Looking for Voter Fraud (In Old Elections) with Data Visualization
What I dislike about a lot of these potential fraud analysis techniques is that if a group that was performing fraud was aware of them, then they would simply perform the fraud &#x27;properly&#x27; such that the given technique(s) don&#x27;t show evidence (since they know what others are looking for and hoping to find, they simply ensure it isn&#x27;t there).<p>The same goes for similar techniques like Benford&#x27;s law: once you know about them, you can improve your sophistication so that no conclusion can be made (There are some interesting exceptions here since most claims of fraud would have one believe that centralized or semi-centralized fraud is <i>much</i> harder to perform than decentralized&#x2F;random fraud, in which case due to coordination issues, some of these techniques could still bear fruit).<p>But, the obvious overlaying issue is that the system is broken from the bottom up: there is no authentication, authorization, or encryption. Rather than having random Internet bloggers attempt to detect fraud with the information and tools they have, the system should instead be made secure and robust from the bottom-up, starting with how votes are made, tallied, transported, and so on. Additionally the technologies used, voting machines used, counting methods used, and voting system itself (lacking any ranked-choice or similar options) are all severely lacking modern improvements.<p>No single person should be counting votes and typing numbers into fields. We should at least <i>try</i> to use some of the multidisciplinary technology developed in the last five or so decades to try to patch this from the bottom-up so that the system is much more robust and auditable for the future, because things are only going to get weirder (honestly, the US election went very smoothly compared to how it gone have gone, imo - there is no better time to prevent future disasters than today).