real election fraud in the US and about the security of modern elections. The arguments against election fraud can be summarized as there being no election fraud as all audits in the election process have found no notable fraud. On the other hand, the actions of election committees, the opaque processes, strange and unexpected results, last minute rulings, and statistical anomalies has convinced many people that election fraud is much more widespread and commonplace than we are led to believe.

Recent news in Pennsylvania has shown that an election committee has caught approximately 2500 instances of fraudulent voter registration., with another 1500 fraudulent registrations in another county.

A large number of suspicious voter registration applications were dropped off at the county elections office near Monday's deadline, county officials said. An investigation by the district attorney's office found incorrect addresses, false identification information, false names and names that did not match Social Security information.

Adams said her investigators found problems with 60% of the registrations they have so far reviewed. She did not say how many of the 2,500 registrations had been investigated. She said applications came from people living in the city, as well as Columbia, Elizabethtown, Akron, Ephrata, Stevens and Strasburg.

The problem about fraud investigations is that they largely focused on where the ballots end up and not on their creation and submission. Like laundering money, mixing real with illegal votes becomes impossible to distinguish when you might only need 5000-10000 fake ballots of 200000 people to flip a county. The more legitimate and illegitimate votes combine, the harder it is to prove that there were fake registrations to begin with.

Even if it is from a lazy ballot collector half-assing their work to get paid, extrapolating from this limited data set is concerning. These are just one or two counties of a 67-county state, and it is incredibly difficult to prove fraudulent registrations once these ballots pass through. Lancaster County and York are historically red counties who are probably more vigilant than, say, Philadelphia in regard to election integrity. Also, these registration submissions were quite obvious, a mass drop off of 2500 right before the deadline. What's the likelihood there were other registration submissions that weren't caught during the submission time period?

There are some real questions that need to be raised about securing failure points regarding election integrity, and there's finally some concrete evidence indicating that there are attempts to manipulate the vote through fake voter registrations. I doubt any of this would have been caught if it wasn't for Trump's fight regarding election integrity in 2020.

I'm looking through the second link... The 1500 number isn't mentioned anywhere (they say "thousands") and there's nothing in the article that suggests registrations or requests for mail-in ballots are in any way fraudulent (besides the high volume from a single delivery).

Am I missing something? Did the article change to omit or modify this information between when you posted and when I read it? Are you thinking of some other story?

Also, MSN is cancerous, here's a slightly less gnarly link with the same article from fox43 (your first article source).

Your second link has been updated with the responsible organization:

According to York County officials, the delivery was made by Field+Media Corps, which was acting on behalf of the Everybody Votes Campaign.

the Everybody Votes Campaign.

About Us: Strengthening political power in communities of color through increased civic engagement.

Surely a Republican front organization!

It must be “Everybody Votes ‘Campaign’,” coordinating neocon war hawks.

The arguments against election fraud can be summarized as there being no election fraud

What a lazy, dishonest, and incorrect summarization.

Also akin to painting Trump’s efforts as “regarding election integrity” — even most posters here, however truculent and to the best of my recollection, seem to often concede that Trump’s personal and individual efforts were manifestly not grounded in any kind of honest concern.

What a lazy, dishonest, and incorrect summarization.

Can you share some counterexamples?

As it is, I'm stuck between believing a few paragraphs of analysis supported by links (that I didn't follow TBH), vs. a one-sentence dismissal.

I think this is positive information about the big picture of election security in PA. The reason why pro-establishment people on both sides of the aisle have a low prior on "the 2020 election was stolen" is that we think that stealing enough votes to flip the result (80,000 votes in PA) would involve committing a ridiculously obvious crime that would be caught given the existence of a clear victim with the resources and motivation to kick up a fuss. This allows you to run modus tollens:

  • An organised attempt to fraudulently flip 80,000 votes would be easy to catch if it happened.
  • Despite no lack of trying, neither the Trump campaign nor local Republicans found any organised attempts to fraudulently flip a large number of votes
  • Ergo there was not an organised attempt to fraudulently flip enough votes to flip the results.

It turns out that fraudulently registering 1500 voters (60% of the 2500 registrations in the suspicious batch - the others appear to be genuine) is a crime that is easy to catch. This is additional evidence for the premise that an attempt to steal 80,000 votes would be easy to catch.

I don't know about Pennsylvania, but in California if you are conducting a registration drive, you must, by law, turn in all completed registrations, even if they are obviously crap. I remember volunteering as part of a vote drive, and we were trained that it doesn't matter if the person hands back a filled form with "Mickey Mouse" or "Adolf Hitler" as the name, we must turn those forms in.

To be fair, allowing the government to (we assume, fairly) sort out crap registrations is probably better than allowing organizations running registration drives the flexibility to "lose" or unfairly reject applications in a biased manner. "Whoops, we misplaced all the [other side demographics] voters" should be avoided too.

Or just get rid of registration drives entirely and let those who care enough to register to vote actually vote

Oh, shit. More info here. I think the editorial spin is minimizing it, but there's clearly something going on.

The officials said one or two organizations that conducted registration drives in the county in recent months were responsible for the applications. They did not name the organizations.

Huh. So these are known groups, going to some effort to create fake registrations. That's how they have a lead on informing specific counties. Someone had better go to jail.

What's their angle? Are they getting paid by headcount, maybe? Because it does seem difficult to convert these into fake votes.

The fake votes would be absentee ballots, obviously, which is probably doable for people who can submit 1500 fake voter registrations.

I doubt the sorts of people who are capable of this seriously think it’ll swing a statewide election, so my guess is- local political machine trying to influence bond elections or something.

On this note, I have a large number of friends who live in a Blue state, and have a tenuous connection to a swing state (for instance their parents live there) and they are just registering and voting in the swing state via absentee ballot.

Anyone who can swing it.

Wowza. Faked registration forms had correct names,addresses, DOBs, SSNs, Driver's License numbers, and phone numbers, but told detectives they didn't send it and that wasn't their signature. Detectives aren't usually coming around and asking about registration forms.

Also, they notified two other counties, who then both found forms with similar issues? Did they maybe then notify the rest of the counties, one would hope? And did the two counties catch the fakes on their own, or only after being notified? I'm curious...

Either way, scary. Even scarier that I suggested this in a comment here earlier asking about how to create disruptions.

I don't understand the middle step here. If you put the correct address on it, doesn't the actual voter get the absentee ballot rather than the bad guy.

  1. Register other people with accurate information but without their knowledge
  2. ?????
  3. Election fraud.

What goes in step 2? Do you have to stake out the mail and try to nab the ballot on the way there? At scale?

Seriously, I'm not trying to be too skeptical here, since (1) is already sketchy, but realistically is there a plan here?

So, I had suggested this in response to someone asking about ways to disrupt the process rather than accomplish actual fraud, and so I tossed it out there with that in mind, thinking that the investigations and sorting of good from bad ballots post-hoc would be a wrench in the gears to sow discord. Application to successful fraud with this method would be somewhat limited.

However, in Pennsylvania any registered voter can "Vote In Person By Mail Before Election Day" by providing a valid Penn driver's license number--not a license, but a number--in person at a designated location, and apply for, receive, complete, and submit a ballot all at one time. Problems with this approach are that 1) in-person limits the number you can crank out to one per visit; 2) employees at the designated locations are finite in number, so while you could maybe get away with a couple visits depending on the size of the office, even that would be pushing it, and 3) if those voters ended up trying to vote on Election Day, they wouldn't be able to because a ballot had already been submitted in their name--which is fine for chaos, but not good for successful fraud. The latter of those could perhaps be gotten around if the fraudster limits themselves to inactive voters, but would require eithier getting really lucky none of them pick this year to become active or somehow having knowledge they won't, like perhaps knowing they're dead or have moved states. Alternatively, an associate in the Clerk's office would make things a lot easier.

Generally speaking, though, I think for successful fraud you'd be almost better inventing voters from whole cloth.

I agree there is a kind of DOS attack here where a bad actor can sow chaos. I think we also agree that this probably wouldn't work at any kind of scale or reliability.

Faked registration forms had correct names,addresses, DOBs, SSNs, Driver's License numbers, and phone numbers

Where did you see this? The only thing I saw from the linked article was:

An investigation by the district attorney's office found incorrect addresses, false identification information, false names and names that did not match Social Security information.

It’s a few paragraphs down the Fox 43 article.

“In some cases, applications contained correct personal identification information, such as the correct address, correct phone number, date of birth, driver’s license number and Social Security number — but the individuals listed on the applications informed detectives that they did not request the form,” Adams said. “They did not complete the form and verified that the signature on the form was not theirs.”

Scary indeed, but for the sake of completeness, let’s wargame the putative fraudster’s next steps.

Plan A: Pick up a bunch of mail-in ballots from the county clerk, fill them in with the details of the “voters” whom you have fraudulently registered, and mail them in/drop them off. This plan hinges on the ability to collect an arbitrary number of blank mail-in ballots: if ballots are (for example) only mailed to the address of registration, this plan is a no-go. Does anyone know if this is the case in PA?

Plan B: On Election Day (or during the ~2 weeks prior, if early voting is a thing), hit up a bunch of different polling stations and vote multiple times, posing as a different fraudulently-registered voter each time. Obviously this is much easier in the absence of mandatory voter ID. Also, if the voter you are impersonating actually registers and votes (perhaps on the same day, in places where that is allowed—again, PA?), you risk blowing the whole operation.

I don’t mean to suggest that the potential failure modes of such a scheme mean that potential voter fraud is no big deal—it absolutely is. But simply fraudulently registering voters is only one piece of the overall theft of an election. Vigilance at other stages of the process can, in theory, head off obvious cases of fraud.

Then again, the fact that these false registrations were so sophisticated and were only caught so late in the game should perhaps be Bayesian evidence of just how much “vigilance” actually exists in practice.

For plan B, even without voter ID, you're limited by the number of people in on the fraud. A single person would be only able to vote a couple times in a day. Ten, maybe? I can imagine a conspiracy of one or two people doing this, but it becomes much more risky the more people you have doing it.

Plans similar to A seem much more manageable, but do any jurisdictions allow you to pick up unfilled ballots in bulk?

In Washington state at least you can print the ballot from your home computer if you claim that the one mailed to you was lost or ruined. You can even have it printed with selections you make online: https://wa.omniballot.us/sites/53033/site/app/ob/ballot/mark

I can't find any evidence that this is the case in Pennsylvania.

But also what are the security measures? I doubt there's anything like a cryptographic signature or even a hologram, or even a ballot ID that you can't easily guess or look up. Likely you'd just need the right paper stock and a decent printer and you could create passable mail in ballots. You already have all of the identifying information you need. The only hitch is maybe the people at the addresses you used would send the ballots back and the elections office would catch on, but maybe most people just aren't so concientious that they'll return to sender rather than throw it away.

Printer manufacturers make it so that printers fingerprint themselves on anything that's printed (as requested by the feds), with a pattern of dots imperceptible to the human eye acting as the identifier. So you could see if there's a third party printer printing hundreds of ballots, and then track it to the purchaser.

You can acquire printers that don't do this, but if you found a bunch of ballots lacking the identifier, I'd consider it a strong sign of fraud.

You can acquire printers that don't do this, but if you found a bunch of ballots lacking the identifier, I'd consider it a strong sign of fraud.

I thought that the identifiers are only on color printers (and maybe only inkjets?). So black & white lasers are generally safe.

You can also similarly encode the printer's identity (and all the metadata associated with the print job--time, originating user, document name, local network information) into the depth of grays on the printout, edge noise, kerning, and probably a thousand other things. No confirmation by manufacturers or the government that that's done, but the yellow dot trick has been around for decades, and I would be very surprised if there haven't been significant advances implemented since then.

I wouldn't trust any printer made in the last two decades for printing anything you don't want traced back to you.

Interesting... I have to go return some videotapes.

Knowing what printer was used isn't that much of a threat if you plan around it. People leave out perfectly good printers on the street when they move. They sell them in yard sales without taking ID. Collect a few without being traced, print the fraudulent ballots, then dump them somewhere.

Also wonder how hard it would be to hack a printer to change the dot pattern it imparts.

I imagine the dot pattern is probably pretty hard to hack--AIUI, it was created to make tracking money counterfeiters easier, and the US government definitely takes counterfeit cash seriously.

It would help for identifying the ballots as fraudulent, at least, unless someone only printed a few ballots per printer.

As far as hacking a printer, it's a question of how much of the steganography is implemented in software vs physical components. At least the printer identity could be done with just physical components.

If any of the polling stations are compromised you can just directly add the fake votes there.

Adding fake votes greater than the number of registered people is risky. But if you know you have a bunch of leeway with registered voters that can't possibly vote ...

You can't register day-of in PA; registration has closed for this election.

First time voters are required to show ID, but it doesn't have to be a government issued ID - school IDs count, for instance.

Our "early voting" is basically picking up a mail-in ballot at certain locations and then immediately sticking it in the mailbox there. I'm not sure if an ID is needed for that or not, though. Our early voting stuff is weird.

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