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How Voter Fraud Works?

Mark Olmsted
2 min readMay 7, 2021

For any voter fraud to work, there has to be a tortured supposition that tens of thousands of people would have the same thought:

“I’m going to register to vote in three or four different precincts, plus request an absentee ballot for myself and a dead relative, then on Election Day go to vote in all three of four precincts, to which I’ll present my real ID each time.”

( Unless, of course, he/she went through the arduous process of getting several fake IDs from the DMV, which means obtaining multiple fraudulent birth certificates. Good luck with that.) And for any of this to work on a big enough scale to swing an election, tens of thousands of people have to have this thought concurrently, and to coordinate it, would have to use social media, thereby exposing themselves.

And any undocumented person would have to make the calculation that voting illegally is worth the possibility of being arrested and deported, and thousands of them would have to make this same calculation concurrently, without communicating with each other.

It distresses me that the hysterical nullifiers on the right aren’t asked: “Could you tell us exactly how you think voter fraud works? What voter ID laws actually prevent?” Because they should be forced to come up with these ridiculous scenarios. Which they couldn’t. But I would like to see them sputter trying.

MCO 2021

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Mark Olmsted
Mark Olmsted

Written by Mark Olmsted

Author, "Ink from the Pen: A Prison Memoir" about my time behind bars. See GQ dot com “Curious Cons of the Man Who Wouldn’t Die” for story of how I got there.

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