alt Hacker NewsThe USA threads the needle by simply not having verifiable voting. And it turns out it works pretty well. Despite countless hours and lawsuits dedicated to finding people who voted more than once, only a handful of cases have actually turned up.
It's not that there are no checks. You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day. To vote more than once you'd have to pretend to be somebody else, in person, which means that if you're caught you will go to jail.
We could certainly do better, but thus far all efforts to defeat this non-problem are clearly targeted at making it harder for people to vote rather than any kind of election integrity.
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> You have to give your name, and they know if you've voted more than once at that station that day.
So you go to other stations, duh. It's called "carousel voting" [0], if done on a large, organized scale.
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.
This. The process in my precinct is roughly...
- Enter queue
- A front of queue, show ID of some sort (various accepted) to volunteer
- They scratch you from the list and hand you a paper scantron sheet
- Go to private booth, fill out scantron
- Go to exit, scan ballot (it scans and then drops into a locked box for manual tally later, if necessary)
The "easy" ways to vote fraudulently are also easily caught... fake ID documents, voting twice, etc.
For people who forget their ID or have address changes that haven't propagated through the voter roll, there is provisional voting - you do the same as above, but they keep the ballot in a separate pile and validate your eligibility to vote at a later time. IIRC, the voter gets a ticket # so they can check the voter portal later to see if the ballot was accepted.
As noted, the number of fraudulent votes are astonishingly small, given the amount of money spent on proving otherwise. The current GOP has spent 100s of millions or billions on proving wide-spread fraud and so far, all they've managed to prove a few voters, most of whom were actually GOP-leaning, have committed fraud (and most of them were caught day-of already).