Well, it would require millions of people to individually commit voter fraud. In fact, individuals do that; didn’t you hear about the Trumpist who voted twice using his mom’s ID? There’s always a handful of cases every election. If millions of people did that, there you go. I don’t understand the confusion.
What stops this is not that it can’t be done, because it obviously can, people do it. What stops it is that it just doesn’t make any sense, and millions of people would never do it because it’s irrational.
If you want to hack an election, then you do not hack the machines, you hack the voter. That’s what Russia and other hostile state actors have learned. Hacking the machines is difficult. Hacking the voter is easy. Voters, mainly Republican at this time, have been fed a lot of misinformation, and propaganda from foreign bot farms that are using human psychology against them. If you want candidate X to win, then get as many voters as possible to convert to X, and get any that won’t switch to not vote at all. This is what we saw in 2016, and again in 2020; however, there was so much hatred for Trump that it did not quite work. Also, the tech giants were a bit more zealous at taking down bot accounts and flagging false information. Nowhere near good enough in my opinion, but still it is a step in the right direction.
My brother who is all about “Corrupt Dems”, “Socialists” etc. on Social Media said he had never heard of Marjorie Taylor Greene or Lauren Boebert. And I believe him.
He also claimed that the Mainstream Media has completely buried a scandal in his state’s Democratic government. What scandal? He send me links to the major newspaper in his city. This was front page news on the major newspapers in other major cities, on the TV stations, on CNN, the local NPR stations, etc, etc.
Whatever news sources he is consuming seem to be. It do much reporting the story as screaming that the mainstream media is burying this story.
The more I try to connect with friends and family at a deeper level on political issues (beyond one-liners) the more stark it is that we are “consuming” drastically different news.
Whoever is hacking the voter, it seems to have been very successful.
A clarification, as least as it works in my state: People get provisional ballots for all sorts of reasons, and yes, “I showed up to vote but they said I already did” would be one of those reasons. As an election worker, giving that voter a provisional ballot, and thoroughly documenting why, is about the only thing I CAN do right then. The voter gets a ballot, and I collect as much information as possible to give to whoever investigates the case, which is probably going to be both law enforcement and somebody from the election office. I personally have neither the resources nor the authority to investigate to determine whether the voter is mistaken or another election worker screwed up or somebody impersonated the voter. Meanwhile, if the voter doesn’t cast a ballot by 7pm election day, it definitely won’t count even if the investigators determine they should have been allowed to.
(I’ve worked probably a dozen elections now, and exactly once have I had somebody show to vote and the system said they already had. That was an elderly person who had voted in that same polling place some hours earlier and was just confused; he eventually recognized his own signature in the poll book.)
Other reasons why a voter might be given a provisional ballot other than being listed as an absentee voter:
they don’t have appropriate photo ID
they have moved since the last election and didn’t re-register
their name doesn’t match the poll book (most commonly a woman who married or divorced and changed her driver’s license but not her voter registration)
I can’t find them in the poll book but they think they are registered
they are in the wrong polling place but decline to go to the correct one, or
(for primary elections) a political party question, for example the poll book says they are registered Libertarian but they want to vote in the Republican primary.
A provisional ballot is a fail-safe anytime there is anything amiss in the paperwork or any question as to the voter’s qualifications.
Another way you hack the voter is to spew propaganda and lies that cause the voter to believe his/her election system can no longer be trusted, despite no evidence to support that view. It’s what Trump did to his followers after November 6th.
He did it before the election for absentee voting/vote-by-mail. So much so, that it cost him the election in Georgia. After the election, Raffensperger reported that 25,000 Republicans who voted absentee in the primary did not vote at all in the general. That’s over twice his losing margin. We didn’t hear anything from other states along these lines, but one wonders if Trump cost himself one or more of the other battleground states.
My wife, who worked a number of elections back before we were married, thinks that working an election should be a required civic duty, for much the same reason you say. If people worked an election and had an understanding of what goes into running an election, there would be a lot fewer of these ignorant yahoos screaming about election fraud when they have no idea WTF they are talking about.
“Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a non-partisan rule of law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.
That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream - a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election, they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that Democracy in America endures.”
Of course, the right-wing crazy sphere is exploding with “We were right, it was rigged, the Deep State is real.” In fact, I wouldn’t have found the article had it not been for the right wing loon heads exploding over it.