You aren't mentioning the other part (notably more influent part) that systematically prevents people from voting. One removes names from voting rolls using brain-dead software that is 95% inaccurate.
Don't forget about voter roll manipulation as the votes of millions of legitimate voters, most of them visible minorities, are thrown out on spurious grounds.
The trouble is that fixing the voter registration rolls means removing names from them, and the other American political faction - the Democrats and all the others opposed to Trump - push a different vote rigging narrative where every name removed from the list is a vote that's been suppressed by the Republicans. This happens even when the supposed voters both haven't voted in years and haven't actually been removed from the rolls or made ineligible to vote.
In particular, I recall there being a very popular article/blog post that went hugely viral on Twitter comparing Trump's election margins in key states with the number of supposedly "suppressed" votes in that election, allegedly demonstrating that Trump won the election that way, where it was clear that the author knew the supposed voter suppression scheme wouldn't even work as described. Part-way through, after the breathless claims about hundreds of thousands of voters, was a careful ass-covering disclaimer about how what actually happened to voters on the purge lists which would supposedly stop them from voting would depend on the state. That disclaimer was because, in at least one of those key states Trump had to win and probably all, being put on the list didn't stop people from voting at all - they just had to confirm or update their address when they went to vote.
Selective voter suppression and exclusion, which the US has had in a significant way for centuries, mitigated somewhat for a time by the voting rights act before it was gutted, is a pretty enormous issue with the integrity of democratic elections.
The idea that the US doesn't have election integrity issues is simply false.
I don't follow your problem here - there are a ton of people who are registered who never vote, you simply log the votes under the names of people who didn't show up.
Democrats have a highly sophisticated harvesting system. A ballot is worth about $7 and each ballot is cross referenced weeks leading up to and weeks following an election to ensure each one is turned in. If a voter doesn't want to vote, people show up at their door to assist them. In 2022 ballot curing was introduced to ensure that each ballot is filled out correctly. In addition to ballot curing, and harvesting, committees exist to judge voter intent. Given the economic incentives, political incentives, and very sophisticated partisan elections teams within Boards of elections, its unlikely a single person wasn't able to vote. Rather than 4,900 victims, how about they come up with a single name a single individual who wasn't able to vote. That person doesn't exist.
There is little if any actual evidence of voter fraud, but plenty of evidence that making voting harder (via voter ID validation, biometric markings, etc) simply disenfranchises voters.
It's easy to say that software can just be hacked, but just because its a possibility doesn't give you the right to invalidate an election.
Making it harder for people to vote is literally voter suppression. You might argue that it is ineffective voter suppression, but I don't think you can argue that adding unnecessary steps to voting, and making penalties for making mistakes harsher while making it easier to make mistakes, is anything else.
> Yea, that's not exactly a complete list. One example is undercounting. Another is changing people's party affiliation, so they cannot vote in primaries.
The first example I'd call "ballot stuffing"--it's really a catchall term for shenanigans around turning the actual returned ballots into an official count. This even would cover things like poor ballot design (e.g., butterfly ballots in Florida's elections) that aren't strictly speaking fraud.
The latter example is a fourth category of electoral shenanigans that I'd loosely term voter intimidation; essentially any mechanism by which people are dissuaded from casting a ballot in the first place, which I omitted because most of this category is unfortunately legal.
> In doing so you removed all actionable information from the threat types. What you did is similar to saying that all computer hacks are remote or local. They are, but so what? That isn't actionable, because it removes all the actual descriptive information.
No it's not. While it's true that the ballot stuffing category does contain a rather disparate list of potential frauds, they're all almost entirely solvable by auditing and oversight of the physical process of counting ballots. And more stringent checks on who can cast ballots (which strict id laws purport to be) don't affect it one whit. A more specific look at how to fix an election might dive into the details more, but grouping them in one category doesn't really affect the analysis here.
This is really just a hilariously (and overly politically charged) small distraction from the real problem.
> I wasn't prevented from exercising my right to vote at all.
Where things get interesting is the way votes are collected/counted in many locations. Electronic voting machines are a mess of proprietary software, and more than a few that have gotten their hands on them were apalled at how inherently easy it is to compromise them[1]. Tapering with an election this way, by virtually denying you your right to vote by not counting your vote, or changing it, is a real concern that we are doing practically nothing about.
> When states like Georgia try to remove voters from the rolls that didn't respond to multiple notices sent to their home address, or haven't voted in many years, people call that "voter suppression."
Removing people from voter rolls should require making active efforts to determine if there is a change in voter status. For example, are they still filing taxes at the same address? The most common cause of stale voter roll information is people moving, and the voter database not reflecting it, but there are already several government databases that will reflect whether or not someone has moved. Purging voters simply because of nonresponse and non-voting should be insufficient burden of proof--and yet states have tried to do that in the past.
It's actually quite frustrating how many different government agencies I have to inform of my move [1], especially because there's very little indication of who will and who won't be told of it.
[1] The title registration of my car and my driver's license not using the same database is particularly frustrating because it was the same damn agency.
One party as a platform is always trying to make it more difficult to vote in ways that mostly affect people that tend to vote for the other party. There's no reason to pretend it's incompetence when there's clear evidence of voter suppression
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