Many news and media have begun to cover the problem of election fraud in the U.S. Already many voters and states are claiming they've had problems with the voting machines and that the results are inaccurate. Fraud has come in many forms, such as removing a candidate from the ballot and hacking the new voting machines. Hacking the machines is simple and can be done in less than a minute and it will sway the vote in whichever direction one may choose.
We have already experienced fraud in the primaries. Because the "hack" tactic is very hard to trace and very hard to prevent, the only proven fraud so far is removing names from ballots, however speculations along with excessive evidence suggests that large scale election fraud has already taken effect in the primaries.
My questions are:
Is election fraud an issue that needs attention?
What can be done to prevent this in the Presidential elections, and what should be done about the fraud that has already taken place?
What will YOU do?
Is it possible that this kind of fraud has been used before and gone unnoticed?
What does this say about our system?
Discuss
KD Wildmo on February 8, 2008, 9:37 PM
Unfortunately the public is too apathetic (lack of comments on this topic as proof). In the last gubnatorial election in my state I participated in training to be an election observer and was credentialed and assigned to a specific precinct to monitor the election process just like the Carters have done in foreign countries.
Because of past racial harassment of voters, the state Democratic organization became very proactive in trying to combat as much voter fraud/harassment as possible. Overall the election process was fairly smooth.
That being said, the fact is that it is very easy to rig electronic voting machines and very difficult to discover this. Processes were in place to try to protect the paper data so that if there were significant deviations in voting patterns there was a paper trail.
I believe, given what happened in the last presidential election, both major political parties ought to actively train volunteers to monitor the elections at the most basic level, the precincts, or whatever political voting division is used. There are non-profit organizations that have prepared training materials specifically for this purpose.
Josh Friedman on February 8, 2008, 11:41 PM
Election fraud has been around as long as elections, and it happens everywhere.
I don’t know that you can make it go away. I think the best solution is transparency. People are scared of internet voting, but I think it would be pretty comforting to people if they could go online at any time and see the vote that they cast, and know that their vote is what they had intended. Counting ballots behind closed doors in tiny rooms leaves a lot more room for suspicion
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