Questions:
"Peter, what stops someone from voting multiple times?"
"Peter, after college my daughter moved to San Francisco, but she still got an Oregon ballot mailed here to our home. What keeps me from voting both her ballot and mine?"
No system is perfect. Not vote-by-mail, not in-person voting. People sometimes impersonate another. Sometimes ineligible people attempt to vote. This past November the 17-year-old son of the candidate for Virginia governor, Glenn Youngkin, twice approached his local polling place attempting to vote. He was stopped. He wasn't on their list of eligible voters. Election systems have safeguards.
The conservative Heritage Foundation has a searchable data base of election fraud cases and their disposition. There aren't many cases of fraud.
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| https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud |
Better than punishing fraud is stopping it before it happens. Jackson County, Oregon has systems in place to make fraud difficult and high risk. What I am describing is how election security is handled here.
One point of presumed vulnerability is a person voting multiple times with counterfeit ballots. The election department does not accept "homemade" ballots. Ballots have a distinctive look and feel. The tabulation machines described in yesterday's blog post require precision uniformity. The election department tracks individual ballots. There are no "surprise" ballots. Ballots are mailed in bar coded envelopes tied to a specific voter and they are returned inside a smaller envelope with the same barcode. A counterfeiter would need to do more than create false ballots. He would need to create false people, with false addresses and false photo IDs at the Department of Motor Vehicles.
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| Return envelope containing my ballot, bar coded to me |
The county gets a monthly feed from the Department of Vital Statistics which it uses to delete registrations for deceased voters. Sometimes a death is too close to an election to be flagged and a ballot is mailed to a deceased person. If that person legally voted, then died before election day, the vote is legal. Family members of the deceased who might think to vote that ballot on behalf of the deceased, before or after death, do so at their peril. Upon notice that the person is on the deceased list, dates of death and signatures are readily checked.
Voters sometimes think that ballots sent to an address of someone who has moved out of the house is a ballot sent in error. Not necessarily. Adult children sometimes move out but their move does not necessarily mean they are not eligible to continue to vote at their former home. A person can have a "voter residence" even though they are away in college, the military, or in a new job elsewhere which they consider temporary, even if for an indefinite period. Of course, if they vote somewhere else, they will have changed their voting residence, and that ballot cannot be legally voted.
Oregon participates in a data-sharing arrangement that alerts election officials that people have moved. The system--the Electronic Registration Information System (ERIC)--gathers and shares information with member states. Not every state participates; 31 states do. The system shares driver's license and vehicle registrations, voter registrations, residence addresses, dates of birth, and the last four digits of Social Security numbers. County clerks use this to update and purge files and to investigate if people claim multiple voter registrations.
What should the parents do with a ballot sent to someone who has moved out? So long as that person hasn't registered to vote elsewhere, and the person still considers that address their permanent voter residence, it can be sent to them and be legally voted. The blank ballot might tempt some partisans. What if they fill it out and vote it, an extra "free" vote? It is a felony with a high risk of getting caught. Even if the person is a superb forger of signatures, the person who moved out may vote elsewhere, change a driver's license or otherwise be flagged so that improper vote comes back to the election department as a discrepancy.
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| Ballot example. Here, signature altered. |
Ballots have a signature which appears on the archived and digitalized ballot envelope. Election officials can readily compare the ballot signature with others on file. The bar code system puts the ballot signature right below the signature, both in large format for easy comparison. An investigator also has instant access to the handwriting of others in the household if an anomaly appears. There is an excellent paper trail, all tracking back to specific names and addresses.
Voter fraud in Oregon. In July of last year I asked the Oregon Secretary of State how many examples of voter fraud she investigated in the 2020 election. Her office was oddly reluctant or unable to answer, which I wrote about here. Now they report the information on their own. In 2020 there were 140 cases of reported fraud; four were referred to the Oregon Department of Justice. From 2000-2019 there were 61 million ballots returned and 38 criminal convictions, a .00006% fraud rate.
I suppose people could try to game the system and cast extra ballots or the ballot of another person, but the systems in place make it hard to do and very risky.
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16 comments:
Everybody knows the GOP obsession with voter fraud is simply part of the Big Lie associated with their attempted coup, as well as an attempt to institute voting restrictions that suppress minority voters. Contrary to the party lie, massive voter fraud has not occurred. All the political maneuvering over it is a scam to further erode our democracy. The biggest election fraud in American history is the lie still being promoted by Trump and his cult, the Republican Party.
Thank you, again, Peter for doing this.
The comments and questions seem to be right out of the attempted coup playbook.
Peter, have to wonder if you read the comments on Part One? I believe everything you wrote today, but the biggest potential fraud, as I thought I’d explained clearly, would happen after the signatures have been validated, and the corrupt voting officials take the opportunity to swap ballots they, themselves, fill the ovals on, then switch them for legitimate ballots during the weeks/nights when early voters' ballots are stored in the Clerks' side rooms. And remember, this switch of ballots would NOT be revealed in a recount.
Surely you, of all people, are not clinging to a preconceived notion that vote by mail can prevent massive voter fraud? What’s your response to my statements? I’ll reiterate: I was the OFFICIAL JOCO voting monitor during an election when I discovered this problem. It’s not my wild imagination.
From Stanford university (sorry if you’ve alread6 seen this) “Lastly, vote accuracy is also an issue, because voters have no way of confirming there vote, and there is also no way of conducting a recount with direct-recording electronic (DRE) voting. With DRE, there is no paper trail, no verification, and thus no scrutiny of the processes. Voter anonymity is also a problem. Voters have to provide much of their personal information to the systems for voter verification, and with that comes the problem of keeping voter information safe and keeping voters anonymous.
The cons against electronic voting laid out here are only some of the arguments against electronic voting. However, they are a good reflection of the ethical and technical concerns related to the issue of electronic voting.”
I put great stock in your opinions, Peter, and hope you’ll address my concerns!
There are amazing, nonintuitive ways that computer systems (both hardware and software) have been hacked. Every complication in these systems potentially introduces new vulnerabilities.
Vote by mail systems are far more complex than same day voting systems. Just for one example, the amount of time that ballots must be stored in vote by mail systems creates significant vulnerabilities. There are many more moving parts with vote by mail, and therefore many more potential vulnerabilities.
The designers of computer systems often assert that their “new security features“ make their systems unhackable. And then later on it turns out that those new features themselves have introduced new vulnerabilities.
Malcolm is spot on in his concerns.
We keep hearing that “there is no evidence“ that voter fraud occurred in any significant measure in 2020. I would like to remind everyone that absence of evidence does not imply evidence of absence. We only know that any fraud that was committed was too clever to be discovered by those investigating.
I do not say this because I wanted Trump to win the 2020 election; I did not. I say this as someone who is the devoted to correct logic and careful reasoning.
There have been many spurious claims of voter fraud, but precious little evidence of it. The figures Peter provides are based on actual investigation. A prudent and reasonable person would put their trust in the data, rather than the spurious claims of partisans and other anecdotal "evidence."
A prudent and reasonable person might want to evaluate what they do and do not know similarly to the “fair witnesses” described in Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land:
A "Fair Witness" is a fictional profession in the book "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Robert A. Heinlein. In the book, Fair Witnesses were individuals trained to see the world around them, as literally as possible, until sensed (see/hear/smell/taste/touch) otherwise.
Another way to describe it would be someone that takes all things sensed as literal as possible & have no reason to believe what they just sensed will remain that way when they are no longer sensing them (seeing/tasting/etc.)
An excerpt from the book itself, where the character referenced as "Anne" is an off-duty Fair Witness:
Jubal to Jill: "Even Cavendish did not--at least he won't say so. You know how Fair Witnesses behave."
Jill: "Well...no, I don't. I've never met one."
Jubal to Jill: "So? ANNE!"
Anne was on the springboard; she turned her head. Jubal called out, "That house on the hilltop--can you see what color they've painted it?"
Anne looked, then answered, "It's white on this side."
Jubal went on to Jill: "You see? It doesn't occur to Anne to infer that the other side is white, too. All the King's horses couldn't force her to commit herself...unless she went there and looked--and even then she wouldn't assume that it stayed white after she left."
By definition, a reasonable and prudent person would evaluate based on facts and evidence, such as Peter provided. Unless credible sources can prove otherwise, all the evidence shows that our elections are free and fair. The Brennan Center for Justice is probably a better reference for this than science fiction:
https://www.brennancenter.org/issues/ensure-every-american-can-vote/vote-suppression/myth-voter-fraud
Reasoning of the form, “we didn’t find any evidence, therefore it’s not true“ is faulty logic.
There was “no evidence“ that Alger Hiss was a Soviet spy for decades. Then the Soviet Union fell, the archives opened up, and it turned out that Hiss was in fact a Soviet spy.
The science fiction wasn’t a source. It was used to illustrate a point:
It’s important to understand the difference between what you know and what you don’t know. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. Epistemic humility is a good thing.
Making allegations of massive voter fraud without any evidence is called 'blowing smoke.' That's why Trump's baseless claims were thrown out of court.
I made no claims of massive voter fraud. I am simply saying we don’t know. All we know is that no evidence of it was found.
Lack of evidence is not proof of nonexistence.
Algar Hiss wasn’t a Soviet spy. Then he was…
Right. And according to Trump, there's also no evidence that Ted Cruz' father wasn't involved in the Kennedy assassination, so who knows? Great logic.
We don't know what we don't know..
What has been most dangerous about conspiracies of doubt regarding election corruption that could have happened, might have happened, but who knows?,, is that people who claim widespread election fraud claim it with certainty,. The dont express doubt and bewilderment. In public they accuse. We have proof! In courtrooms, where attorneys face sanctions if the just make stuff up, they change their tune. They have no evidence, only accusations. So of course they strike out. Then they exit the courthouse and say they have proof, but the court wouldn't hear it.
In an honest discussion about the philosophy of knowing, I accept that we exist in a fog of ignorance. But if someone accuses me of murder, or rape, or armed robbery--or if someone says the election was corrupt--I would prefer the accusers have evidence.
. I would certainly hope that any of my readers, if accused of being racist, would insist on some credible evidence being demonstrated.. I am also sure tthat if any reader or commenter were accused of being a racist by a co-worker or colleague, that reader would be unhappy if that woke accuser circulated rumors and accusations among a circle of like minded friends and then said, "just because there is no evidence he said or did anything racist, that doesn't prove that deep down he isn't. We want him fired and shamed. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. So fire the privileged racist!"
Peter Sage
“We don’t know” is very different from “j’accuse.” I am only arguing against unjustified certainty in either direction.
Making accusations because there might be evidence is just as wrong as claiming nonexistence because there is no evidence.
Thank you for the information about ERIC. It's good to see there are efforts to eliminate extra ballots if/when people move. From the FAQ:
As of October 2021 Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nevada, New Mexico, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Texas, Utah, Vermont, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin. The District of Columbia is also a member. (31 states plus D.C.)
Notably absent are two states with large numbers of voters: California and New York. Several weeks ago, I commented about friends from CA who moved to VA, and were still getting ballots at both places for several years. Yes, they have residency/domicile/registration in Virginia, but still have a 2nd home in California, despite friend contacting the elections office that they no longer want to vote in California. Due to frequent travel, one friend had absentee voting when he was a resident of California.
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