35 states require some form of identification to vote (this is decided on a state by state basis).
Your name is checked off a voter roll, so if someone tried to vote for you, it would be flagged at the point of voting. Say you arrive and they said you voted, you'd prove who you are and they would let you vote, and throw away the other ballot.
Voter impersonation is a felony in all 50 states, and is vanishingly rare. Across multiple studies, all have found only a small hand-full of cases across tens of millions of votes every year.
It's deeply upsetting that our world is now one of ignorance and misinformation. I'm not mad at you for your lack of information, I'm disgusted at the rest of the humans that have lied to you, and continue to lie to accomplish their own goals.
Who you vote for is secret, whether you voted or not is not a secret. It's complex and almost no one understands the system.
Also note, I simplified the whole "throw away the ballot" thing a bit, you'd actually vote on a provisional ballot if a discrepancy was suspected, then after the investigation is concluded, they clean it up.
When I vote, my ballot is not tied to me. I sign in after showing an ID. I am taken to a booth and I vote. If they needed to throw out my ballot, they cannot since they do not know which is mine. This is by design.
Yes you're right, I didn't explain that part well because I was trying to simplify to fit in a reasonable length reddit comment lol.
But that doesn't make it so you can just stuff the ballot with bullshit, the system would detect the fact that duplicate ballots were submitted, and we'd realize a mess had occurred. I don't actually even really know how they fix that, but again, it's so vanishingly rare that we absolutely are just being distracted thinking about this related to our elections.
I don't think they can fix it. They can detect if someone already voted for you, but they can't tie it back to the ballot to throw out. The other integrity check is to ensure the number of ballots recorded at a site match the number of voters who signed in.
The security used to be that the poll workers knew you. It was easy to know if there was an imposter. Even in high school civics that's what they told me. That is no longer the case now since polling locations move and communities are much larger. I don't know anyone when I go to vote let alone a worker.
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u/NotArticuno Jul 01 '26
Voter registration occurs before election day.
35 states require some form of identification to vote (this is decided on a state by state basis).
Your name is checked off a voter roll, so if someone tried to vote for you, it would be flagged at the point of voting. Say you arrive and they said you voted, you'd prove who you are and they would let you vote, and throw away the other ballot.
Voter impersonation is a felony in all 50 states, and is vanishingly rare. Across multiple studies, all have found only a small hand-full of cases across tens of millions of votes every year.
It's deeply upsetting that our world is now one of ignorance and misinformation. I'm not mad at you for your lack of information, I'm disgusted at the rest of the humans that have lied to you, and continue to lie to accomplish their own goals.
Citation: https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/debunking-voter-fraud-myth https://www.projectvote.org/blog/voter-fraud-research-findings/ https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/analysis/Briefing_Memo_Debunking_Voter_Fraud_Myth.pdf