Timeline for What fact-based arguments exist that mail-in voting would lead to significantly higher instances of US voter fraud?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
20 events
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| Aug 13, 2020 at 2:22 | comment | added | Jan | For a sense of scale, I think total turnout (almost 137 million or five orders of magnitude above the fraud count) of the 2016 election does a better job than the margin. I agree that ‘fraud that matters/might matter’ is the better metric because honestly who cares how big the margin is in a D+37 or R+39 district (I believe there is no advantage for any candidate getting any additional votes past one over the majority in the US system – unlike e.g. Germany where the total absolute number of votes matters for state party financing). | |
| Aug 7, 2020 at 18:49 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | Also, you would have to focus on fraud that matters. Instead of talking about national fraud levels, we have to pick a state and talk state levels of fraud instead. | |
| Aug 7, 2020 at 18:46 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | @Jan I gave the popular vote as a sense of scale. You can decide what the CDF of the vote spread is, and determine the probability of whether X voter fraud incidents can change the result of the election. Then that can be compared against all of the other effects floating around in this complicated system. For example, it woudl be fascinating to compare voter fraud against the number of people who fail to vote because the flu prevented them from goign to the booths. | |
| Aug 7, 2020 at 17:59 | comment | added | Jan | Sorry to point this out but the national popular vote margin has zero influence on the outcome of a US presidential election. What counts is winning a sufficient number of the effectively 56 individual elections (51 statewide/DC elections plus the 5 individual congressional districts in Maine and Nebraska). It famously came down to a couple of hundred votes in Florida in 2000 which ultimately did decide the presidential race (Gore won the national popular vote by ~500.000). | |
| Aug 7, 2020 at 16:43 | history | edited | Cort Ammon | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
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| Aug 7, 2020 at 16:02 | comment | added | BobE | There is a tendency to misapply the term fraud to cover a multitude of offences. In actuality, 18 USC 594 breaks out voter intimidation specifically, from the various election offences. So from a technical standpoint election fraud is a different crime than voter intimidation. | |
| Aug 7, 2020 at 3:37 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | @BobE True. If you restrict your definitions that way, in person and mail in voting have identical fraud behaviors... or at least would if we implemented some minimal safeguards. The only differences between them are behaviors that are done at the household when filling out the form. | |
| Aug 7, 2020 at 3:34 | comment | added | BobE | I guess that I make a distinction between voter / electoral fraud and voter intimidation. On it's face (in a worst case) threatening a voter is not fraud. OTOH, a voter who knowingly improperly claims a right to vote is committing a fraudulent act. A person or organization who "stuffs the ballot box" is committing fraud. In that context, facts are available that demonstrates that mail based voting is no more susceptible to fraud. Given that framework, the examples that are available are those states that utilize mail based voting and all states that employ absentee voting. | |
| Aug 6, 2020 at 4:30 | comment | added | BobE | Generally I agree that the impact (changing the winner/loser) of an election (particularly of a national election), would require massive vote manipulation. That said, we'd like elections to be as free of voting fraud , that is the ideal. However in human systems we are likely never to achieve that ideal. IMO, the states of Washington, Oregon, are doing pretty well (infinitesimal fraud) with their voting by mail. | |
| Aug 6, 2020 at 3:19 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | @BobE I considered the argument pretty trivial. It is always easier to do more fraudulent behavior when restrictions are relaxed. That being said, I hope it came through clearly that my primary argument is a frame challenge that says it doesn't matter, because it would have to increase fraud by multiple orders of magnitude before it could materially change an election. | |
| Aug 6, 2020 at 2:51 | comment | added | BobE | @puppetsock, Can you tell us what states accept "ballots for weeks after the election date" ? Even overseas ballots have to arrive no more than ten days after the close of the polls to be acceptable. | |
| Aug 6, 2020 at 2:42 | comment | added | BobE | -1, I was looking for facts, not personal conclusions, that would support "the idea that mail in voting would lead to higher instances of fraud" | |
| Aug 6, 2020 at 0:41 | comment | added | zibadawa timmy | @puppetsock Exactly zero, which the answer makes pretty abundantly clear. | |
| Aug 6, 2020 at 0:21 | comment | added | puppetsock | Also, you should be pointing out how many elections could have been swung if those 1291 cases of fraud had not been detected. | |
| Aug 6, 2020 at 0:18 | comment | added | puppetsock | In addition, you could mention such things as mail-in-voting allowing a much longer period for shenanigans. Ballots can potentially be accepted for weeks after the election date. And you could mention such things as Patterson NJ washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/06/29/… where 19% of mail-in ballots were judged to be invalid. | |
| Aug 1, 2020 at 1:34 | comment | added | Azor Ahai -him- | In Washington, you may cancel your ballot and get a new one. So it would be pretty easy to avert those first cases, make it a functionally useless way to conduct voter fraud (even more so than it already is). | |
| Aug 1, 2020 at 0:48 | comment | added | Cort Ammon | @AffableAmbler I agree to the absurdity of it. At the national level, it's simply a boogeyman. | |
| Aug 1, 2020 at 0:14 | comment | added | AffableAmbler | The idea of spending significant amounts of time/money buying or coercing individual votes seems somewhat silly in today’s world when those resources could be (I can only imagine) spent much more effectively (and legally) on advertising/social media campaigns to psychologically manipulate people en masse into voting the way you way you want them to. Still, very good answer. | |
| Jul 31, 2020 at 23:57 | comment | added | Joel Harmon | This answer could be improved by clarifying how much fraud would be needed to turn the 2016 election. According to your link, that is about 78 thousand in three counties. Knowing where to cheat in advance and also ensuring that fraud survives recounts and audits is an exercise for the reader. | |
| Jul 31, 2020 at 23:23 | history | answered | Cort Ammon | CC BY-SA 4.0 |