Tuesday, November 03, 2020

Election fraud

There'll be some, of course. Some of it is legal (ballot harvesting in California cough cough). And ballots will mysteriously appear in car trunks, if past history is anything to go by. I expect the latter to draw a lot of unwanted attention--so the usual suspects may be a little less ambitious in their efforts.

Mail-in ballots offer no guarantee of privacy or lack of coercion. (And some states have a history of not dealing with them well--especially military ballots.)

The door-to-door harvesting is more efficiently done in high population density areas--the big cities. And chicanery with boxes of ballots is also more easily done in a place where you can have a critical mass of the corrupt, and a complicated-enough organization to obscure what's going on from innocent eyes.

For state-wide races (e.g. for senator or presidential elector), that economy of scale makes the big cities the most important foci of fraud. And because big cities currently tend to skew to one particular party, the fraud will generally skew that way too. The more diffuse fraud (intimidation of family members, etc) should be more uniform.

1 comment:

Assistant Village Idiot said...

The temptation is likely greater where payoff is greater and ability to cover one's tracks is greater, yes. On a strictly moral plane, that may get Democrats off the hook a bit, as it remains unknown what Republicans would do with similar levels of temptation. However, looking at the issue over many elections should have mitigated that. Once it is known that the likelihood for corruption is greater, jurisdictions should have taken steps to correct for that. As far as I can see, many have not, and some officials actively work against accountability as being directed against the powerless.