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buckle8017yesterday at 6:37 PM3 repliesview on HN

Have you considered that in a system where proving cheating is so difficult, even weak evidence is powerful?

If cheating is difficult to prove then we would expect only minimal evidence even with material amounts of cheating.


Replies

moduspolyesterday at 6:48 PM

Also, most crimes aren't uncovered by lawsuits. They're uncovered by law enforcement. The reason people resort to lawsuits is because law enforcement does not rigorously investigate or monitor. Voting laws vary by state / municipality, and they're mostly run by well-meaning volunteers acting in good faith.

When we're not sure how well the TSA is doing, we try to send prohibited items through, and infamously get abysmal results [1]. IMO the reason we don't see more election fraud cases is because *we're not looking for it*, so we just see the obvious cases like when dead people vote or people brag about voting twice publicly.

Until we actually do some "red teaming" of elections, we won't ever know. But the reality is, if we actually did, the results would reduce credibility of numerous prior elections.

[1] https://abcnews.com/US/tsa-fails-tests-latest-undercover-ope...

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jfengelyesterday at 7:04 PM

Sure. And the weak evidence still isn't powerful, because so much effort had to be expended to gain it. If cheating were widespread it would have been detected much more easily.

Instead, efforts to clean up the voter rolls never cause people to get caught. But they do cause many legitimate voters to lose the ability to vote.

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archagonyesterday at 7:47 PM

Since we’re just considering things without providing any evidence, have you considered that we don’t have such a system?