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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   34277 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 28, 2024

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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.

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