The most common refrain I hear against the possibility of widespread voter fraud is that demographers and pollsters would catch such malfeasance, but in practice when pollsters see a discrepancy between voting results and polls they seem to just assume the polls were biased. Is there a better reason besides “the FBI seems pretty competent”?
This is another case of “people arguing about scope of a fuzzy problem RATHER than how to define/measure the problem or analyze cost/benefit of mitigations”. Almost everyone deeply involved in this has a political/culture-war preference, and it seems to be the case that proposed changes seem to shift results in one direction or another, SEPARATELY from whether it reduces fraud.
In fact, it’s ludicrous to believe that zero fraud happens, as it’s ludicrous to believe that most outcomes are driven by fraud (as opposed to non-fraudulent bullshit reasons like advertising and vote friction). Most anti-fraud proposals ALSO raise barriers to technically-non-fraudulent-but-distasteful-to-some participation, and without being willing to discuss numbers and impact, there can be no resolution.
To your actual question, I believe that watchers would notice very extreme cases of fraud at the state and national levels, though they likely miss some at local levels (where natural variance is much more possible), and they probably can’t detect (and won’t have sufficient evidence to convince anyone) minor or incremental cases of fraud or illegal manipulation.
Controversially, an honest statistician will acknowledge that there’s lots of noise in the methodology. And honest democracy-proponents acknowledge that close races are … close and it’s not too critical for legitimacy which side wins the coinflip. So even if fraud or biased rulings change an outcome, if it’s hard to detect, it probably doesn’t matter.
I think a similar type of financial fraud is often detectable via violations of Benford’s law. Or more generally, it’s hard to fake the right distribution. As another case of that principle, you’d expect the discrepancy between polls and results to fall within a predictable distribution if they were sampling from the same space.
But would pollsters actually, in real life detect an odd discrepancy between one district and another and loudly proclaim it as voter fraud? Do we even know if such irrelegularities have happened before?
Maybe? I was not trying to answer the object level question either way, but instead just pointing out what sort of evidence there might be that could answer this.
The most common refrain I hear against the possibility of widespread voter fraud is that demographers and pollsters would catch such malfeasance, but in practice when pollsters see a discrepancy between voting results and polls they seem to just assume the polls were biased. Is there a better reason besides “the FBI seems pretty competent”?
This is another case of “people arguing about scope of a fuzzy problem RATHER than how to define/measure the problem or analyze cost/benefit of mitigations”. Almost everyone deeply involved in this has a political/culture-war preference, and it seems to be the case that proposed changes seem to shift results in one direction or another, SEPARATELY from whether it reduces fraud.
In fact, it’s ludicrous to believe that zero fraud happens, as it’s ludicrous to believe that most outcomes are driven by fraud (as opposed to non-fraudulent bullshit reasons like advertising and vote friction). Most anti-fraud proposals ALSO raise barriers to technically-non-fraudulent-but-distasteful-to-some participation, and without being willing to discuss numbers and impact, there can be no resolution.
To your actual question, I believe that watchers would notice very extreme cases of fraud at the state and national levels, though they likely miss some at local levels (where natural variance is much more possible), and they probably can’t detect (and won’t have sufficient evidence to convince anyone) minor or incremental cases of fraud or illegal manipulation.
Controversially, an honest statistician will acknowledge that there’s lots of noise in the methodology. And honest democracy-proponents acknowledge that close races are … close and it’s not too critical for legitimacy which side wins the coinflip. So even if fraud or biased rulings change an outcome, if it’s hard to detect, it probably doesn’t matter.
I think a similar type of financial fraud is often detectable via violations of Benford’s law. Or more generally, it’s hard to fake the right distribution. As another case of that principle, you’d expect the discrepancy between polls and results to fall within a predictable distribution if they were sampling from the same space.
But would pollsters actually, in real life detect an odd discrepancy between one district and another and loudly proclaim it as voter fraud? Do we even know if such irrelegularities have happened before?
Maybe? I was not trying to answer the object level question either way, but instead just pointing out what sort of evidence there might be that could answer this.
(Sorry)