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Notes -
Two arguments for no illegal fraud:
If there was fraud, I think it would need to be perpetrated by a institution, and again, since the Reds would benefit hugely by being able to point at any single significant thing, I think that absence of evidence is evidence of absence here.
As for ballot harvesting and no/low information voters, I rate this as the Blues doing what they are advertising. They want to enfranchise more people and presumably the ways they are doing it are not technically illegal or else they would get in trouble. So the bottom line is that you don't want these legally enfranchised people voting when they otherwise would not under a different policy decision. Well, yeah, its understandable why one might think so, but it's a difficult argument to sell! Massive voter fraud is an easier one. And if "voter fraud" is to be construed as code for Blue institutional shenanigans, then Voter ID requirements is fighting systemic bias with systemic bias. Which is what it is, but you can't say it out loud. The optical advantage is in the hands of those who advocate for more voting, so the Reds are forced to be more dishonest about it.
Because the courts don't let them.
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Signature rate matches on mail-in voting disappeared in 2020 as mail-in voting surged. Some of that is likely fraud. Like a granddaughter helping her nursing home grandmother vote and leaning heavily on the scales. Or a wife voting her husband. Personally, I had my ex-gf ballot and easily could have just filled it out and it would have counted.
I would call all those fraud. Violation of the concept of secret ballot. And I bet they happened widely in 2020. And wouldn’t show up on any fraud investigation that was done.
Funny thing is in my opinion if a bag of fake votes were found nothing anywhere would have changed. Courts still wouldn’t want to interfere in an election. Reddit would still be reddit and deny the bag of fake votes found.
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Ideologically motivated decentralized gangs are notoriously difficult to crack, and ballot harvesting can be done with minimal risk to the harvester -- particularly if he has the implicit cooperation of the people counting the votes.
The letter of anti-ballot-harvesting law was broken in many states in 2020, and nobody got in any trouble.
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This one always strikes me as a silly question. In theory it sounds like a tolerable system in the same way that paper cheques or signatures on credit card receipts do. But there is a reason we don't tend to use those anymore: as best as I can tell forging a signature to at least pass within a large dataset isn't hard -- we aren't going to deploy credentialed handwriting experts for every ballot -- and many, if not most, of your obvious signature mismatches are probably going to come from medical issues like dominant hands in casts or motor control issues in older people.
I suppose it might catch a whole building or block of voters all signing with an X, but I'd be curious to see someone argue the cost-benefit of checking is worthwhile.
Cryptographic signatures is a whole different can of worms.
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