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How much fraud is there?
During the Republican Primaries, Vivek called out the GOP Chairwoman for being utterly useless, and leading the GOP to loss after loss after loss, and called for her resignation. In the wake of this, the Trump takeover of the GOP was complete, with Lara Trump taking the top spot. One of their top priorities? Voter fraud. Largely because Trump has never abandoned his fraud claims. Reactions from political pundits was that this was generally a bad idea. Polling supposedly showed the continued sour grapes over losing in 2020 turned voters off. All the same, the organization clearly staffed up to proactively fight potential voter fraud.
They successfully took noncitizens off the voter roles in Virginia.. They've been wining court cases in PA and GA to prevent mail in votes from being counted if they arrive after election day. In Arizona they won a lawsuit once again trying to purge non citizens from the voter roles. And many more.
Now, winning court cases is all fine and dandy, but if the people counting the votes choose to just blatantly ignore it, you still have a problem. To illustrate my point, there was a Chinese national in Michigan that voted because LOL apparently? And when he went out of his way to report that he shouldn't have been allowed to vote... well he's in trouble but the vote is still going to count. And that's basically the rub. Without police in the room enforcing these court orders, once a fraudulent or illegal vote is counted it's fiat accompli. Laws are meaningless with a process designed to ignore them.
Regardless of my black pilled skepticism about whether all these legal victories will amount to anything, what if they do?
My understanding of a lot of polls is they weight their demographics by turnout from the last election, plus maybe some secret sauce to try to guesswork around shifting coalitions. But, what if their starting point, the 2020 election, was rife with fraud that is now being proactively stamped out? Or at least reduced significantly due to the GOP's new diligence? Well garbage in, garbage out. If the polls get their weighting from fraudulent elections, they won't be accurate for an election that has had the fraud cracked down on.
So I propose that if Trump wins, and the polls are significantly wrong, it could constitute some circumstantial evidence that there was significant fraud in 2020. Alternately, it's possible that if the polls are bang on and Trump loses, perhaps it constitutes equally weak circumstantial evidence that they were not. Assuming places like PA and GA don't count undated or late dated ballots anyways because fuck you, once it's counted it's fiat accompli.
Wait, what? Why are same-day registrations not given provisional ballots in Michigan like they are in other states?
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I'd intended to make an election post earlier this weekend but ended up spending time with friends/family and "touching grass" instead, but I also want to get something out before tomorrow. Glenn Reynolds (of Instapundit fame) has labeled 2024 "Schrodinger's Election" and I feel it. I look around my purple but leaning blue suburb and Trump Flags, bumper stickers, and yard-signs seem to outnumber Harris ones by a solid two to one margin and are often seen coexisting with more liberal municipal/state candidates and "vote yes/no on [thing]". My intuition is that Trump has this in the bag. But I also know that if history is any guide, my intuition is probably wrong as I thought the same back in 2020. I wouldn't call myself "an election denier" but I do have a sneaking suspicion that an honest accounting in 2020 would've resulted in either a Trump victory or a much tighter race for similar reasons to those that @Tractatus lays out in this post here. As such I find myself approaching the current election with a certain amount of trepidation, I think that support for Trump is much thicker on the ground than it is for Harris, but I also think that whatever "fortification" efforts that are in place now will be far more mature and firmly established than they were 4 years ago.
I am predicting a resounding "win" for Harris, but that win is in quotation marks for a reason.
My alternate lower confidence prediction/conspiracy theory is that the reason the media has suddenly started to give questions about voter-rolls airtime is that it's "battle space preparation" so that in the event of a Trump win all the commentators who've spent the last 4 years prattling on about "the Jan 6th Insurrection" and how there was no proof of election fraud, can pivot to "questioning election results is the mark of a true patriot" without suffering fatal amounts of cognitive whiplash.
I’m expecting precisely nobody to accept the results. Baked in. One side believes the election was stolen, both believe the election is being stolen now (they differ on methods and direction, but in both cases, it’s against them). One side believes the other is Nazis. The other side believes that the others are communists.
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Note the PA case is about undated/wrongly dated ballots, not ballots that arrive after election day. Meaning they wouldn't be counted if undated even if they arrive BEFORE election day, which is why it was being challenged. Because obviously you know that an undated ballot that arrives before election day was mailed in time. There has been significant debate about that clause in the law by Republicans when they were the ones expanding mail in ballot access to help rural turn out, when they were on the pro side.
Note that the US. Supreme Court may have overruled the PA one and allowed the undated ballots to be converted to provisional ballots for the November election:
https://www.thewellnews.com/2024-elections/supreme-court-allows-undated-ballots-to-be-counted-in-swing-state-lawsuit/
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Speaking of which- the really incredibly blue counties in Atlanta illegally extending early voting hours, what’s going on with that? Is there any way to stop the illegal votes from counting? Of course not.
In 2020, I was on my cousin’s deer lease for the election, watching TV during the day and he said- this was before Trump got up and claimed the election was stolen, mind you- ‘they’re counting them(ballots) just as fast as they can fill em out’. I don’t know if he was referring to Pennsylvania or Arizona or what. But 2020 was weird, the establishment had trashed its trust, and it was apparent that democrats were willing to do things normally beyond the pale out of TDS.
This kind of reaction to the base’s sentiment is natural even if it doesn’t do anything.
AP News "Georgia judge rejects GOP lawsuit trying to block counties from accepting hand-returned mail ballots" says a judge has already reviewed the issue and said they're not violating the law. Apparently the law says that after a certain deadline, the drop boxes have to close and absentee ballots can only be accepted by handing them to an election official... so they kept the offices open so people could hand their ballots to election officials without having to do so on election day when presumably anyone could go to their polling place and hand in an absentee ballot, but at that point they might as well just vote in person (modulo rules about letting you hand in an absentee ballot for someone else; not sure what Georgia's laws say about that).
It is a bit disorganized that they would be deciding to do that last minute... but early voting is new enough and significantly more popular this year, so it's not surprising the election offices were caught off guard by its popularity and needing to increase resources.
There's also the related issue that apparently Cobb county messed up and sent out ballots late, which would be a reason for them to attempt to do their best to make up for their mistake so people could still return their ballots.
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Catholic doctrine distinguishes between a sacrament which is illicit, and one which is invalid. An invalid sacrament is null and void, whereas one which is simply illicit is meerly wrong or sinful, while still retaining its essential function.
I wonder if a similar distinction is appropriate here. Its hard for me to see why votes cast in violation of minor provisions of state election code (such as early voting hours) should be voided. Voters can't be expected to understand the entireity of the state election code. A proper remedy would target the election officials responsible for the violation.
Of course, things like ballots cast by inelligible voters or in the name of others should be tossed out and rendered invalid.
Let’s say you have Area A and Area B. A votes R and B votes D.
A and B are supposed to be open 9-9. But B decides it will remain open an extra 2 hours.
B making the decision to stay open is unfair unless A also gets to stay open longer.
Except this is already the case because different states have different rules and in some cases so do different muncipalities within states.
Which isn't to say whatever the rules are shouldn't be followed, but your example would suggest there is already built in unfairness due to the fragmented nature of your electoral law and procedures.
If the rules are published in advance, it averages out. If you change the rules at the last minute, you're explicitly fishing for a certain outcome.
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That’s one reason why the electoral college still makes sense. If votes are pooled nationally but elections are run locally then you’re incentivizing states to be as lax as possible to pile on the votes, trading validity for volume.
About a decade ago in Washington, which is fully by mail, we had some conservative counties start offering free postage for ballots. Very quickly the state moved to make free postage universal.
Doesn't that just switch the incentives to swing states? Indeed PA has mail in voting because Republicans passed it in 2019 prior to Covid, because they thought it would help rural turn out, to make the state more Red. Obviously that is not what came to pass, but that was the intent.
With the electoral college a legislature has incentive to help their preferred candidate win, but they only need 50% + 1 to do that.
Without it a legislature has incentive to put as many votes on the board as possible. So if your state leans hard in one direction, it helps your candidate to do maximize number of votes cast, so you have incentive to be lax on election security excepting coordinated attacks by the other side.
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Because the minor violations are ways to get around (what little) safeguards. In Fulton County Atlanta's case, they were trying to count ballots during off-hours, and attempting to refuse GOP poll watchers from being admitted because they weren't allowed to come in during off-hours.
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My whacko conspiracy theory is that he did it to sow chaos. It's obviously very easy for non-citizens in Michigan to vote. So easy, in fact, that the only way they'd ever get caught is if they turn themselves in. This is pretty obvious, but people insist it isn't so. Some Chinese guy saying, "yeah, I voted, can I get my vote back?" exacerbates the obviousness.
Eastern folks sure seem to understand self-immolation style protest.
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That's the wild part. Our entire election system is apparently governed by the honor system where nobody would ever lie so we never need to check. And then people have the gall to state that voter fraud is rare. If this were any other institution arguing about why they should never be audited or have any oversight what so ever, we'd all be calling bullshit.
Yes, welcome to the party, this has been a GOP talking point since the Clinton administration.
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My state’s online voter registration accepts many forms of identification, but doesn’t require any that would prove citizenship. You just have to affirm you are a citizen, and are informed it’s a crime to lie about it.
I don’t think they have some database to cross reference things like driver’s licenses with citizenship. If they did, I wouldn’t expect my permanent resident friends to have gotten called for jury duty, and yet they have.
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If republicans ever wanted to fight fire with fire (probably the only way we ever get meaningful reform) what noncitizens would they need to import who could be counted on to vote red? Russians? Hungarians?
They didn't poll Russia, but among the 34 countries Pew did poll, only the Tunisians and Hungarians prefer Trump to Biden, at least when the only question is whether they "have confidence in ____ to do the right thing regarding world affairs".
Globally (at least in these countries, which are a somewhat diverse sampling), Biden had 43% confidence and Trump had 28%.
I feel like the interpretation of that could be a hell of a scissor statement. Democrats: "Everybody else everywhere in the world knows the right choices to make; why don't you?!?" Republicans: "Hundreds of countries are run the way you want, and for some reason you can't understand why everybody wants to live here instead!"
This includes a poll of various Euro countries on Trump/Harris. The countries preferring Trump to Harris are Slovenia, Slovakia, Moldova, Bulgaria, Hungary, Georgia, Serbia and - at 78 to 22 % - Russia.
Of course such polls have a limited value in telling how the citizens in those countries would vote if they actually were American citizens. Insofar as someone living in Finland is concerned, what exactly would there be for us to gain in Trump becoming a president over Harris? The two most important ways US politics affects Finland are trade and security, and in both cases Trump causes at least some level of danger of those things going south, i.e. there being tariffs and a trade war or an US withdrawal - partial or full - from NATO.
Sure, at least the latter one didn't happen during the first term, but both are actually things, i.e. a change in trade policy and withdrawal from Europe that many Trump supporters, including prominent ones, actually want Trump to do, so they still exist as possibilities. Putting America first is what Trump would be specifically elected to do! OTOH, if one actually lived in the US, the priorities would undergo at least some revision.
I rather suspect that for most of these countries the poll mainly indicates opinion on Russia/Ukraine conflict - there's a rather amusing poll from Czech Republic on how the voters of various Czech parties would vote, and while the most Harris-voting segments are TOP-09, a center-right party, and the Christian Democrats, the most pro-Trump party is KSČM - the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia.
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An easier solution would probably be to just prosecute noncitizen registered voters. Or, heck, just prosecute illegal immigrants. They're breaking the law, after all.
Requires voter ID. Which is racist and therefore going to be fought tooth and nail
Why? You know who voted, you know who is a citizen (almost all the time - social security records are how the US usually verifies citizenship before granting a passport, so it's good enough for voting), and you know where they live (its on the voter roll).
Noncitizens voting under their real identities is the easiest type of voter fraud to catch and prosecute. Several red states and purple states with Republican governors have run the checks, and successfully caught and prosecuted the tiny number of noncitizens who voted. The most recent example is Texas, who referred 1930 suspected noncitizen voters for prosecution - that is 1930 suspected noncitizens who have ever voted in Texas, not 1930 noncitizens voting in any given election. 1930 votes is less than 0.02% of a typical Texas presidential election turnout (c. 11 million), so even if all 1930 really are noncitizens (some will be paperwork errors) and they all voted in the same election, it isn't enough to swing anything short of Bush v Gore II - The Electric Boogaloo.
The type of fraud that voter ID prevents is people voting, in person, in someone else's identity. That is a type of fraud that could be committed by noncitizens, but would normally be committed by citizens because they have more stake in US elections. It is also a type of fraud that doesn't happen in elections with no-excuse postal voting because committing the same type of fraud by post is a lot easier.
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You're thinking like a democrat by assuming that republicans would want illegal aliens to vote. That they dont is pretty much the crux of the issue.
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Trump is apparently very popular in Israel.
Ironic given Jewish voting preferences in America
The more orthodox the more they vote for Trump
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It really depends on the Jews. Among the Russian-speaking American Jews the GOP is still more popular, since they or their parents still remember the USSR.
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Given that it appears a dem scheme to cheat was already exposed shouldn’t that partially increase odds that they did in fact cheat? It would be weird if the o r and only time they cheated they got caught
What was the "dem scheme to cheat"? Some clueless immigrant checking the wrong box?
Something similar to Pennsylvania happened in Arizona: https://www.azfamily.com/2024/11/05/40k-damaged-incomplete-voter-registration-forms-submitted-maricopa-county/
When I read this headline, my first thought was that the registration forms had been corrupted by Chaos.
Anyway, I hope the voting machine spirits are adequately appeased by the ritual sacrifice of ballots, lest we end up with more hanging chads. Praise the Electomnissiah.
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They found thousands of fake registrations by a single dem aligned PAC
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It was a bit more sophisticated than that
While I think this is stupid, anybody can print out a voter registration form off the internet whenever they want. Having physical forms available does not meaningfully change anything.
This isn’t what I’m talking about. Take Lancaster country for example. They found approx 2500 fake registrations by a Dem aligned NGO. This now has been found in about four counties in PA. Add in VBM and there you have a GOTV effort n
2500 were suspicious, but after review 50% were confirmed legitimate, 25% were incomplete but not suspicious and the remaining 25% were being further investigated (so some number of these could be fake).
As was mooted at the time the organization involved pointed out as per PA law they have to turn in all registrations they collect whether incomplete or inaccurate because they are not allowed to filter those out.
So how many are actually fake is up in the air.
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It’s possible it sends the wrong message and confuses noncitizens who end up voting when they shouldn’t
You don't think every one of these NGOs that are organizing migrants into this country, helping them apply for welfare, walking them through exactly what to say to claim asylum, wouldn't also be going, in that sickening passive voice "This is a voter registration form. You can only vote if you check this box here. If you vote it's important to know that Harris will protect your asylum status here."
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I would guess this.
This one actually does seem quite sketchy. Hmmm.
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Polls are always off to some degree, and it's often explainable to their weighting factors, e.g. in 2016 they didn't take educational polarization into account sufficiently. It's also pretty clear that many polls are herding this year, and the fact they're weighting on previous elections (which AFAIK wasn't standard practice before 2024) is another potential avenue for a bigger-than-average miss. Much of the industry is just really, really worried about underestimating Trump for a third time in a row, and as such they might be overcorrecting.
The initiatives against voter fraud won't amount to much because there's never been much evidence for widespread voter fraud despite countless fishing expeditions trying to find some. It does exist in isolated cases, e.g. an old black women voting once for herself, and once for her dead father whose house she's now living in. But beyond individual incidents like these, there's not much else.
There is no good indication that any of the major polls underestimated Trump in any previous elections.
If you estimate that Trump has a 30% chance to win, and he wins, you weren't wrong. You'd have been wrong if Harrison Ford, estimated as having a 0% chance of winning, had won.
There haven't been enough elections in which Trump was eligible in order to say much about whether his chance of winning was underestimated.
I was talking about polls here, not modelers like Nate Silver. Polls don't estimate win chances, they estimate win margins. They had a lot of egg on their face for stuff like Wisconsin in 2016.. Polls underestimated his support in most swing states in both 2016 and 2020.
I agree that Nate Silver didn't get it "wrong" in 2016 as popularly perceived, as they're doing something different.
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Would you consider the coercion of electors as being in the same class of fraud as ballot-stuffing? My prior for the former is non-negligibly high at this point due to the prior correspondence of 2016’s scheme and the fact that if the polls are whatsoever correct (still holding out on a judgment for that one) then we’re looking at a likely EV differential that could fit on one hand.
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They don't get their demographic data from the official tabulations of the last election. The official tabulation doesn't have demographic data. The adjust their weighting based on exit polling from the last election, among other things. For your theory to have any credence there would have to have been fraud in the exit polling, and efforts taken to eliminate fraud in exit polling.
Exit polling was useless in 2020 already thanks to mass mail in ballots. I thought pollsters broke things down with zip code and results, zip codes often serving as pretty good proxies for demographics.
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this is a game where there are two players not just the Republicans. the Republicans might be cracking down on Democratic vote tech this year but that doesn't mean the Democratic party haven't made improvements to their vote tech that might compensate for whatever measures the Republicans have introduced.
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