If you give your mail-in ballot to a friend to drop in the mailbox, you didn't actually vote.— Scott Adams (@ScottAdamsSays) May 27, 2020
Your friend voted twice.
Once with his own vote and once by deciding whether or not to put your vote in the mail. #MailInVoting
Could one of you math geniuses check the math? If your friend knows your vote is for the other candidate and he chooses not to mail his, then he prevents his vote from being canceled by yours and keeps his vote as a vote. Is that equivalent to voting twice? I'm looking for a sophisticated math answer to that question.
Anyway, if he knows you're voting for the same person, and he goes ahead and mails your vote, then you're getting your vote counted only because he followed through, so that's 2 votes at his option, but we're just guessing that he might be tempted to trash your envelope if he didn't like the idea that it was canceling his vote.
Now, I'm thinking about this mythical devious friend. To accept Adams's clever point, you have to think that people don't feel bound by principles of integrity. The "friend" has to see that he has a choice before we can say that he "voted" when he mailed or did not mail your ballot. Have you ever looked back on your life and seen a place where you could have taken an advantage but you can't even give yourself "credit" because it didn't occur to you to be dishonest?
Anyway, Adams doesn't mention the possibility of a friend whose only deviousness is laziness. He's got your envelope and he knows you've checked the box for the other guy, and he decides he can simplify the whole thing by trashing your ballot and not voting. Now, do the math: How many times did that guy vote? Do your own math and do the math within the Scott Adams concept. He didn't vote, so you might say 0. But he didn't vote and he threw out your ballot, so how can it be the same number as if he just voted and you handled your own mail. So is the answer -1? If it's -1, then when he does vote, if he also throws out your ballot and you were against his guy, then it seems as though we should say he voted 0 times, but Scott says he voted 2 times.
Discuss!
Posts
148 comments:
The guy mailing the vote(s) is voting ONCE.
He's also deciding whether to allow someone else to vote.
That's not voting twice.
Sometimes Scott Adams' world seems more Dilbert like than the real world I live in. I hope has better friends than that.
This is why we need in-person voting. To avoid stupid math problems.
I wouldn't hand a friend my taxes, a bill, or any legal document to mail ... what adults do this straw man example?
I am guess this applies to the elderly voting, as no one else is having this sort of situation.
Same person who fails to mail your ballot probably also fails to give you a ride to the polls... this just seems unrealistic and a complete straw man.
"If your friend knows your vote is for the other candidate and he chooses not to mail his,"
Now that would be very unlikely, no?
Your friend voted three times! His own vote + Your vote would have been 2 votes that add up to 0. But then his vote actually counts because he threw out yours. So 2+0+1= 3
3 Votes!!
Is it so terribly hard to post your own ballot? Anyway, how many votes does my postal carrier get then?
Your first paragraph doesn't make sense to me.
In the scenario, there are several possibilities.
Possibility one is that both votes are for the same candidate. We’ll call this a +2
Possibility two is that one vote is for one candidate and the other vote is for another. We’ll call this 0 (they cancel each other out)
Possibility three is that one vote for the preferred candidate is mailed and the other is withheld. This is a +1
Now, where it gets interesting is when the vote in the secret ballot is thought to be known but not known 100%.
I believe there will be a lot of people who will claim to support another candidate but who will secretly vote for Trump. So someone could say - hey, sent in my vote for Jo Jorgensen but the vote is really for Trump.
I'm sure there are many good reasons to be wary of mail-in ballots, but this is not one of them. Firstly, only a small percentage of voters would give their ballots to a friend to mail. Secondly, there would be an even lower percentage of trusted friends that would violate the trust given to them.
I remember PBS news at the conclusion of the 2016 election declaring there was zero evidence of widespread voter fraud and at first I thought no big deal. But later I realized that they weasel-worded the idea of "zero evidence" because they determined what widespread meant.
He says "friend" to simplify things, because nobody is clear about what "ballot harvesting" involves or how it works or who does it. Don't law professors sometimes oversimplify their examples when they are teaching first years?
To Jake:
I might be hard to cast your own ballot. “Hey, grandma, I’m taking mom and dad’s ballots down to the mailbox. You want me to take yours too? ”
Also, if ballots are put in mailboxes with the flag up around Election Day, won’t that be tempting for vote thieves?
And, If it’s safer to go to a blue mail box, won’t the handle need to be cleaned after every person uses it, else we’ll spread the virus?
Specifically "keeps his vote as a vote." But he didn't vote!
The answer is that neither person voted. Both mail-in ballots were "sorted" into bins at the Post Office and never delivered to the county Clerk's office. It happened in Milwaukee, just on the mail delivery phase and not the return. USPS, the official vote fraud wing of the Democrat party.
Where's Marilyn vos Savant when you need her ?
Which is why ballot harvesting should be illegal.
And it turned OC Blue in the midterms.
To accept Adams's clever point, you have to think that people don't feel bound by principles of integrity.
Is there any doubt that some people don't fee bound by principles of integrity?
it's called chain of custody, the only way it's secured is if you mail it yourself, or turn it in at the precinct on election day,
I think "a friend" is just a placeholder here. It could as easily be "to a ballot harvester". Or "to your yellow dog mail carrier".
The issue is not a "friend." It is the nice young volunteer who goes door to door with the registration rolls in her hands to decide which ballots will be mailed.
"Is it so terribly hard to post your own ballot? Anyway, how many votes does my postal carrier get then? "
Apparently, a few people here never heard of vote harvesting in California. Google it.
sophisticated math answer...
I'm only auditing this class.
Deflection.
What is the purpose of moderating comments when you let obvious spam through, not once, but twice? (Raletta Technology at 7:57 and 7:58)?
That said, Adams' hypothetical is ridiculous. He must have some asshole friends.
That's not voting twice.
It's equivalent to the friend voting twice. The net effect of mailing his ballot and tossing out yours is +1 for his candidate. If both you and he had voted once, the net effect would have been zero. If you had mailed in your own ballot and he had voted twice, the net effect would also be +1 for his candidate.
"Is that equivalent to voting twice?"
-- Yes-ish, in the sense that he gets to swing essentially two points towards his desired outcome instead of just one.
I once did not remind my wife to votes absentee as she was gonna be traveling on Election Day.
Did I vote twice?
-XC
PS. - it didn’t work, Obama got elected anyway.
By deciding whether your vote and his vote gets counted, he controls 2 votes. The motivation doesn't matter. (He could also change your vote if he knows you voted for the other guy, but that's not necessary to support Adam's point.)
So glad I'm on Althouse today because I just happened to be looking for Birthday Quotes. What?
Anyway, let's say, just for this discussion, that you and your friend are in California. And your friend has picked up not only your vote, but hundreds of other ballots from 50 or so households. (Note the discrepancy. California sent out thousands of ballots to dead or moved people.). Let's say your friend is a ballot harvester. Let's say your friend's job is to make sure that he/she signs and checks off all the Democrats on those ballots before they get turned in. And let's say that there are a few that have already been signed and checked for Republicans. What does your friend do with those? Dump 'em, of course. Then turn in the other 500 ballots all signed interestingly with the same style signature, all voting for the same Democrats. All coming from those 50 houses.
Democracy in action. That's how you get a state, and soon, a nation, with no Republicans in office. The problem is, currently Californians with brains and means can escape to Texas. Once Dems take over the entire US government, where do we escape to?
The Democrats want to prevent Colored people from NOT voting. A Colored person who is NOT voting will be visited and harassed aggressively until he relents and votes. This harassment will last continuously during the several weeks before the election.
Mark said...I am guess this applies to the elderly voting, as no one else is having this sort of situation.
It's a species of ballot harvesting. A Democratic operative goes around to the old folks homes and collects hundreds of ballots to deliver. And if the fogies need help filling it out, well, he'll happily provide that service.
These so-called "voters" should stop meddling in our elections.
Blogger Jake said...
"Anyway, how many votes does my postal carrier get then?"
Given the recent election in Wisconsin, that is a very good question.
One dishonest postal worker could easily swing a close election. Even worse, it would be very difficult to ferret out the crime (plausible deniability).
Scott Adams also made a suggestion, don't know if he thought it all the way through. Instead of conservatives griping about voter fraud, and liberals scoffing at them because it never happens and you're just pretending to believe in it so you can justify voter suppression: Let conservatives openly say they're going to game the new system as much as possible. Absentee ballots? Oh, we'll help you fill them out. Just send them to us with your signature, and some suggestions, and we'll fill it out according to your suggestions - trust us! Or we'll drop by your house and pick up your ballots and turn them in for you, if that's hard. We'll register you, unless you tell us not to (if you're dead, you can't tell us not to.)
All the things that (conservatives believe that) liberals actually do, we'll do them more!
If this attitude became big, liberals would be in favor of voter ID and paper ballots.
"Is it so terribly hard to post your own ballot?"
No, but the nice Dem lady harvester promises to make it even easier for you, so --.
I suspect he is using a simplified story to illustrate the larger point that the process cannot be trusted due to chain of custody issues and lack of accountability.
This is about as far from “show me your ID or you cannot vote” as you can get.
People talk this way all the time. "A vote for Jill Stein is a vote for Trump." Well, it's half a vote for Trump. A vote for Trump is a full vote for Trump.
Mark-
Ever hear of vote harvesting? It’s all the rage in California
Your vote doesn't count until it's submitted.
Filling out a ballot that isn't turned in is no different than "voting" by writing on a post-it that you intend to vote for a particular candidate.
Let's take the scenario of a 20 person electorate. If the election were very close, as often are the case, the vast majority of elections cope out either 11-9, 10-10 or 9-11. So your friend has his vote, and what is behind envelope #1. He controls whether the envelope is opened or not.
If he knows that you voted against his choice, he can suppress your vote. The final vote tally would then be 11-8, 10-9 or 9-10. If you voted your own ballot, but your friend got to vote twice (he had two addresses last year, maybe). the final vote would be 12-9, 11-10, 10-11. Same results. Under that scenario, your friend would have the equivalent of voting twice.
If he knows you voted FOR his candidate and he includes it, the results would be 11-9,10-10, 9-11. Not voting your ballot, the results would be 10-9, 9-10, 8-11. So if you failed to vote for yourself, the results would be the same as if your friend did not include your ballot, but he can then vote for your candidate twice to make up for your failure to vote for yourself. You don't vote: 10-9, 9-10, 8-11, he votes twice to make up for it: 11-9, 10-10, 11-9.
So in both those situations, your friend has the same effect as if he voted twice PROVIDED he knows what your ballot contains. IF he cannot know at all, then it is a 50/50 proposition. If he has partial information then there is some sort of probability distribution on the net outcome of whether to include or not include your ballot.
So, perfect knowledge is required for Scott to be accurate. Imperfect knowledge lowers the net result.
I don't remember Bayes enough from my college years decades ago, but I think the net probability is >1 for favoring your friend's choice if he controls your ballot. That probability goes up the great number of ballots he controls. This would be one strong argument against ANY kind of ballot harvesting.
If he does not know your choice
He's also deciding whether to allow someone else to vote.
He's voting whether the other guy gets to vote.
So, if you give your ballot to a poll worker to place in the ballot box, you didn’t actually vote, the poll worker voted?
Your friend voted twice, unless you went to school under the new math, in which case- whatever answer makes you feel good about yourself is correct.
Once you vote, you don't want anyone else touching your piece of paper until you enter it into the counting/recording machine.
Hey! What if the friend gets hit by a truck on the way to mail both ballots, how many votes did he get? What complete nonsense can people come up with to keep people from voting by mail?
Lol, Scott must have some shitty friends.
On the 2 votes/no votes math question, back when my state was voting on an anti-gay marriage amendment (2008, I think? Ancient history now.), some of the religious groups discovered that constitutional amendment votes are somehow counted based on the number of votes for governor, rather than just a straight yeses verses nos. IIRC, they realized that if they didn’t cast any vote in the gubernatorial race, but voted yes for the amendment, they mathematically voted yes twice. (On the other side, a gubernatorial vote without any vote on the amendment was mathematically equal to a no, though there was no way for the nos to get a second vote.)
This is the sort of mental masturbation that leaves me feeling empty and alone. I'm social distancing from such antics
Mr. Adams math makes sense after a fashion. Assuming you were going to vote for Candidate A and your friend was going to vote for Candidate B, the two votes net to 0 with neither candidate gaining an advantage. If your friend tosses your ballot in the trash, then Candidate B goes +1. If your friend illegally voted twice but also sent in your ballot, then Candidate B goes +1 as well. So the end result is equivalent.
If both you and your friend voted the same way then this analysis no longer holds up, but your friend would not have any reason to toss the ballot in that situation, unless this is some sort of contrived miscommunication worthy of a sitcom.
On a serious note. Yesterday on msnbc I saw them claim absentee ballotts, are the same as mail in voting. Very dishonest. So exactly what I expected
"Hey! What if the friend gets hit by a truck on the way to mail both ballots, how many votes did he get?"
-- I think that by conflating an accident with deliberate malice you're missing the point being made.
Trick question. Nobody has any friends who disagree with them politically.
Does anyone think that, given the opportunity, voter fraud made easy would make it more rare?
If you believe the outcome of the election is the most important thing in your life, and someone made it easy to cheat, would you not cheat? And if not you, don't you think a lot of people would?
"So, if you give your ballot to a poll worker to place in the ballot box, you didn’t actually vote, the poll worker voted?"
-- Every time I have ever voted, I feed the slip into the machine. Do they do that differently in some places?
Lyssa! I'm glad to see you!
My own comment at 8:39 AM
The Democrats want to prevent Colored people from NOT voting.
I apologize.
I inadvertently used the wrong expression Colored people instead of the correct expression People of Color.
Please make the mental correction.
"'To accept Adams's clever point, you have to think that people don't feel bound by principles of integrity.' Is there any doubt that some people don't fee[l] bound by principles of integrity?"
No, but he doesn't allow for the fact that some people do. I realize it's more provocative to put it the way he does. Also, he openly admits that he tweets things he know are wrong because it gets a reaction.
Anyone who has been involved in politics knows the inherent massive possibilities of voter fraud. It happens all the time with harvesting of absentee ballots, especially with the elderly and in less sophisticated neighborhoods. There is probably someone in almost every state not completely controlled by one party that has convictions. Both parties have got caught doing it.
Vote by mail will be worse than motor voter and be even worse that states failure to clean up the rolls. Combine all three and the elections are meaningless.
Scott Adams is using the word 'vote' in two different senses.
The first vote is where your friend votes by mailing his ballot.
The second 'vote' is where your friend decides whether or not to mail in your ballot.
Scott knew this when he said this and he did not literally mean the friend votes twice in the election.
But having said that what actually is the math?
If we ignore the case where you and your friend are politically aligned (and you really, really must know that since you could be wrong!) then there is no problem.
Or to say it another way, it only matters if the two of you are voting differently.
If your friend is also unethical, in addition to voting differently, then she or he will either not mail in your vote or will 'forget' to mail in your vote. And taking out a vote is equivalent to a real vote, so in this instance, your friend is literally voting twice. Or equivalently the same effect could be accomplished by giving her or him two votes and you just one.
So maybe my first intuition was wrong. Maybe this is literally two votes.
And it's still kind of true even if you are voting the same. Your friend has control over whether your vote counts even if she or he wants your vote to count.
"Lol, Scott must have some shitty friends."
-- It doesn't take long on a political subreddit where people say "By any means necessary" to stop the bad Orange Man that you might think that some of these people actually mean it. I don't think any of my friends would be untrustworthy enough to not vote, even if they didn't like who I was voting for, but I'd also never put my friend in such a terrible position.
But, given there are people who say, "yeah, Thanksgiving is the perfect time to call your family up on their political failings for not buying sustainable cranberry sauce" who believe the "personal is political" to seriously question whether we should trust people with our votes.
Friends don't create moral dilemmas for friends.
Mail your own ballots!
Also, he openly admits that he tweets things he know are wrong because it gets a reaction.
Althouse similarly proposes solutions and questions she knows are wrong to get a reaction.
Adams is correct, kind of. He is describing a well-known effect that is frequently used to skew the results of data analysis. If the friend knows how you voted, then he has two degrees of freedom: how to vote himself, and whether to post your vote. If you voted the same way he did, then if he votes and posts your vote that is 2 votes toward his side vs. zero if he does nothing. If you voted the opposite way from him, then he has two choices: either post both votes (net zero) or post only his own (net 1).
The situation is not equivalent to his having two votes, but it is also not equivalent to his having one vote. Now consider a situation with 1000 people who vote for candidate A, and 1000 friends, half of which vote for A and half for B. Without intervention, you would have 1500 votes for A and 500 for B. With intervention, you end up with 1500 votes for A and none for B. The vote differential goes from 1000 to 1500, with (in this specific case) every person who has the choice getting an average of 1.5 votes. The vote percentage change is more dramatic: the vote goes from 75% for candidate A/25% for candidate B to 100% for candidate A.
Of course, the actual numbers depend on many things, including how often friends will vote differently, but Adams' point is clear: vote by mail is indeed quite prone to fraud. If one side is more likely to engage in that fraud, then the results of the election can be dramatically skewed.
Wow, you are missing Adams' point altogether. The "friend" isn't really a friend, he is someone working at that the post office. You give me a 1000 ballots sealed in the their envelopes with the same ZIP Code, and I can tell you whether or not to trash all 1000 depending on whether you support Democrats or Republicans.
However, I will play your game- if your friend knows who you voted for and it is different from his vote, then he votes twice by tossing yours in the trash 1 vote - (-1 vote)= 2.
Assume there are two candidates, A and B. There are actually 8 possibilities with a dishonest friend and the same 8 scenarios (call those 9 - 16) with an honest friend:
1) You vote A, your friend doesn't know your vote, your friend votes A
2) You vote A, your friend doesn't know your vote, your friend votes B
3) You vote A, your friend knows your vote, your friend votes A
4) You vote A, your friend knows your vote, your friend votes B
5) You vote B, your friend doesn't know your vote, your friend votes A
6) You vote B, your friend doesn't know your vote, your friend votes B
7) You vote B, your friend knows your vote, your friend votes A
8) You vote B, your friend knows your vote, your friend votes B
Assuming your friend is honest and mails your envelope: No change in the results
Assuming your friend is dishonest mails your vote if and only if he knows it agrees with his vote:
2 of 8 scenarios (3 and 8): no change to the results
2 of 8 scenarios (1 and 6): the mutually preferred candidate of both of you loses your vote
2 of 8 scenarios (2 and 7): your candidate loses your vote
2 of 8 scenarios (4 and 5): your candidate loses your vote
Assuming there is a 50-50 chance of having a dishonest friend,
Consider scenarios 1 - 8 as the dishonest friend scenarios
Consider scenarios 9 - 16 as the honest friend scenarios
10/16 times (62.5%) there is no change to the outcome
6/16 times (37.5%) there your candidate doesn't get your vote
Let's go forward. Let's assume you have a friend who truly believes voting for X is a morally repugnant act and that if that person gets into office [terrible thing happens.] If they know you're going to vote for that person, and somehow still consider you a friend, I think it would be very easy for them to justify not mailing in your ballot.
"I know I told them I'd send in their vote, but if [X] gets voted in, [women will have to die in forced childbirth/we'll have wars for oil], so I'll just lie to them and give ever so tiny an edge to the not Evil candidate."
I don't know why people are acting like "no one would do that."
For mail in voting to become a huge grounds for cheating, it doesn't take some people with integrity. It only takes a few people without integrity.
I recall there was a WaPo or NYT article widely discussed at the time on the right about a woman who *threw out* her husband's absentee ballot - and didn't tell him - because she voted for Obama and he voted for Romney.
So Scott's point isn't a "strawman" or even out of the realm of possibility. Especially with "ballot harvesting" and mail-in voting. Ballot harvesting in CA has been a partisan affair, even to the point of the harvester declining to accept a ballot from someone not listed on their program from the *same household* as one who was. It would be trivially easy for these partisan operatives - who get party registration lists for this purpose - to simply toss any ballot from a person not on the list on the way to dropping off what the reasonably assume is a vote for their candidate/party/issue.
+1 to Static Ping's description.
Or should that be +2?
Key word mistake in Scott's funny point is Friend. A friend would send in the ballot. But Scott's point is there is no chain of custody with mail in. I am against mail in. The postal service is a government union. Having any government union employee get any where near my vote is a big red flag.
Colorado has had mail-in voting for a number of elections. Mostly, it works okay. Here, however, are the concerns:
1. Ballots mailed to “voters” who have post office boxes (instead of delivery to their homes) or who live in apartments where residents’ mailboxes are all in the same place (with a trash can on the floor) may mean ballots end up in the trash can if the “voter” has moved. This is an easy opportunity for fraudulent voting. And Colorado has many counties with 100% PO Box delivery.
2. Signature checking is remarkably lax. Colorado elections personnel check signatures in 2 cases:
A. When a ballot is voted and returned to the elections officer, the signature on the envelope is checked against that voter’s signature on other official government documents (like their voter registration signature or on their driver’s license application).
B. When signatures to put an issue initiative on the ballot are submitted, a similar signature comparison occurs.
Rather shockingly, ballot initiative signature reviews often result in more than a quarter of all signatures being rejected because the signatures don’t match BUT mail-in ballot signatures have only a tiny rejection rate. Both situations use computer-based signature comparison. The difference? Mail-in Ballots’ signature checking by temporary, poorly paid election “judges” almost always results in that ballot being counted.
So the supposed verification process for mail-in ballots is probably nearly useless in stopping fraud.
It’s hardly surprising that of our counties with 100% PO Box Delivery, those counties that lean Democrat have seen substantial increases in the number of ballots counted (often nowadays above 100% of the adult population in those counties) while Republican leaning counties have see only small increases compared to the “vote in person” era.
It’s no wonder Democrats in other states want to go, with no advance preparation, to all-mail voting.
See, MayBee gets it. Remember, you aren't talking about the power of large numbers overcoming the actions of a small number of miscreants- it isn't the vast numbers of overall voters that matter, but the differences between vote totals themselves, which are usually in the range of 0-10% of the complete vote totals.
Doesn’t have to be “widespread” to be consequential.
This is classic Adams setting up his Trumpian debate strategy:
1.) Allow defenders of mail-in voting argue on the basis of what a friend would do with your ballot.
2.) Then rebut their argument with, "well, what if that person isn't your friend, but a partisan activist come to harvest your vote?"
Yancey Ward said, "You give me a 1000 ballots sealed in the their envelopes with the same ZIP Code, and I can tell you whether or not to trash all 1000 depending on whether you support Democrats or Republicans."
There are real examples of that. In Baltimore some years back, the city via some vast coincidence de-registered voters from Republican-leaning sectors but not from Democratic-leaning sectors. I think it was on the order of tens of thousands of people that discovered on election day that they could not vote.
The practical effect was more than enough to swing the gubernatorial election as well as probably other elections.
The courts later ruled it was all okay.
“ So, if you give your ballot to a poll worker to place in the ballot box, you didn’t actually vote, the poll worker voted?”
No - because there is a chain of custody for the ballots. Typically poll watchers from both parties watch every step of the process together. Almost always, when there was voter fraud, the chain of custody was broken, for example by an election official finding a box of uncounted ballots in their trunk. In such cases, the ballots were not under observation by representatives of both parties from the time they were cast to the time that they were counted. Both ballot harvesting and mail-in voting violate this standard fairly egregiously. Which, of course, is the point of them.
What you are depending on cancelling out the fraud is that both Republicans and Democrats will engage vote fraud equally. I don't think the data would even suggest that is true, but I mostly don't believe it because I don't think individual, unethical Republicans have access to the volumes of ballots that unethical Democrats do. What do you think the voting patterns/political donations of postal employees is if you had to take a guess?
The post office may or may not send out your vote, the mail carrier may or may not deliver your vote, the vote counters may or may not count your vote depending on which zip code you are residing.
What if the "friend" harvests the ballots of 20 or 30 people, knowing for whom they voted, and then decides which ones to actually mail? How does the math work then?
Or if some machine pol's kid goes through a nursing home and "helps" people vote (the right way) - because the pol threatens the manager with "a thorough inspection" if he objects?
Endless possibilities...
Nothing to discuss. It's sophistry.
Deadlines are a terrible thing, sometimes.
A friend who says he'll do something for you will do it.
That said, I disapprove of mail-in voting and in-person voting that does not require ID to be shown, and the use of electronic vote recording machines.
I like the idea of marking paper ballots with a little yellow pencil and putting them in the box. Because then there's a, you know, paper trail.
Of course, the most that we can hope for is lowering, not eliminating, the amount of voting fraud. But that is the standard that we have to accept whenever morally imperfect human beings are part of the process--just to keep it down in the weeds as much as we can.
When my son lived in a hip/rising part of LA, he would regularly not receive greeting cards. My parents had been in the habit of sending him cards with $20 or so tucked in to the card, and he would never receive them. They had a big mail box area, but each mail box was separately keyed and locked.
I went to stay in his apartment while he was in the hospital for a few days. My sister sent me a greeting card at his address, and I received it -- opened. I mentioned it to his neighbor, and she said she had a post office box in a different part of town for this very reason.
My husband's credit card was sent to our old address in LA. I don't know if it ever made it to our old house or if it was intercepted by the post office. But it was recently used to buy $5,000 of computer equipment in Saudi Arabia. Either the people who bought the house or a postal worker got the physical chipped card to SA. (it was an in person, chipped card purchase and the person using it talked to the fraud alert people to assure them it was a legit purchase)
So yeah I don't trust all post office workers. Or people who now live where we have been registered to vote. Or even remote fraud protection procedures.
This is another rhhardin vindication thread. Althouse is playing dumb. She usually hates it when people play dumb, but she doesn’t like Adams and she wants mail in ballots, so it’s okay I guess.
“The issue is not a "friend." It is the nice young volunteer who goes door to door with the registration rolls in her hands to decide which ballots will be mailed.”
Precisely. The point is the many, many ways the system can be abused. The point is NOT whether the word “twice” can only be used literally. If you allow “twice as nice” then you must allow Adams his figure of speech. (That or figure out a precise way to measure niceness. )
What adds up are how many tickets Scott Adams sells placing deplorables on the Trump Turnip Truck.
One method of reducing voter fraud that never seems to get considered is getting the government out of the business of micromanaging people's lives. The ability to utilize the power of the government to get what you want is the prize. Limiting the amount of power available for use makes cheating to win the prize less attractive. How much effort do you suppose will be applied to influencing the results of voting for the county dogcatcher?
I'm surprised nobody posted this Dilbert cartoon. Dogs can't vote!!.
My initial reaction, that's probably the dumbest thing i've ever heard.
Scott knows that we have had absentee ballots in California for decades.And, contrary to the right wing beliefs (bad) we have managed to elect a number of Republican governors and congress people and mayors. And, truth be told, most of the people who avail themselves of absentee ballots are not actually absentee, they just don't want to go in and vote. And the great percentage of them are not elderly, housebound or infirmed.
Vicki from Pasadena
My husband's credit card was sent to our old address in LA. I don't know if it ever made it to our old house or if it was intercepted by the post office. But it was recently used to buy $5,000 of computer equipment in Saudi Arabia. Either the people who bought the house or a postal worker got the physical chipped card to SA. (it was an in person, chipped card purchase and the person using it talked to the fraud alert people to assure them it was a legit purchase)
Some years ago. a patient's husband was murdered in Mexico. They had a house in Rosarita Beach between Tijuana and Ensenada and he was staying there alone at the time. His credit cards were used, presumably by the murderer, for more than a year. She even had video of the person using them but could get no cooperation from Mexico in looking for the user/killer. I think she was able to avoid paying the bills but that was not her concern.
And, contrary to the right wing beliefs (bad) we have managed to elect a number of Republican governors and congress people and mayors.
Not lately, you idiot. The 2018 election in Orange County was a test run of ballot harvesting and worked like a charm. All GOP Congress members were ahead the day after the polls closed and all were defeated by "late" votes from harvested ballots.
There is a difference between voting twice and failing to mail a friend's ballot. Suppose that there are 200 voters, and their preferences are 110 favor candidate X and 90 favor candidate Y. If cheater (assuming he favors Y) votes 21 extra times, it is enough to tip the election from X to Y. To accomplish this by refusing to mail others: (assuming he knows how the others voted) he could simply fail to mail 21 of those ballots; but (assuming he does not know how the others voted) he would need to fail to mail 43 or so ballots, to get an expected win for candidate Y. So the two methods are only equivalent when (a) you know how your friend voted, and (b) your friend does not agree with you about how to vote.
This is approximately the same argument we see a lot. Democrats and liberals are fund of arguing that voter repression is evil and even if it only happens one time, that is one time too many; on the other hand, if voter fraud occurs it is so rare that we don't need to worry about it. Republicans and conservatives argue that voter fraud is evil even if it only happens one time, that is one time too many; on the other hand if voter repression occurs, it is so rare that we don't need to worry about it. Voter repression is "not mailing" voter fraud is "voting twice".
Absentee ballots are one thing, but mailing ballots to all on the voter rolls leads to many ballots being mailed to people who have moved or died. This creates two huge opportunities for vote harvesters. First they can collect completed ballots and then "lose" ballots of voters their data analytics has identified as the "wrong" party. Second, they can collect unfilled ballots and then fill them in for the "correct"party.
Also, how many people will fill out a mail in ballot and then go to the polls to vote in person? The likelihood of catching this double voting is low in the rush to count mailed ballots and get the vote "certified"
MayBee said... Your friend voted three times! His own vote + Your vote would have been 2 votes that add up to 0. But then his vote actually counts because he threw out yours.
Good point.
We need to go back to the lever pull system where precinct captains pulled the straight Democrat ballot a couple of hundred times before the polls opened.
No votes get thrown out, democracy is saved by keeping Republicans out of office. It worked in Chicago when I was growing up.
Althouse: “To accept Adams's clever point, you have to think that people don't feel bound by principles of integrity.“
Integrity? Integrity? Think Russia hoax! Think impeachment hoax! Think Clinton! Think Schiff! Think Fat Jerry! Think Pelosi! Think the Bidens! Democrat graft and Orangemanbad “trump” integrity for nearly half of the population; certainly for their leaders.
For the other sane nearly half who know sedition and grifting are criminal activities there is only shaking our heads in wonder and disgust while hoping the Democrats lose big in 2020.
A few years ago a woman came to our door advocating for a particular candidate in the Democrat primary. She knew that my wife was a registered Democrat and that I was not. She only stopped at the houses on our block where registered Democrats resided.
Is this information widely available?
I know that poll watchers have access to this information since our state only allows voting in the primary for candidates in your registered party.
So the scam is simple. Collect mail in ballots for your preferred party and deliver them (or as an alternative, put them in your trunk for use as needed). Collect mail in ballots for the opponent party and accidently lose them.
"Republicans and conservatives argue that voter fraud is evil even if it only happens one time, that is one time too many; on the other hand if voter repression occurs, it is so rare that we don't need to worry about it."
-- Generally, Republicans argue that the things people claim are voter repression often aren't. The common example being voter ID is not voter repression/suppression because almost every adult uses an ID for something they do more frequently than voting, and not having an ID is incredibly unlikely. Republicans generally dislike active voter suppression, which is why, for example, they were upset Obama's Justice Department did not pursue the case against the people who showed up to intimidate people at the polls. It is probably a good idea to have a better understanding of what Republicans and conservatives believe and argue before positing what it is they do.
victoria said...
My initial reaction, that's probably the dumbest thing i've ever heard.
Scott knows that we have had absentee ballots in California for decades.And, contrary to the right wing beliefs (bad) we have managed to elect a number of Republican governors and congress people and mayors.
Well, now the above is one of the dumbest things I have heard in a while. You are seriously holding up California as an exemplar of unbiased voting? And you assume that if the voting is biased then one party can never have any candidates win?
I'm guessing you learned math in the California public schools.
nice circle jerk set up by Professora Emerita.
I haven't looked to see how many are jerkingoff.
Q: if mailman fails his responsibility by not delivering the ballot, then voter also shirks responsibility by not depositing ballot in mailbox at least for the first step of the process
Don't get caught up in the terminology. There is a difference between voting and having your vote count. So change "vote" to "cast a ballot".
In the hypothetical, each person voted once. The person mailing his and his friend's ballot is casting two ballots. If he doesn't mail his friend's ballot, his friend still voted, but it wont count. Same as if the mailman failed to deliver the ballot. Or if the clerk threw it away upon receipt. Etc.
When you say you voted, even doing so in person, all you can say for certain is that you cast a ballot. You can check later to see if your vote was counted. Voting by mail requires a chain of custody before the cast ballot becomes a counted vote. You are assuming more risk of non-counting than if you cast a ballot in person.
The meta-messaging has been consistent since Trump won in 2016. Voter fraud and other skullduggery is acceptable (and almost encouraged) because the orange man is "that" bad.
Incidentally, one of the reasons my wife's remains a registered Democrat, even though she came over to the dark side decades ago, is that she thinks the only way her vote will count in our Democrat machine county is if they think she is a Democrat.
That and the hilarious campaign material that she gets in the mail.
You miss and hang the nine ball in the pocket.
Youlose the hundred bucks in your hand as well as the hundred in the other guys hand.
You got 2 hundred less than you woulda had.
Simple.
I envision people who don't normally vote receiving a ballot and giving it to their friend who seems to really care about this junk to fill it out. So everyone who cares strongly will be able to vote many times. This will multiply the effect of the folks already "helping" people in nursing homes and group homes request ballots and fill them out. Both parties will end up doing this because they know they other party is doing it.
I'm not sure why this needs a mathematician. The mailer gets to make 2 decisions: 1) whether or not to mail in their ballot 2) whether or not to mail in your ballot. A vote is essentially the act based upon the decision.
A fun legal question is if your friend says they mailed in your ballot, but actually did not; did they commit voter fraud? I'd say yes, but then that shows how easy it is to commit voter fraud as related to mail in ballots. If you say no; then what is your definition of fraud, and when does that definition relate to voting? I'm asking for Twitter.
Miriam Webster dictionary defines integrity - firm adherence to a code of especially moral or artistic values.
Plenty of Karen's would feel they were showing integrity by tossing out the ballots of their husbands and parents. If karen feels her relations are going against their own interests by voting for the bad orange man she is morally right to throw out those ballots. As a mother and woman she is more caring then the men in her life. She is trying to keep Hitler from being reelected.
Yancey, up-thread, made the salient point: it's about the mail carrier.
I live in an affluent Houston suburb. Political signage around election time runs about 2:1 R:D or so. It's one of those 'burbs where there is a bank of mailboxes every couple of blocks, and only 1 outgoing mail slot - no house mailboxes. Does it take so much imagination to picture a mail carrier, a relatively low-wage person compared with the people in the neighborhoods s/he serves, often of color in this area, and likely voting D on the basis of working in government even leaving out the person-of-color voting bloc effect, simply discarding ALL mailed ballots from this neighborhood?
My father (not an admirable man in many ways) told me of work he did as a campaign volunteer in college on election day arranging rides for voters. Both parties have lists of registered voters and their party IDs. To answer a previous question, it is widely available information.
Anyway, on election day itself, they'd call up voters of both parties, and arrange rides to the voting station for them. Rides for the opposing party were always arranged later in the day when the polls would soon close. Their rides never showed up....
Vote manipulation has been going on forever.
If you want to vote- get your ass up on election day, get yourself to the polling station, and cast your vote. In person. That's the lesson I got from his story. Just got the vote by mail ballots for the upcoming school elections. So did my son. Who has been registered to vote in another state for more than a decade, and yes, the county election board had been informed. Multiple times.
In terms of impact on the election the bad friend caused a 2 vote shift in the total votes, his vote and the subtraction of your vote.
If we allow massive mail in balloting, then mail in and in person votes must be grouped by candidate, so any interested party can calculate if there is a difference in party choice between in person and mail in votes, and a voted vs registered list.
". She even had video of the person using them but could get no cooperation from Mexico in looking for the user/killer. I think she was able to avoid paying the bills but that was not her concern."
If someone else has your card or is billing you automatically and you can't get help from the card company, then make sure your address is up to date and report your card lost and ask for a new one to be sent (it will have a different number).
Your friend is facing a weigh scale. There are 1 ounce weights piled on each side. Evaluate these two schemes Ann:
Rule 1. He can place two weights on the side of his choice.
Rule 2. He can place one weight on the side of his choice, and remove one from the other side.
These two schemes seem to offer him exactly the same chance to affect which side of the scale has the most weights. In either case, he can contribute a two ounce difference between the sides.
You are now facing the scale. You may either add one weight to either side.
You can only contribute a one ounce difference between the sides.
True stories from a VERY liberal newspaper and journalist:
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/vote-early-vote-often-6391857
https://www.dallasobserver.com/news/absentee-minded-6391500
Short version, suppose your "friend" knows and holds on to your vote -- for proposition "A", for instance. He takes itto the Pro-A campaign HQ and offers to sell it to them. If they buy it, it goes into the mail, and the total vote for A is N+1
If the Pro-A campaign refused, the friend walks over to the Anti-A HQ and offers to sell it to *them*. If they buy it, it goes into the trash. The total vote for A is now N+0.
If no party or PAC buys it, the friend decides for himself whether or not to put in the mail. This, along with his own vote, gives him control over the total outcome, +1 or 0, and so, his own voting power is up by 1.
If YOU are in the military and your friend has control of your ballot, the rules in some states will count the vote even if it is postmarked AFTER election day. This is because the Military post offices overseas were at the time the legislation passed very slow. Your friend can wait until measure "A" (or Candidate Al Franken, say) loses the election, then phone the Pro-A (Candidate Coleman) team and offer to sell your vote. It now has extra value as the canvas and recounts go on. Candidate Coleman needs every chance to preserve his win, and Candidate Franken needs every chance to reverse the election day result. This gives your friend a lot of political power -- that ought to have been yours.
In any case, the friend profits from control over what was originally a valid
(non-forged, non-fraudulent, not coerced, etc) vote. When experts say vote-fraud is rare, they are talking about something OTHER than vote harvesting.
ALSO in any case, the measures in place for controlling mailed (absentee, military, etc) abuses assume that a very small percent of all ballots will arrive in such channels, and so can be manually processed against signatures-on-file, etc. If a very large number of such ballots come in, proportionately fewer of them -- necessarily -- will be reviewed, and any abuses harder to detect.
Yes there's some possibility of mail-in votes being destroyed or kept without the voter's permission (illegally), but any voting system has some potential for unfortunately preventing some votes from being cast. For instance, requiring everyone to vote in person on the same day creates a possibility that some people won't vote because they're sick and can't physically go to the polls that day, or because they're required to work unexpectedly long hours that day, when they would have mailed in their ballot a week earlier (or voted in person early) if they had been allowed.
Fullmoon's example is pretty good, but the easiest way to understand the math is this- if you and your friend vote opposite to one another and he trashes your ballot, then you have to vote again and illegally to reestablish the balance. In other words, if you have to cast two ballots just to get back to even, then your friend has cast two votes, too.
I think Yancey Ward is pointing in the correct direction here. You don't even need to act with deliberation. All it takes is the Postal Service pulling out all the stops to make sure all the ballots are first deposited in mail boxes and then that all ballots that come in are delivered with due speed to the county clerk in one zip code, while taking a more relaxed attitude in another zip code. If you toss in ballot harvesting - people going door to door to "help" people who might not have got around to voting - you don't actually need to destroy ballots. You just need to be insistent about knocking on the doors in certain neighborhoods but not others. And if you have automatic mail in voting, then people who would not have voted because they didn't want to are going to wind up in the voter pool.
You can say that the answer is for Republicans to be just aggressive as the Democrats were in the 2018 cycle, but at a certain point the ballot devolves into a measure of which party is most aggressive about collecting ballots. In other words, it's exactly what the good government types are always decrying: further polarization as parties grown their power by rousing the base rather than trying to appeal to independents.
The issue is not a "friend." It is the nice young volunteer who goes door to door with the registration rolls in her hands to decide which ballots will be mailed.
Yes, this is the issue. I can go along with Ann having her fun but in this golden age of ubiquitous leftie propaganda misunderstanding an issue is just another arrow in the quiver.
To accept the criticism as valid seems disingenuous.
P(B|A)=P(A and B)/P(A)
A = vote counted
B = vote cast
if A and B are not independent then P(B|A) may not be equal to P(B)
In this year's primary, Washington state residents were forced to choose a political party before casting a vote. Only one problem with that: The party selection was on the outside of the envelope.
It's not so much about manufacturing votes as it is about 'losing' them. One is far easier than the other.
John Althouse Cohen said...
Yes there's some possibility of mail-in votes being destroyed or kept without the voter's permission (illegally), but any voting system has some potential for unfortunately preventing some votes from being cast. For instance, requiring everyone to vote in person on the same day creates a possibility that some people won't vote because they're sick and can't physically go to the polls that day, or because they're required to work unexpectedly long hours that day, when they would have mailed in their ballot a week earlier (or voted in person early) if they had been allowed.
Your employer is going to be in very serious trouble if you don't get enough time off on election day to vote.
Election is supposed to be snapshot of the electorate. A snapshot isn't taken over several weeks. It's why, in the past, there were strict requirements on who could or couldn't vote absentee. Early voting, vote by mail, makes cheating much easier.
Nice way to avoid that pesky voter id issue.
I mean, you'd need to lower the mask.
And after that covid explosion after the WI primary?
Oh..and forget about the absentee ballot witness thing too.
Got a death wish or something?
Yes there's some possibility of mail-in votes being destroyed or kept without the voter's permission (illegally), but any voting system has some potential for unfortunately preventing some votes from being cast. For instance, requiring everyone to vote in person on the same day creates a possibility that some people won't vote because they're sick and can't physically go to the polls that day, or because they're required to work unexpectedly long hours that day, when they would have mailed in their ballot a week earlier (or voted in person early) if they had been allowed.
Though personal responsibility are offensive words to many people your age, for many of us living in a democracy it is considered reasonable to 'burden' voters to vote in person. Polling places make reasonable accommodation to remain open before and after working hours, and employers usually work to accommodate those on the clock during the time polls are open.
...this analysis also misses the biggest criticism of mail in ballots, which isn't loss or destruction of ballots, but rather the potential for harvesting and manipulation by special interest groups and fraud on a scale disproportionately large compared to those 'budrdened' by voting in person.
Anyone who has been involved in politics knows the inherent massive possibilities of voter fraud. It happens all the time with harvesting of absentee ballots, especially with the elderly and in less sophisticated neighborhoods.
You have absolutely no proof of harvesting of ballots "happens all the time". If you do have evidence, please provide it. The only recent case of ballot harvesting was perpetrated by a Republican, so there's that.
Ken B's scale is also a good visualization. I think what is tripping some people up is that this involves the concept of a trashing a negative vote from the viewpoint of the Democr.....er...."friend"- something I tried to address in the first comment with the equation 1Vote - (-1Vote)= 2Votes
John Althouse Cohen,
Just because any system can be gamed/cheated doesn't mean mail-in-voting is thus ok. Bruce Hayden's comment at 9:42 a.m. is spot on in this regard. As an analogy, one can make an ATM machine's box out of cardboard, but that doesn't mean it is as good an ATM machine for security purposes just because both types can be broken into.
I simply don't trust any voting system where the ballots aren't watched by both parties all the time. Any system where the ballots are unobserved at any point in the chain of custody is more open to fraud and abuse than one where they aren't unobserved.
Most of your concerns with in-person voting can be dealt with with week/two week long in-person early voting, or more strictly enforced and secured absentee voting.
Here is a minimum for mail-in ballot security:
(1) Regularly updated voter rolls with addresses every two years. If you go two years without voting, you get struck off the rolls- period. You have to go and register in person with the proper documentation.
(2) Every single ballot has a unique code tied to the voter to whom it is mailed (this is already being done, by the way, as far as I know). When that ballot is returned, that voter cannot show up at the polls and request an in-person ballot of any kind- not even a provisional ballot. If someone stole your ballot and returned it without your knowledge, then tough shit- you don't get to vote, but then you know a claimed case of voter fraud right then and there, and you have a place to start an investigation.
(3) Make it a federal felony with serious jail time to collect a ballot door to door, and make it a federal felony with serious jail time to fill out anyone else's ballot. No more vote harvesting, no more help "choosing" for whom to vote. If you don't have the mental faculties to fill out your own damned ballot without help, then tough shit, you don't get to vote.
(4) Sealable thumbprint box that the voter must use for the vote to be counted. It will only be investigated, though, if the voter claims to not have received his mail-in-ballot.
(5) All mail-in votes have to be post-marked a week before Election Day. Any that with postmarks later than that date must have their codes scanned and kept on file for people who show up for provisional ballots on voting day.
Every one has missed the most evil part of mail in. It destroys the secret ballot. When you go into the booth, no one knows how you vote. With a mail in ballot, someone can force you to vote the "right" way, sign your ballot, and mail it in. This is the most dangerous part of mail in.
Your boss can tell you bring in your ballot. If you want to keep your job, make sure you vote the right way . Or "your" labor union, or your church, or your cult.With the secret ballot, your actual vote is SECRET. With fraud by mail,your vote is no longer secret.
"Every one has missed the most evil part of mail in. It destroys the secret ballot. When you go into the booth, no one knows how you vote. With a mail in ballot, someone can force you to vote the "right" way, sign your ballot, and mail it in."
When the secret ballot was instituted in the U.S. around 1890, making it more difficult to buy or coerce voters, voting "participation" dropped 10%.
+1 to PresbyPoet, or +2 since I have secretly deleted Freder's downvote.
Freder Frederson said...
You have absolutely no proof of harvesting of ballots "happens all the time".
See my previous comment with URLS /links to published reports. And, is "happens very frequently" really a more acceptable situation?
Consider the ratio of ballots requested (R); ballots issued (I); ballots marked (M); and ballots counted (C). ( Some ballots might be requested but not issued if the address can't be confirmed, or the request is too late ... A ballot might get marked but not counted if not returned on time, or never sent in, or damaged such that voter intent can't be determined: "Hanging Chad" etc. ) What are the acceptable ratios?
I/R ought to be very very nearly 100%, yes? This is within the control of government bureaucrats and so should be nearly perfect, right?
M/I is probably going to be less than 100%. Voters, (regular people, consumers, etc) just don't behave as perfectly as we'd all like. And it's this problem that the "harvesters" make their money by addressing. They follow the postman and "help" voters mark ballots and "help" take them away. If there were no harvesting, the M/I ratio will go down. Some political parties might think this would be a good result.
C/M ideally ought to be close to 100%, again. But now we have two agents with control, the harvesters and the election bureau. What measures should officials and authorities impose to ensure that all the ballots "marked" DO get returned and DO get validated against eligibility rosters and DO get counted?
And why should any of us assume the current processes are beyond improvement?
I suspect that promoting widespread mail-in voting is one of the factors behind leading Dems pushing the lockdown as far as they are able. At this point, having scared so much of the electorate to the point they don't want to return to their offices/places of work until there's a vaccine, this effort may backfire spectacularly if a good portion of the neurotic electorate stays home in November. That would be justice.
any voting system has some potential for unfortunately preventing some votes from being cast.
This is in the same category as burglars may break into your house so why lock your doors?
Blackstone's Ratio is often invoked with regard to one important decision (made by unanimous vote of a jury): Better that ten guilty persons go free than one innocent person be punished. And so we instruct the voting jury members about reasonable doubt, or other standard appropriate to the crime or tort or issue...
Do we advocate a similar Ratio with regard to elections? Better one invalid vote be allowed than ten valid votes be rejected? It's worse to deprive one "marginal" voters in a nursing home and or tenement or addiction asylum from help, (by professional vote harvesters), than to privilege ten ordinary citizens who walk in to the polling place on the traditional election day?
Earth to Freder.
Between 2012 and 2018, 28.3 million mail-in ballots remain unaccounted for, according to data from the federal Election Assistance Commission. The missing ballots amount to nearly one in five of all absentee ballots and ballots mailed to voters residing in states that do elections exclusively by mail.
States and local authorities simply have no idea what happened to these ballots since they were mailed – and the figure of 28 million missing ballots is likely even higher because some areas in the country, notably Chicago, did not respond to the federal agency’s survey questions. This figure does not include ballots that were spoiled, undeliverable, or came back for any reason.
Scooter P has the right of it. The whole bit with mail-in voting is the false assumption that the folks behind the wall in the local post office are “just sorting the mail”, with no incentive to throw a spanner in the works. They are all just as likely on the take as any other public employee. The post office is going to be filled with spies and agents provocateurs who know intimately the voting habits of the districts/precincts in which they work. Just toss that locale’s ballots in a bankers' box and it gets overlooked and never forwarded to the elections officials tasked with getting the count right.
And wouldn’t it be counted as voting twice when a husband and wife compare notes and vote identically? Yes, the paperwork is separate but don’t tell me that George is one room filling out his ballot while Jane is down the hall in another, or that one of them fills out both because the other can't be bothered. (eyeroll)
Lets model this,
100 votes are cast, 50 for party A and 50 for Party B:
In addition,
Your friend votes party A 1 and you vote Party B 0 total is Party A 51 Party B 50.
Your friend votes 1 and you vote 1 total is Party A 50 Party B 50.
If you need to win by one vote, the friend can do it!
We'll consider two situations:
1: You and your friend agree on everything:
If your friend delivers both ballots, his candidates are at +2 votes. If he doesn't, they're at +0 votes. So your friend got two votes
2: You and your friend disagree on everything:
If you vote, and your friend doesn't, his candidates will be at -1 vote
If you give your vote to your friend, and he throws is away while voting himself, then his candidates are at +1
So, again, your friend got two votes.
The only people who support "vote harvesting" (allowing someone other than you to bring in your "absentee ballot") are people who favor vote fraud
sorry Your friend votes 1 and you vote 1 total is Party A 51 Party B 51.
Left Bank of the Charles Demonstrated his stupidity by writing...
So, if you give your ballot to a poll worker to place in the ballot box, you didn’t actually vote, the poll worker voted?
I give the ballot to the poll worker, then watch as the poll worker drops the ballot into the box: I voted
You give the ballot to the poll worker, he takes it into the back room, where he checks your party registration, and then decides whether to throw your ballot away or to put it into the box: He voted
I'm curious, LB, can you count past 12 with your shoes on?
John Althouse Cohen said...
Yes there's some possibility of mail-in votes being destroyed or kept without the voter's permission (illegally), but any voting system has some potential for unfortunately preventing some votes from being cast. For instance, requiring everyone to vote in person on the same day creates a possibility that some people won't vote because they're sick and can't physically go to the polls that day, or because they're required to work unexpectedly long hours that day, when they would have mailed in their ballot a week earlier (or voted in person early) if they had been allowed.
Polls are typically open for 12+ hours on voting day. And as long as you're in line to vote before the polls close, you get to vote. If you're afraid work will keep you too late to vote, go vote before you go to work.
Here's the deal: I take my right to vote seriously. it is my job to get my body in there and vote. That is under my control, as it should be.
I can't stop you from voting as someone else, if there's no photo ID requirement.
i can't stop you from harvesting a ballot that wouldn't have been voted, and voting with it.
Any vote fraud destroys my right to vote at least as thoroughly as simply refusing to allow me to vote, but destroys it insidiously, not even letting me know my rights were violated.
What you are pushing is evil bullshit. It is excusing vote fraud, for the purpose of stealing election for your amoral, power abusing side. And yes, we know you're either amoral or evil, because no one who wasn't would be pushing for vote fraud the way you Democrats push for it.
If you're not going to be around on election day, then you get to submit a request for an absentee ballot with your justification for needing it, far enough ahead of time so that you can get your ballot and postmark it before election day.
Otherwise you show up on election day, show your Driver's License or State ID card issued by the State where you're voting, and then you vote.
If your vote isn't worth enough to you to make that minimal effort, then the world is a better place if you don't vote
John Althouse Cohen said...
Yes there's some possibility of mail-in votes being destroyed or kept without the voter's permission (illegally), but any voting system has some potential for unfortunately preventing some votes from being cast. For instance, requiring everyone to vote in person on the same day creates a possibility that some people won't vote because they're sick and can't physically go to the polls that day, or because they're required to work unexpectedly long hours that day, when they would have mailed in their ballot a week earlier (or voted in person early) if they had been allowed.
So, we have two situations that are neutral to slight disadvantageous to Republicans (Democrat gov't workers don't get kept late on election day) and John happily replaces them with a system where Democrats routinely steal elections from Republicans by massive vote fraud, and then he tells us who wonderful and even-handed he is
No
Scott Adams has the right view on this. It is, admittedly, a cynical view, and I'm not sure who would entrust a friend or family member with the mail-in ballot. But yeah, putting your vote in someone else's hand (litch'rully) gives that person the ability to vote twice.
"...any voting system has some potential for unfortunately preventing some votes from being cast."
-JA Cohen
With respect, this is a false equivalency. Yes, there will be a certain number of people who are sick on voting day, for example, and literally cannot drag themselves to a polling place to vote. Their votes will not be cast. But it is quite a bit different to consider these un-cast votes and votes not cast because someone has decided that they should not be cast, which is what we're talking about here - and which is shockingly easy to accomplish a vote harvesting or mail-in-only voting scheme.
Most importantly, in the first case it's an unfortunate happenstance, whereas in the second it's vote suppression by design. It actually doesn't matter at all how often it happens - if you set up a system that allows such easy vote suppression, you're casting your own ballot for easy vote suppression.
And while I'm at it, can I just second the comment about how mail-in ballots are not secret?
Adam's proposal goes to the heart of the problem of mail-in ballots. We know that ballots will be collected and mailed in mass, because the DNC does ballot harvesting now.
The potential for corruption is unlimited. I don't see how this is debatable.
As to the math, in the Adam's scenario, voting once for your candidate and preventing one vote for the opposition has exactly the same effect of voting twice. Elections are determined by the delta in number of votes for each candidate. To win, you must have a delta = or > than +1.
If candidate A gets 1 vote and candidate B gets one vote, then the delta is 0.
If candidate A gets 1 vote and candidate B gets two votes, because you voted twice, the delta is +1 for your candidate.
Likewise, if candidate A gets 0 votes, because you tossed the ballot, and candidate B get one vote, the delta is +1 for your candidate. Exactly the same as voting twice.
Out of 50 states Illinois is the most corrupt.That's not even debatable. There are more federal prosecutors in Chicago than the rest of the country combined. Vote fraud isn't rare. It's a democrat art form.
It's not who votes that counts
It's who counts the votes
So much power for sale
Post a Comment