Fake News.

[Asmodean]

There is a lot of foreign interest in the US elections because various foreign entities stand to gain and/or lose substantially based on the outcome.

I would expect foreign meddling in a nation like the United States. Were China approaching democratic, they would be subject to that as well - partly from the very same United States.

As an interesting aside, over in my part of the globe, foreigners who have lived legally in a county for a certain number of years get to vote in the local elections there. That said though, we are a higher trust society than many, and still you need a legally recognised ID to exercise that right - foreigner or no. I must admit I was kinda' baffled the first time I heard that requiring ID for voting was a controversial issue in at least parts of the United States. Like... Why on Earth would you not?!

[zorkan]

The US only interfere when they know it's right.

"The U.S. has a long history of attempting to influence presidential elections in other countries – it's done so as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000,"

https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-us-intervention-foreign-elections-20161213-story.html

[Asmodean]

It doesn't matter if it's "right." It is subject to a cost-benefit analysis, just like "everything else" in intergovernmental politics.

If "right" even comes into play at that level, I'd say it's likely to be little more than a way of selling it to the public.

[billy rubin]

non citizens in america have voted in local elections forhundreds of years.

they cant vote in federal elections, but they do mayors, and school boards and such all the time.

not everywhere

[Asmodean]

I suppose it does make more sense in the United States. A few assumptions on my part here, but I think they are logically consistent; As a foreigner [here: foreign national], you cannot vote in federal elections because you cannot vote on behalf of your state. You can, however, vote in local elections because that is voting for policy within that state.

Norway is not a federation, yet we do appear to have a similar practice. I imagine the reasoning is that as a foreigner, you cannot speak for or on behalf of Norway, but you can affect local policy in the part of it, in which you legally reside.

[Icarus]

Our far right folks are all atwitter about illegal voting. They believe, or at least they claim to believe, that all voting is "rigged". There is no evidence whatsoever of any illegal voting or ballot stuffing anywhere across our nation but the conspiracy theorists persist. There are millions of them.

[Asmodean]

Are there ways of knowing though?

Assuming there is little identity verification, what's to stop, say, a person who has already voted or who has no right to vote from casting a ballot while pretending to be someone they know who has no intention of voting, but does have the right to do so?

Or in the case of mail-in, could a mother easily get away with sending in a ballot on behalf of a politically-apathetic adult child?

What evidence of the act would exist if she did?

The scope may well be tiny... But then, sometimes, so are the margins.

[Icarus]

The vote cheating accusations are completely unfounded.  One of the odd ball situations that lend suspicion to voting  honesty is a reality called "red mirage". It goes like this......Large or medium large cities and counties typically have a majority of democratic voters. Small counties and rural communities are largely republican adherents. That is  the way the demographics have aligned for many decades.

The small counties have far fewer voters than the larger cities and counties have. The small counties can count their votes and report the count rather quickly because the numbers are small. The larger population centers need more time to count the many times larger number of votes before they can prepare a report.

The early reports  from the small population areas tend to indicate a large proportion of the votes are for red candidates including presidential candidates. Looks for all the world that the republicans have won by a landslide.

Uneducated egomaniacs, like Trump, will seize on the early evidence and claim victory. Later the Blue wave arrives. The larger population areas have counted their votes that show a Democrat vote much larger than the ones that were reported by the sum of the rural regions.

The blue side (democrats) win decisively. The red side will shout and scream that the damned election was rigged by some nefarious method contrived by those conniving democrats. The Screamers are never quite able to identify the methods that were used to rig the election. They do know in their hearts that there is no way in hell that their candidates lost. Must have been those devilish Jews and their space lasers, or the voting machines were compromised by a secret cabal in Venezuela.

Not everyone understands how the Red Mirage and the oncoming Blue wave actually work. The rural folks have never even heard of such a thing.  They bring out their pitch forks and torches to smite the offenders.  Actually  not pitch forks. They have guns with which to augment their anger.

[Asmodean]

The vote cheating accusations are completely unfounded.

...and yet I have just lain the foundation in my above post. (As it remains unaddressed, it remains standing)

Sure, it may be the case that large urban centers tend to vote one way, while rural areas tend to vote the other. How do you verify that Bob Bobson Jr. did not vote on behalf of Bob Bobson III, his ne'er-do-well 19-year-old son AND Bob Bobson Sr, his 85-year-old senile dad?

[Dark Lightning]

Where I'm registered to vote, the family name contains the four individuals living in that precinct. Our names are checked off as we vote, if we vote at the polling place. Can't vote twice. My MiL passed away after the last election. We certainly could have voted her ballot, I guess. We shredded it. I can't speak for everybody's basic honesty, though.

[Asmodean]

A good and honest answer.

I think that largely, the vote-cheating conspiracy theorists are wrong in their assessment of the scope of the actual cheating. They do, however, seem to have a point or two with regard to it being effortless to cheat in certain ways.

For example, The Bobson conspiracy I presented here would be far less credible if each Bobson had to use his electronic bank ID to vote, or if a couple of election functuionaries stopped by their place and collected their individual ballots from them.

As it is, it seems to boil down to one side, which is willing to trust people in this regard, and another, which is not. I suppose that in a high-trust society, the former would be more "naturally credible," while in a low trust society, it would be the latter.

Maybe if you would expect to have your wallet handed to you unmolested if you dropped it, you'd be inclined to assume the best of people's intent. Maybe you'd be perfectly justified to. Or maybe your life and/or your perception thereof has taught you differently. Maybe you are just as justified to think that. [The Asmo goes on and on about the perception of cities and city-dwellers out in the sticks and such-like]

[billy rubin]

when i vote i have to present an id. to be registered, i have to present more stringent papers.

never had to do that when i started voting. i just told them who i was and that was that.

[Asmodean]

when i vote i have to present an id. to be registered, i have to present more stringent papers.

never had to do that when i started voting. i just told them who i was and that was that.

As a matter of personal opinion, I think that is good. It takes some air out of the tyres of "Bobson conspiracists" and makes the process more robust.

Yeah, it's nice to be able to just trust your fellow citizens, but on a tree of hundreds of million apples, there are literal metric tons of bad ones, not to mention potential infiltrators from the pear tree over yonder, pretending to be all apple-like and... And I guess I'd better abandon this metaphor before it grows truly Asmoic in complexity and confusion.

On a unrelated note, in a recent poll, the Progress Party was the largest in Norway. I don't think that's ever happened before, but it does align with the trend of Labour taking their (former) base for granted to the point of having forsaken them to the point of being forsook by them. A few will move on left, but for a lot of people, there's just too much Commie in them hills... So here we are, a very surface-level and imperfect analysis though it is.