Why Voter Fraud is Nearly Non-Existent

Answer before explanation: Because voter fraud is just about the most expensive, burdensome, unreliable and risky way imaginable to rig elections.

The "r" in "voter fraud" is an important letter.

VoteR fraud would be someone pretending to be someone else when voting, or pretending to be legally entitled to vote when he or she is not, or contriving to vote multiple times or in multiple jurisdictions. That is, it would be fraud by someone who is, or is pretending to be, a voter.

If I was a party or campaign operative who wanted to affect the outcome of an election, I'd dismiss voter fraud schemes out of hand. They would require rounding up a whole bunch of people, trusting those people to cast the votes I wanted cast instead of just voting however they felt like voting, and risking each and every one of them getting caught and/or turning coat and outing me. And using "illegal aliens" (as if any such thing existed)? Risible. Their chief concern in life, other than making a living, is to not get caught making a living, so why would they do something dangerous and of little or no personal benefit to themselves like trying to vote?

Now, "vote" fraud, without the "r" on the end of the word "vote," is a different story altogether. It requires many orders of magnitude fewer co-conspirators: Polling place workers and/or vote counters and/or programmers of voting machines. My co-conspirators can find ways to change votes from votes against me to votes for me, or to add fake votes to the totals.

Yes, that happens. I've caught it happening before.

If Donald Trump was asserting vote fraud as a reason for Hillary Clinton getting more votes than him in November's election, it just might come somewhat close to getting into the neighborhood of being marginally believable. But that's not what he's asserting. He's asserting (and now saying he's going to "investigate" his fantasy of) voteR fraud -- the idea that there were "millions of people who voted illegally."

[Addendum, later in the day: I don't usually turn my blog posts into Garrison Center columns, but I do sometimes, and this was one of those times]

CoupCoup Clock

First Electors Meet In ...*Countdown

* Electors meet in their respective state capitals on Monday, December 19, at various times, beginning with Vermont and perhaps Maryland at 10am Eastern (here's the list).

The final set of electors don't meet until 7pm in the Hawaii–Aleutian Time Zone (three guesses which state we're talking about there) -- midnight Eastern.

For obvious reasons it will be some time Tuesday before all elector votes have been cast and the totals are known. But we'll probably have a pretty good idea much earlier as to whether or not there's a coup attempt under way in the electoral college.

Principled Non-Voting: The Missing Element

I'm listening to Free Talk Live (and I'm listening live, so I can't just link to the episode; I'll try to remember to come back later and do that here), and there was just some talk about voting, not voting, "principled non-voting" and so forth.

One of the hosts (Mark) is apparently a little sick of "principled non-voters" belly-aching about how voting is "supporting the system" etc. He hates it -- not because he thinks it negatively affects the libertarian movement in terms of large numbers, but because he thinks it's irrational and that the irrationality is infectious.

I kind of agree, but probably not for the same reasons, at least from what I'm hearing so far. The discussion doesn't seem to have come around to what I consider the main thing:

If all you do vis a vis voting is not vote, it doesn't bother statists nor does it really negatively affect the state.  There's a certain amount of immunity there in the form of the claim/perception that people who don't vote aren't voting because they're apathetic rather than because they have a problem with the system, and that in turn buttresses the whole "if you don't vote, don't complain" / "not voting is consent to abide by whatever the people who do vote decide" consensus.

As a former and possibly future "principled non-voter" I have to say I have always agreed with what Mark seems to be getting at.

In order for not voting to be an effectual statement, or to be or become the tactic of a movement, the people who don't vote have to say why they're not voting, and some non-trivial portion of them have to agree, at least roughly, on why that is.

One of my past little projects (you know me, I start projects to see where they go and abandon them if the answer is "nowhere") was to try and get a campaign going through which non-voters could, as a group, publicly say (through a sort of public registry and communique system) "we're not voting because we don't consent to your system." I called it ⛒-VOTERS. Didn't really go anywhere, but I still think it was an interesting idea with potential.

IIRC, somewhere in the neighborhood of 22% of Americans voted for Barack Obama for president in 2012. 78% did not, and a majority of that 78% didn't vote at all.

Suppose that in addition to the ~22% of Americans who voted for Obama, ~22% or more had joined together in publicly stating "we neither want nor need a president thingie, have your little ritual if you want to but keep it to yourselves." Somewhat different perceptual story there, huh?

But absent that joining together around a message, not voting really isn't any different than not checking the mailbox or not having mayonnaise on your ham sandwich, or not watching Game of Thrones. Nobody notices that you didn't do it and nobody cares why.

A Strong, if Early, Candidate for "Dumbest Thing I've Read This Week"

In an email I just got from something calling itself the "Progressive Turnout Project" ...

"Election Day should be a holiday, so no one has to choose between a paycheck and a vote." -- US Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA)

The derp, as always, is strong with this one.

The only people who automagically get all federal-government-decreed holidays off work with pay are government employees.

Sure, some other people get some holidays off work with pay; in some industries (e.g. banking), that holiday schedule may closely track the government holiday schedule.

Other people don't get paid for days off, period, end of story.

And on any given holiday, there are many, many, many Americans at work.

Given Warren's political orientation, perhaps making it easier for government employees, but not everyone else, to vote is really the whole point.

If the goal is really maximizing the ability to vote, there are several ways to go about it, none of them as stump-stupid as "make Election Day a holiday."

Some of them have already been implemented here and there (early voting, relaxed rules for absentee voting, voting by mail).

Another would simply be to make the voting hours longer and/or move Election Day to the weekend when at least those who work the 40-hour, Monday thru Friday, routine are off. Any particular reason why "Election Day" shouldn't start at 12:01am Saturday morning and run through 11:59pm Sunday night?

And then there's the matter of election venue and method. Why does it have to be a school gym or church social hall filled with dedicated voting machines, when it could be standardized terminals at every Post Office and many convenience stores (yes, I'm aware of fraud concerns, etc. -- separate issue, right now I'm talking ONLY about making it EASIER to vote, not about making the vote less vulnerable to fraud)?

In which I reject the glamour of evil, and refuse to be mastered by sin

I hereby declare the monkey off my back:

If democracy is a religion (and it is -- "the worship of jackals by jackasses," as Mencken so indelicately phrased it), elections are its principal sacrament. Voting is communion, complete with miraculous Transubstantiation of the Most, in which a plurality or majority of ballots cast are magically transformed into the "consent of the governed."

Upon this rock the entire church of state is built. Every nuance of the perpetual Black Mass we call “government” -- every act of theft, extortion, brutality, murder, war read in solemn tone from the Liturgy of Realpolitik -- justifies itself on the basis of this alleged “consent,” in turn symbolized by the stickers handed out across America to those leaving the polling place: "I Voted!"