Let's say that you brought in signature experts to look for fraudulent ballots, based on detecting forged signatures. What do you think their false positive / false negative rates would look like?
Beats me; given the historically low rate & the allegations of fraud, it seems to be you should do the review so that everyone can be confident in the results (in the event there was not significant fraud) or so that the fraud can be exposed (in the event there was).
One data point is in Arizona where the judge allowed 100 randomly-sampled envelopes to be reviewed for a signature, the democratic expert witness said 16 of them were inconclusive. However, the Judge ruled that that was not evidence of fraud. I'm not really sure how exactly you can conclude that, and the fact that we are apprently counting votes in AZ with signatures that don't match certainly doesn't make me particularly confident in the results.
In that case, what protects against fraud? Anything?
I personally know of two ballots, not mine, that I could have filled and out returned, if I'd been so inclined. (People in apartment buildings I have access to who have moved out of state, but still got sent ballots, which were just setting in the foyer; I'm sure there are gazillions of other ways to get ballots.)
If you're not even going to require the signatures to match, it seems like committing vote fraud would be ridiculously easy.
(Of course, if you really want to have a secure election, make people vote in person and have a continuous chain of custody of those votes; use the ink-on-your-finger trick to prevent double-voting.)
> I'm sure there are gazillions of other ways to get ballots.
You need gazillions of ballots going to someone who is the dedicated to committing fraud. There is no evidence that occurred, and it's easy to detect. Ballots are numbered, so if a bunch of sequential ones all are the same you can see it.
The process for this was all decided before the election. There's zero evidence that fraud occurred, and all people are pointing to is parts of the process they don't like.
The fact that it's quite obvious if someone votes multiple times. To sway an election, you would need to submit a significant number of fraudulent ballots. This is likely to result in an extremely high number of detected duplicates. It is also extremely hard to pull off without involving a large number of people, any of whom could blow the entire conspiracy wide open.
It seems crazy to me to count ballots with signatures that don't (reasonably) match.
If I had believed one or the other of the candidates were a threat on the level Hitler, I would certainly have taken the opportunities given to me to fill out and return ballots that were not mine.
You don't need any conspiracy for this; you just have to have one side that is extremely motivated to defeat the other side combined w/ a lack of signature standards.
You would have gotten caught then. Signature matching doesn't appreciably increase the security of the election; It simply disenfranchises people based on a shoddy test.
Besides, the ballots have long been separated from their signatures. Suppose we take your numbers seriously: The solution is to re-run the election or to let Pelosi become President and run it next year. Letting legislatures choose the president because of FUD is incredibly dangerous.
I think you're underestimating how exceedingly difficult it would be to correctly identify the people that you could steal their vote, and not get caught.
Picture it, if you try to vote for someone, and they also vote - in person, or requesting another ballot - that's trivially detectable.
You linked to a news story about double-voting being detected yourself. Said news story also identifies the causes behind double-voting:
1. Delays in inputting data about who had voted in real-time.
2. Poll workers overriding machines to submit ballots.
Is there any evidence that these things happened at scale during the general? I would expect that poll workers would be better-trained and that the election would be generally smoother than the primary.
In addition, that article makes no mention of nursing homes as a particular source of double votes.
For me the take away was there's no failsafe automated way to detect double-voting.
Since the ballots themselves become anonymous once removed from the envelopes, I'm not really sure at all how'd you notice double-voting, unless you're doing something to look for duplicate envelopes. I don't there's any automated invalidation of the previous ballot if you request multiple ballots (e.g., if some1 took your first one).
Maybe there are more rigerous systems in place than I realize, but I haven't read about it, if so.
Re nursing homes, the point there is you can be pretty sure if you take those ballots, you won't risk a double-vote.
Of course there's no failsafe automated way to detect double-voting. There's no failsafe automated way to detect anything. In fact, there's no failsafe way to detect anything.
But checking for duplicate envelopes is part of the process. That's how duplicate votes are found and thrown out of elections (see the Stokke case). Checking for voter eligibility is part of the process. That's how votes are invalidated (see the report I linked elsewhere in this thread).
There is no evidence that ballot fraud exists at a scale which affects elections in the United States. The fact that it exists at all is not a good enough reason to disenfranchise millions of people.
Taking tens of thousands of ballots (the number needed to swing the election) from nursing homes will absolutely cause detected double-votes. Not to mention that collecting those tens of thousands of ballots necessarily involves a large number of people. And when a conspiracy includes a large number of people, the chances that someone talks skyrockets.
That's not concrete enough for me to have any confidence duplicate ballots would reliably be rejected. Perhaps there is a robust process, but I haven't heard it.
We're a bit in the weeds though. To summarize top-level findings, for GA at least:
- The 2016 mail-in ballot rejection rate was 6.42% †
- The 2020 mail-in ballot rejection rate was 0.37%
That's a huge, surprising difference that deserves an explanation. The GA secretary of state has refused to audit those signatures.
One of the arguments against the need to do an audit is that observers from both parties had a chance to challenge the signatures when the ballots were opened. But, per reports (I believe in sworn affidavits), republican observers were often unable to do so. So why not allow an audit of the signatures?
One could argue, as you and several other commentators have, that signature verification does not matter.
But that is not following (for GA) at least the written law; it also, I would say, remains unconvincing.
Finally, I don't see what's unreasonable about asking a signature to match. That does not seem like an unfair burden to place on legitmate voters.
If GA wanted to build confidence in these results, I would recommend at least uploading a copy of all accepted ballot envelope signatures along with the on-file registration signature. I think it would then become obvious one way or the other if it was reasonable to accept the ballots.
† These are taken from the state of TX lawsuit, which I assume are correct
> If GA wanted to build confidence in these results, I would recommend at least uploading a copy of all accepted ballot envelope signatures along with the on-file registration signature.
...wouldn't that make it far easier for some malicious to steal the signature of thousands of people? Perhaps in the 2022 midterms or 2024 general election?
It's total rejection rate to total rejection, so that's apples-to-apples, right?
It is interesting that the GA SoS claims rejections in 2016 due to signatures was really low.
If that's true and 2020 is comparable, then we would not expect to see a significant number bogus signatures in an audit, which would provide reassurance to all observers.
Hence, in that case, I don't understand the reluctance to perform an audit.
They check the voter registration while they're opening the envelopes. If there's a double-vote detected, they pull that envelope to the side to investigate more, before they open it and count the vote.
Also, I really think you don't get the point of my first question to you.
How many false positives and false negatives do you think signature analysis would result in?
Because if you're trying to detect a fraudulent signature, and you have false positives, and you then don't count that vote, you have disenfranchised someone.
Perhaps you just mean that those envelopes should be pulled aside, and the state should go and track down the person and ask them if its really their signature?
> Perhaps you just mean that those envelopes should be pulled aside, and the state should go and track down the person and ask them if its really their signature?
Yes, in Georgia at least, that's the process that's supposed to be followed -- if the signature doesn't match, you mail the person, and then they have a chance to mail it back corrected.
This actually happened to me the first time I voted, in Oregon. Sort of stupidly, I signed my ballot with a nicer signature than my usual scribble. The sent the ballot back saying the signatures didn't match; I sent it back w/ my scribble. I'm not sure if the vote ended up counted or not...
Is that true? I've never heard of any such system; I don't think states in general communicate with each other and do automatic unregistrations like this.
Googling, I found this:
> Since the U.S. has a very mobile population and voters rarely inform election officials when they move, voters can often be on the voter rolls in two (or more) different states at one time. Unless states have an efficient way of communicating with one another, it’s possible that they may not be able to identify an individual who is on the rolls in two different states.
> You describe it as "ridiculously easy," but you seem to be unaware of the protections that are in place.
It is true I have never actually tried it, so I should say it seems like it would be ridicuously easy. I've still not seen any convincing arguments that protections beyond signature matches would prevent this.
Well, as that link discusses, states are in charge of managing why and how voters are removed from their rolls. In 2016, upwards of 4.5m names were removed due to cross-jurisdiction change of address (p. 48). https://www.eac.gov/sites/default/files/eac_assets/1/6/2016_...
