Trump and Biden are both claiming victory in the most recent election. I tend to believe Biden because this is consistent with my prediction regarding how a timid cower-in-place population would vote. But how could anyone be sure who is correct?
In most countries there is a national ID card system. Citizens show this ID in order to vote. There can be a record of which ID numbers went to the polls (or to an Internet e-voting service) in every district nationwide. With such a record, a 10-line computer program can verify that nobody voted twice, for example. (Start with Quicksort in Haskell!)
How can it work in the U.S.? Maybe we know that “Joe Smith” voted in both Florida and Pennsylvania, but how could we ever determine whether these two voters are the same person or two different people?
Also, with mail-in ballots, how do we know that they were filled out and sent back by people who were (a) alive, (b) actually resident in the state, and (c) not voting in any other state? (see “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises” (NYT, 2012))
(The working class don’t seem to be convinced that the system cannot be manipulated by the elites. I was at an airport in New Hampshire recently talking to a mechanic. A military-schemed Sikorsky S-92 was departing. The mechanic said “That was probably Joe Biden dropping off another box of ballots.”)
“But how could anyone be sure who is correct?”
Every state has its own procedures for preventing vote fraud. Where the margins are close, there’ll be manual recounts.
Conspiracy theories are inherently implausible, because they require a large number of people working together effectively while keeping it secret. (Will Rogers: “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”) In the case of the 2020 election, it’s even more implausible because of the size of the margins and the number of states (Democrats subverted the vote in Arizona and Georgia?).
Henry Olsen, a committed Republican: How we can be confident that Trump’s voter fraud claims are baloney.
The New York Times called election officials (Democrats and Republicans) in every state to ask: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/10/us/politics/voting-fraud.html
“Washington Post, a committed anti-Trump propaganda rag…”
Anyway, the conspiracy is: “Let’s fake votes for Biden. (Don’t bother with down-ballot candidates–the glare of sunrise approaches!)” It doesn’t take any coordination. It’s not an amphibious assault. The question of its significance is not decided by a hand-wavy article from a biased source.
“Conspiracy theories are implausuble” — yet every single state in existence is a result of conspiracy which had succeeded.
If you don’t trust the Washington Post, Fox News has called the election for Biden.
The fact that Trump Nation is mistrustful of all institutions means that only Trump conceding will convince them that he’s lost – and Trump will never do that.
Barton Gellman, writing before the election:
Russil: I don’t doubt that “election officials” self-report that they’ve been doing an excellent job, not tainted in any way by fraud or error. But my question still stands… how could anyone ever verify the work of these officials, e.g., to make sure that ballots from the same person weren’t being counted in multiple places within a state or in multiple states?
@Russil:
In Canada, nobody complains about having to show an ID to vote. It’s the law. Why is that so contentious in the United States? We’re a “richer country” than Canada, as everybody knows. So why is it such a big problem here? Before, during and after our elections here, all our liberals want to move to Canada, but maybe they should just stay here and demand better voter identification!
To vote at the federal election you have to prove your identity and address. There are three ways to do this:
https://www.elections.ca/content.aspx?section=vot&dir=ids&document=index&lang=e
Philip: I can tell you what the typical safeguards look like here, in our recent BC provincial election.
In-person voting: Party representatives are present throughout Election Day and the counting of ballots. When someone arrives to vote, they show identification, typically a government-issued photo id with their current address. Making sure people can’t vote twice: If they’re voting at their designated polling place and they’re already registered, their name is crossed off the list of registered voters, If they’re not registered, their name and address are recorded. If they’re voting at a polling place which is different from their designated polling place, their secret ballot is placed in a numbered certification envelope, and their name and address are recorded for that certification envelope; these certification envelopes are validated against the list of people who have already voted, opened, and counted (with party representatives present) two weeks after Election Day.
Mail-in voting: The voter puts their secret ballot in a numbered certification envelope, and their name and address is already recorded for that certification envelope. Again, these certification envelopes are validated to prevent duplicates, opened, and counted (with party representatives present) two weeks after Election Day. To protect the secrecy of the ballot, the secret ballot is removed from each envelope and placed in a ballot box. Only after several hundred ballots have been placed in the ballot box are they removed and counted.
Party representatives are also present for the counting on Election Day. Before voting starts, the ballot boxes are sealed, with an election official showing to the party representatives that each ballot box is empty. Similarly, when voting closes and counting is about to begin, the election official opens the ballot box and empties the ballots onto a table, showing the party representatives that there are no ballots remaining in the ballot box.
The typical counting process is that an election official opens each ballot, records the vote on a tally sheet, and places the ballot on a pile. Party representatives can observe, but cannot touch the ballots (if they do that’s grounds for immediate ejection). Once all the ballots have been counted, the election official checks that the number of ballots issued matches the number of ballots counted.
To prevent bogus ballots from being introduced, or valid ballots from being discarded, each ballot issued has a detachable counterfoil with a unique number. Any ballot which is issued but not placed in the ballot box – e.g. a voter comes back from the voting booth and says they need a new ballot because they messed up their current one – must be recorded. The counterfoil is only detached when the voter places the ballot in the ballot box. This is similar to the way the individually-numbered certification envelopes serve as a safeguard for mail-in ballots.
Everything’s on paper, and all the paper materials are saved, including the certification envelopes.
https://elections.bc.ca/docs/guidebooks/879-Guide-to-Voting-and-Counting.pdf
It is rather obvious that the current system is inherently unverifiable, probably by design. Trump and his supporters’ activity in this regard is rather futile. We’ll never know if any “rule” breaking activity took place or if it did whether it was sufficient to change the outcome.
In any case, even if it did take place, the losers deserve what they got, primarily because they failed to make sure that the rules of the game are observed, e.g. voter id. They agreed to play the game nevertheless and lost: case closed.
Russil: Thanks for that explanation. I think the only thing that can be more-or-less guaranteed in the U.S. is that there won’t be multiple votes associated with the same physical address. A given individual might be able to vote 100 times, but you can’t have 100 votes tagged to “123 Main Street, Springfield,…”.
Philip: I don’t believe that’s correct. Each certification envelope is associated with a unique voter on the registration list. To vote 100 times, you would need to be able to pretend to be 100 different voters on the registration list.
Russil: My statement about being able to vote 100 times relates to a person in the U.S. You’re saying that isn’t possible because of some safeguards that are in place in a country other than the U.S.?
I’m assuming that the state processes are similarly stringent to those in BC. Here’s the Massachusetts process, for example: https://www.mass.gov/doc/950-cmr-47-early-voting-procedures/download
The short answer is that we can’t and it’s a huge flaw in voting by mail, in addition to all the other flaws of voting by mail. We’re never going to know.
It’s like this 100 years later, someone finds something important:
https://patch.com/massachusetts/winchester/human-bones-found-winchester-yard
During a terrible pandemic, it would be difficult to blame people that want to avoid physical proximity with others when voting in person. Of course we will know. We know which ballots were sent, and which ones were received.
I hope you put your money where your mouth is and start contributing to sore loser Trump’s legal fund. And pay his debts.
@Jack: No, I’m not contributing to his legal defense fund. I’ve stated my personal qualms with the Trump Administration at length in many other posts prior to this. I think it’s worth considering changing the way we do mail-in voting, and I think having national ID requirements for voters is an idea well past its time. No matter how many statutes people quote in defense of our current system, I know that the laws can be bent and subverted by determined actors. It’s pretty clear, and rational observers would agree. I don’t think it rises to the level of significance that any states will wind up changing in this election. As Karl Rove points out in his op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, these types of challenges have happened only three times before successfully, involving hundreds of votes, not thousands or tens of thousands.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/this-election-result-wont-be-overturned-11605134335?mod=searchresults_pos14&page=1
“There are only three statewide contests in the past half-century in which recounts changed the outcome: the 1974 New Hampshire Senate race, the 2004 Washington governor’s contest, and the 2008 Minnesota Senate election. The candidates in these races were separated, respectively, by 355, 261 and 215 votes after Election Day.”
Our politics shouldn’t be so poisonous that we can’t agree on finding better ways to do this. In every election since Bush v. Gore, a large part of the story has been this constant legal battle over close races, but we’ve done very little to reform the system. The Democrats hate the idea of requiring people to show ID – allegedly based on the “expense” involved. These are the same folks who don’t have any trouble spending hundreds of billions of dollars on contact tracing for Coronavirus.
All of the opposition to national IDs – or even state IDs – exists because it is the main source of fraud – and thus hope! – for the fraudulent.
I recently renewed my driver’s license online in Massachusetts and had to send them a scan of my birth certificate. People all across the country should have a national ID provided free of charge by the government, which includes their birth records and can be used for voting. Period.
On the other hand, the best way to avoid these problems in the first place is just to have people go to the polls, as John Bolton thinks is the best way. I agree with him. But they should also have a unique National ID card. I don’t think our poll workers are too stupid to scan a National ID card versus crossing off a line with an ink pen on a printed sheet of paper, like they do where I live.
By the way, where I live, they didn’t verify that it was **actually me** in any way. I walked up to the poll worker, said my name, and as long as it wasn’t crossed off previously, I got a ballot! There was no verification that I am really who I said I was. It was just the “honor system.” I could have been Joe Blow from Blowtown and they wouldn’t have been able to tell, because they didn’t check anything! So if you know that John Strange is going to be out of town, you could have voted in his place as Mr. Strange just by saying you were him!
What I fail to understand fully is this: How in the world, in Chomskyland ( https://noam-chomsky.tumblr.com/post/6900283126/we-live-entangled-in-webs-of-endless-deceit-often ), do we have a voting system that’s so full of holes as to be completely ridiculous to anyone who probes it even superfically? One would think by this point that at least Massachusetts would want to be able to verify that people who cast a ballot were actually who they say they are. But they don’t.
It exists because of our racist past. Preventing black people from voting was systemic, overlooked, and enforced by the government. Can’t register to vote unless you can tell me how many jelly beans are in this jar? Conservatives love to overlook history; that doesn’t happen anymore, it’s all in the past, it can never happen again.
@Senorpablo:
So what’s the answer in the anti-Racist future? Ask white people to identify the number of jelly beans in the jar? The same people who trust so much in the integrity and honesty of government workers and the “process” requirements to ensure the accuracy of our elections can’t abide by a national ID card or showing some form of ID at the polls, like they do in Canada? It doesn’t follow that because their were racial injustices in the past that reforming our elections in the future is wrong. That’s a ridiculous argument. Women couldn’t vote in the past, either. But nobody seriously thinks that women as a group are routinely disenfranchised by reforms that apply to everyone.
@Senorpablo: What would it cost to implement a National ID system run through the Social Security Administration? Even if it was $10 per person per year, with 330 million people, that’s $3.3 billion dollars out of our Federal budget. Everyone gets a US Government ID card containing a GUID with a photograph, that can be updated when their address changes, in person. Why is that so onerous to contemplate?
I would feel much better about voting in person in Massachusetts if I had to prove my identity and address at the polls. As I’ve said, where I live, they don’t check for ID! My town has a highly transient population and many of the people here decamp to Florida and other places in the winter. I’m sure many of them vote in Florida – where you have to show an ID. But to my knowledge, that vote in Florida is never cross-referenced with their Massachusetts voting status. So to me, it looks a lot like they could very easily vote twice, or have someone vote in their place in Massachusetts, because nobody ever checks! With a National ID, once you vote anywhere, that’s it! This doesn’t have anything to do with racism against Black people or other “minority” groups – 94% of the people in my town are white!
Why do it? There’s zero proof of even infinitesimal voter fraud. Why fix what isn’t broken? I love how the liberty and anti-regulation party is all for ID’s–which is just needles regulation and hurdles. The whole voter fraud thing is a red herring drummed up by republicans to do some voter suppression.
> Also, with mail-in ballots, how do we know that they were filled out and sent back by people who were (a) alive, (b) actually resident in the state, and (c) not voting in any other state? (see “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises” (NYT, 2012))
We don’t. There is no way to tell. You have to trust that the ballots were mailed to people who were all of (a), (b), and (c). I have never seen any good investigation of how that information is either established OR verified.
You don’t know b of c with in person either.
Someone sends out a mailpiece that has a barcode on it. Some person either gets the ballot and returns it, or they don’t. It comes back to the destination, the barcode is scanned, and it goes into the pile. When the ballot is opened, someone also sees exactly who it was from. Then they sit in a big room and toss them around. At any point in the process, there is no real guarantee of anything. You are not there.
https://imgbox.com/4xTkZzhn#
The only way to guarantee that your vote actually counts is to vote in person. And even then, there are ways it’s subject to errors. The vote by mail system just introduces a bunch of new holes into the Sea of Holes.
I don’t even deign to comprehend the MA system for “tracking my ballot” which says:
“Enter your name and the address at which you are qualified to vote.
This address must be in a city or town in Massachusetts, and NOT your mailing address.”
Then it asks for your address. How do you enter your address and NOT your mailing address? It’s just unholy.
https://www.sec.state.ma.us/wheredoivotema/track/trackmyballot.aspx
> When the ballot is opened, someone also sees exactly who it was from.
Where I come from the ballot is sealed in an envelope which is sealed in a second envelope which you sign. So the person who verifies that the ballot is valid just sees the inner envelope but not its contents
The Great McGinty (1940) starring Brian Donlevy addresses issues of voter identification and fraud. In 1940, the fact that government was rife with machine politics and voter fraud was so uncontroversial that it was the subject of light romantic comedy.
Philip K Dick had an alternative voting system in “The Solar Lottery.” Everybody had an equal chance for elected office based on a totally random system based on solar activity. Tbis tiny chance could be pledged to a political master, who would dole out largesse to his pledged vassals, and gain office himself if any of his pledges’ number won the solar lottery. The novel assumes the system is incorruptible.
“Also, with mail-in ballots, how do we know that they were filled out and sent back by people who were (a) alive, (b) actually resident in the state, and (c) not voting in any other state? (see “Error and Fraud at Issue as Absentee Voting Rises” (NYT, 2012))”
It would be pretty simple. Just leave a spot for people to confirm their identity using their social security number!
@Toucan Sam, I hope you put your money where your mouth is and start contributing to sore loser Trump’s legal fund. And pay his debts.
The one point idiots like Trump overlook is that even if there was fraud, which has never been proven, you would then also have to prove that the fraud wasn’t on both sides and wouldn’t cancel itself out. But, since it’s all a morons fantasy anyway, why not make the outrageous claim that there’s fraud, and only the opposing side is engaged. How convenient.
This all ties in nicely with republican stereotypes in which only democrats commit crimes. Looting in the streets? Democrats. Illegal alien? Must be a democrat. The Clinton’s have never been caught despite nearly a decade of investigations and never ending scrutiny from republicans; yet cult members remain convinced they’re up to no good. Meahwhile, Trump has been caught red handed of the very same crimes–charity and business fraud, campaign fraud, money laundering and very likely tax evasion, insurance and bank fraud, but no big deal/nothing to see here.
Clinton was not caught because Clinton has a privilege to pop on the same airplane as attorney general flies.
Thanks for proving my point. You have the requisite paranoia and imagination to be a republican.
I highly doubt individuals are committing voter fraud – it’s a big enough headache to even vote once!
Question: was there a determined, sinister effort to interfere in the election process?
Answer for 2016 (Trump wins): definitely!
Answer for 2020 (Trump loses): preposterous conspiracy theory!
So the answer to “How could the U.S. election results ever be verified?” is a function of whether the correct candidate won.
Has it occurred to you that (1) interfering in an election by influencing voters and (2) interfering in an election by fraudulently counting votes could be two different things? The reason the US has such an archaic election system is 100% the Republicans fault. It is only the Republican party that systematically aims to make it harder for Americans to exercise their democratic rights. They discourage people from voting, make it harder for people in cities and minorities to vote, make it harder to vote by mail and count postal votes, make it harder to count city votes. And even with the representative system so rigged in their favour, they claim fraud every time they lose. Even when counting is supervised by their own people, even when frivolous lawsuits are thrown out by their own appointed judges.
I hope you put your money where your mouth is and start contributing to sore loser Trump’s legal fund. And pay his debts.
I just listened to a Freakonomics interview with Tara McGowan, a “progressive political operative” whose job is to influence voters online through social media.
She at one point said it’s too bad that people get caught up in what they think is right and wrong when gaining power is the only goal that should matter.
When the only thing that matters is gaining power, logical consistency between 2016 and 2020 regarding claims of election meddling need not stand in the way.
Jack, you seem to be saying that Trump succeeded where Obama failed. In 2016, federal elections were vulnerable to ingenious Russian interference that helped Trump win power (well, office at least). Then in Trump’s term, things improved so much that those clever Russians were stymied. So doesn’t Trump deserve some credit for helping Biden to victory? Maybe you should show him some monetary appreciation!
Sam, one can only applaud such candor.
Phil, I hope you have started paying into Trump’s legal fund, to help pay his debts.
The US electoral system is ridiculously easy to simplify and the only reason it doesn’t get done is because Republicans prefer a good communist dictatorship to democracy. One person, one vote, one single registry as virtually every other non-communist country has shown possible. No need for state registration. Even India manages to get it bounds and leaps better than the US.
In fact, the US already does this – it manages to only give US passports to US citizens, so just do the same. Give a voter ID with passport application. In fact, a great idea would be to just allow voting for those who have a passport, and have visited a foreign country that is not Canada. Could do wonders for those uneducated Republican voters.
Teachers are 90% Democrats. Who is doing the bad job at teaching uneducated Republicans?
Jack: Sam does raise a good point. No matter how deep into MAGA country I have ever ventured, I never fail to find loyal Democrats working for and running the public schools! If Americans are growing up so stupid that they can’t see the virtues of the Democratic Party, who else can be blamed other than teachers who are themselves Democrats?
I don’t think there is much voter fraud.
I do think there is a shit ton of election fraud.
After four years of Trump is literally Hitler is it really hard to believe that a handful of election officials took it upon themselves to put a thumb on the scale? No conspiracy necessary.
Our national elections are run under the laws of the various states. These elections are administered at the county level. All of the areas of the nation that have ballot access problems and other issues have been controlled by democrats for years. The democrats could have more polling places. They could have more voting machines, etc. They choose not to for some reason.
And contra the New York Times, election fraud is well documented in Illinois (1960, 1982 (58 people were convicted) and 1987). What makes anyone think they’ve stopped? Even here in my home state of Texas, Lyndon Johnson (the Box 13 Scandal) was a well known beneficiary of election fraud. It does not require any great leap of faith to believe election fraud can happen elsewhere in this country.
At 65 years old, I’ve voted in all the elections I could. Fraud has never been an issue. We’re talking about it now because trump planted the seed before the election, and is cultivating it’s growth. The only problem here is trump himself and those that enable his nonsense.
Fraud is different from flaws in the election process. You can’t confuse the terms. There are relatively few fraudulent cases of voting but the process itself is flawd. Not having to show an ID when you vote is only the biggest one.
Obviously, Alex. But the insinuation here on the part of trump is that the election process led to fraud.
You definitely need ID to vote in Texas
@Jim: It’s not going anywhere. It’s to gin up some kind of schmucky legacy for him and Steve Bannon, so he can pay the $340 million dollars of personally guaranteed loans he has coming due in 2023 from Deutsche Bank. It may well succeed in that, but his Presidency is over.
@Wally: It should be everywhere. If I have to send a copy my birth certificate to Massachusetts RMV to have my driver’s license renewed, people should have to have an ID to vote.
Agreed, Alex. There’s method behind his madness for sure.
@Jim: I don’t think there’s a method to it. He’s a very disruptive nonmethodical person, and he doesn’t care what he knocks over. His entire life has been built on making sure that other people pay for his mistakes and he continues to ride a wave of support from people who can’t possibly compensate. It’s simple enough. I really don’t like what he’s done to the Republican Party and what he might have in mind for its “future.” But here we are. He’s not a Republican or a Conservative and never has been.
Alex: Agreed, to me it’s disappointing that the Republican Party seems to have fully surrendered to Trump Nation. I’m glad to see some Republicans (like Romney) speaking out.
“He’s not a Republican or a Conservative and never has been.”
Sorry, Republicans don’t get to disavow themselves now, after backing his every move for the last four years.
@baz: Well, then we’re going to have a civil war. I don’t see any way round it.
I think the worst days are ahead of us, and after that there’s not much better coming for a long, long time. The die has been cast, in my mind. Where it goes from here is anyone’s guess. The rich will flee, the poor will stay, and it’s going to be a very sad scene.
In FL we need an ID to vote
What would a civil war even look like?
Police have just shown their ability to violently suppress mass protests. The number of people willing to form a militia or engage in terrorism is easily combatted by national security apparatus .
Would some red or blue states attempt to secede and the military get involved?
Most likely result is continued social media polarity, passing the presidency back and forth every 4-8 years and the pillaging of the economy by the 0.1%.
@baz: I’ve always advised people against thinking about participating in a civil war in the United States with weapons. I don’t think they’ll last long. At some point rather quickly after the combat erupts, the heavy firepower will be brought in and they’ll lose very quickly. Once the military is involved, they’ll be using weapons that are far beyond the capabilities of the average civilian combatant to wield. It’ll be a bloodbath, the State will win.
@baz: I think the police have shown their restraint to a remarkable degree. They didn’t suppress very much in Portland or anywhere else for that matter. Certainly not in New York City. In fact they’ve all shown a great reluctance to become too deeply involved in the protests despite being wounded in large numbers. But a civil war is a different situation and I think President Harris wouldn’t hesitate to mobilize the military, despite Posse Comitatus or anything else, to put down widespread, violent civil unrest, particularly orchestrated by people she doesn’t care for ideologically. They’ll lose in about the first week. And they’ll lose everything.
Turchin is probably right. It’s not pretty. We have a huge overproduction of elites relative to their value to the society, endless bloat in the government, and tremendous inequalities that hit the previously-proud and forgotten people the hardest.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/