Thread by @LeonHWolf

As I continue to run things down, I wanted to jot down a few thoughts about voter fraud, and why I think it is fairly frequent on a small scale basis and largely impossible to pull off on a large scale basis. 1/

I would view it as more likely that the counting software caused serious problems than I would that there are massive numbers of fraudulent votes. The reason is pretty simple: creating a vote creates a paper trail and each instance significantly ups the risk of being caught 2/

At a certain point, risk becomes certainty. Remember, first of all, that you can't just print a ballot and stuff it in a ballot box. The ballot has to be associated with a voter who is REGISTERED and who is recorded as casting a ballot at a precinct that day. 3/

At the end of the day they reconcile precincts and make sure the number of votes cast for each candidate totaled up matches the number of votes cast on their registered voter list. 4/

If there's a large discrepancy between those totals then they're going to go hunting through and reconciling ballots with their list to find out what went wrong. A large batch of completely fictitious ballots would get caught in reconciliation. 5/

So if either some huge chunk of bogus votes was added or a huge chunk of votes was destroyed, it would be immediately apparent. There's some tolerance built in for machine error but it's small. 6/

So hurdle one is that you have to cast a vote that belongs to an actual, registered voter. Casting it in the name of a live voter can be done in a few ways but all basically invite getting caught. 7/

The first, old school way, is to just go pay people who would otherwise not vote to vote for your guy. The problem with this approach is that every person you pay becomes witness to multiple federal and state crimes committed by you. 8/

All it takes is one of these people who surprisingly has loyalty to the person you're committing fraud against and you're in jail for a long time, especially in the era where everyone has a cell phone and habitually takes it out to record everything of even moderate interest. 9/

Could it still happen? Maybe, but there's a humongous amount of risk. An operation that did this with a couple dozen people might be feasible. An operation that did it with tens of thousands? That would get blown wide open in minutes. 10/

Second method would be just voting people without their consent with fraudulent or fake IDs. Again, this causes a problem because at least some of them will actually show up to vote (especially in this election) and when it shows that they've already voted... 11/

The police will want to talk to them about why they are trying to vote twice. When it turns out they haven't... well, it's a simple matter of matching signatures and the fraud is busted. Again, a method that might work small scale, but would immediately get caught large scale 12/

So voting living people is out, which leaves voting for dead people. Voting for dead people absolutely does happen but it's impossible to do for the numbers some of my conservative friends imagine, for some simple reasons. 13/

Federal law and applicable regulations require states to regularly update their voter rolls to remove dead and duplicate entries, so every state has a reporting system that catches the majority of dead people when they die and removes them from voter rolls. 14/

Now, the government is the government, so they sometimes do a pretty crappy job. More on that in a minute. But the bottom line is that you can't just go vote any dead person that you know of. You have to know that someone is dead AND that the county doesn't know they're dead 15/

How many of those people exist? Some. It's not that hard to figure out when the state government hasn't got wind of someone being dead. But it isn't enough really to come close to mattering. 16/

For example, a lawsuit filed earlier this year accused the city of Detroit of having 2,500 dead voters on their rolls. The city of Detroit did their own investigation and deleted a large portion of the names on the list, leading the organization to drop the suit. 17/

Story here. Bottom line: kind of hard to believe Detroit is worse than most other large cities in America in terms of record keeping. And with respect to Detroit's rolls specifically, THEY WERE JUST CLEANED. 18/ detroit.cbslocal.com/2020/07/01/org…

Now, the same org filed suit against Pennsylvania on the day before the election, claiming that Pennsylvania had 21,000 dead voters on its rolls. Now, it should be noted that a court expressly rejected this claim: 19/ cdn.factcheck.org/UploadedFiles/…

But even assuming the judge got it wrong, I think it is safe to cap the number of even potentially registered dead Pennsylvania voters is 21,000, which is substantially fewer than the number he is behind in PA. 20/

I do encourage anyone with credible evidence of me being wrong to contact me with it. If something horrible has happened, then the country should know about it and those with information should come forward. 21/

Even if it doesn't swing the election, that doesn't mean that any level of voting fraud should be tolerated. Where there is evidence that it exists even in small amounts it should be investigated and prosecuted. 22/

I just am not seeing anything that would cause me to conclude that any voter fraud that did exist even potentially cost Trump the election. 23/