> The voting machines at each polling station, including in the 39th Ward, 36th Division, generate records in the form of a printed receipt documenting the use of each voting machine...Demuro would add fraudulent votes on the voting machine
They didn't hack the machine. They actually voted on the machines multiple times. The same scheme would have worked with mechanical machines or paper ballots.
I know for a fact that where I vote it is impossible to vote more than once (or close to, Berlin managed to fuck up voting last year for some reason). How is it impossible? Everyone is centrally registered with their primary residence. Based on these records, invitations are sent out prior to elections. With that invitation, or passport or ID, you show up at your voting local (of which there are plenty, the school just across the street has three of those and it is far from the only place in our town). There volunteers check you invitation or ID, hand you your ballot, verify you drop in the ballot box and strike from the voting list for this election. Not on the list? No ballot. No documents? No ballot. Since there are thousands of those locales, preliminary results are available in the first two hours after voting closes. We have no waiting lines (most of the time, Berlin is the exception that proofs the rule but then we talk about Berlin...). Mail-in voting works just fine and without any constraints. ballots are archived (for a very long time, I'm too lazy to check the exact duration), so if there are any doubts everything can be rechecked.
No idea how the US just fails at the most simple thing in a democracy, voting. Or rather I have an idea, with gerrymandering and such shenanigans it seems to be by design to keep certain demographics from voting too much.
How would it be "impossible" to vote more than once when the volunteers who are enforcing that have been paid off to allow it to happen? That's exactly what happened in this case.
Sure, and with hundreds of those places, and at least 4 volunteers per place, just how many votes do you think you can stuff? Plus any statistically significant deviation will be spotted. But besides theory we never had more then the odd case affecting a handful of votes every handful of elections for almost 80 years, so history proofs that for all practical reasons it is 1) not happening 2) impossible to do at a scale that would impact results and 3) easy to spot.
You're rehashing literally the same exact argument we're having about US voting, it's not different. Some people think fraud is easy, some people say what you just did, that statistically it's very unlikely.
> No idea how the US just fails at the most simple thing in a democracy, voting.
You're generalizing too far. Much of the US works just like you described for your local voting. The US has tens of thousands of voting precincts with their own rules. For better or worse.
> The US has tens of thousands of voting precincts with their own rules
Surely that's the failure being described. There are always parts of the US where corruption is winning, and those places ultimately have enough political or other capital that they are worth corrupting, and that puts the system of the entire country at continuous risk.
Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US. It’s OK if you didn’t know that, lots of people from other countries are dumbfounded to learn that all you have to do in the US is show up and give the poll workers the name of a registered voter in order to vote.*
* Well, in some states you have to show ID. But one political party in particular fights very hard against this requirement.
I followed this discussion in the US quite close actually. Simply because we need to have government ID. It is racist to require it if access to those IDs is, in praxis, limited for the demographics that should have limited access to voting. It is not if you are required to have government ID, and it is very easy to get one. getting a provisional passport for travel, with a validity of 6 months, takes all of one hour tops over here in Germany.
Precisely. You can’t make something a prerequisite to voting if every voter doesn’t have it. And the US is very much against the concept of a national ID. So you can’t have a national ID requirement.
And as another commenter points out, it’s not that an ID requirement is racist, it’s that the motivations for it, knowing its impact, are racist.
Man, the US is such a strange place. It is also the only country I know of, top of my head, that doesn't have national ID requirements. No idea why this can be seen as bad thing.
The US is over 4.5x the population of Germany, the largest EU member. The entire EU is only about 25% more people than the US. California alone is larger than all but four of the EU member nations.
The US Federal Government is more like the EU itself rather than any member country. The states are more analogous to the countries in the EU.
So a US National ID is kind of like a EU Citizen ID.
What we have instead is an agreement between states and the federal government on ID guidelines. From that perspective it’s not so different.
It's fundamental to the country. We are a federal republic of states, and as such the real power lies with the states. The feds get the nukes, sure, but culturally we are reluctant to hand more power to the central government of a nation of 330 million people.
Yeah, I don’t completely get this one either, but the way we are raised is that national ID is somehow a slippery slope towards federal agents wandering the street demanding “papers, please.”
Interestingly enough, the intersection between those who would advocate for national voter ID requirements and those who would fundamentally oppose a national ID is very large.
> Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US.
This is not the argument people are making, so I hope you aren’t making it intentionally. No one is saying that requiring voting id is inherently racist.
The argument is that requiring voting id without a commensurate effort to make sure everyone has voter id ends up disproportionately affecting minorities. These efforts are subsequently dubbed racist by political opponents because the people implementing them know this to be true and do it anyway, because they prefer the outcome that minorities are disenfranchised.
Republicans have been found in court to play these tricks with “surgical precision”, to make sure the rules they come up with impact minorities more than whites.
Another example is closing polling places so that it takes 8 hours to vote in black precincts whereas it takes 8 minutes to vote in white precincts. Yes, the act of closing a polling place is not an overtly racist thing to do. But the way in which it’s done and the actual impact make clear it is done with the intent of disenfranchising minorities.
> The argument is that requiring voting id without a commensurate effort to make sure everyone has voter id ends up disproportionately affecting minorities.
Democrats have never negotiated in good faith over the requirement to make IDs available though whenever the debate is brought up. States like Wisconsin require voter ID and will make an ID for voting available for free, through the mail, and yet there is still opposition that always relies on handwavy arguments about how utterly baffling and difficult it is to obtain a photo ID, even in Wisconsin. Arguments which are ultimately disingenuous and yet still persist in light of accommodations by states that require voter ID.
It's a pretty standard tribal division, much like abortion and everything else. Each side refuses reasonable compromises because they perceive that it would be a slippery slope allowing the other side to ultimately prevail.
Like I said, unfortunately Republicans have been found in court to have used similar tactics intentionally to disenfranchise minority voters. When they have full control of states they show their hand by passing voter ID laws without commensurate GOTV funding. So we know they are acting in bad faith before it even starts.
If Republicans were serious about non-racist voter ID laws they could have demonstrated that in Georgia when they overhauled election laws there. They didn’t and we know why: more “surgical precision”.
In Wisconsin? With that legislature? Want to guess how easy it will be for them, over time, to make certain cuts to the program that makes it so easy for everyone to get a free ID?
In this case it looks like you could bribe the volunteers to simply give ballots without checking for ID, then bribe the overseers to validate the fraud.
So long as the people who’s votes you are stealing don’t come in, then you are safe.
There are no systems safe from fraud if you allow human judgment to be a part of the system.
elections are as fraud save as they are because you have humans in the loop. Hundreds of them, all over the place. And it is not judgement, but decentralized supervision that solves this problem for you. Not some flimsy electronic system without auditable paper trail.
Hundreds of humans who can all work for a single individual or organization. Without any additional rules, adding more people to supervise is simply security theater.
Note, I am not a general proponent of electronic voting machines either. They can easily make fraud easier by reducing the number of people to bribe to the few engineers with access to the blackbox code and the few officials who certify that the code is valid and was used on Election Day.
The "quiet part" is the US' long history of using ID requirements and other tactics to suppress and disenfranchise black and other minority voting[0,1], especially in the South, for example in North Carolina[1] and Texas[2], going all the way back to poll taxes[3].
If considered in a vacuum, completely absent the context of historical precedent, voter IDs seem like a simple common sense solution to the (practically nonexistent) problem of voter fraud. Unfortunately, we are talking about the US, and it's simply not possible to assume good faith.
So, are you saying Europe’s voter ID laws exist to solve no problem? Because from where I sit, confidence in the electoral process seems to be a larger problem preventing than imaginary racism using real racism of low expectations.
Yes, that is really a Democrat position, along with opposing signature checks on postal votes, supporting sending out unsolicited mass postal voting forms, opposing removing people who've moved states from the electoral register on the state they left, dismantling any system for identifying people recorded as having voted in more than one state, and fighting even the most basic checks on their programs for literally paying workers to fill out voters' ballots for them. The stated justification for all of these is the same: not doing so is an evil attempt to suppress the black vote and disenfranchise black voters. The ACLU and the non-Fox News media generally support them on this. American politics is wild by European standards.
How is this different than dropping in additional paper ballots into a ballot box? If it isn’t, then this has nothing to do with the machine, but rather control of the “ballot box”.
Sure there is