Re: 2012 Presidential Election Part III: October Surprise!
Require a paper record of every ballot cast so that a true recount can be done in case of questions about a result (vs. just adding up a bunch of numbers from the insecure voting machines again). Do an automatic paper count on a random sample of precincts to make sure that the electronic counts jibe with the paper counts, regardless of whether an overall recount has been requested, and only determine which precincts will be sampled after the votes have been tallied (otherwise anybody interested in stealing the election knows which precincts to tamper with).
As things stand, not only do we not know if tampering is going on, in most cases we can't know because the only record of votes cast is the electronic record.
Hmm....from the evidence I've seen, most of the tampering comes with paper ballots. The easiest and most popular is marking and inserting paper ballots into the voting box before the polls even open, or to "run out" of ballots before the polls close and then "bring in more" many of which conveniently happen already to be marked. This is difficult if not impossible to prove since so many different people could have done it, and also because the people who are supposed to police the polls also are complicit (like the Democrat attorney general is going to investigate the Democrat secretary of state over an election won by the new Democrat governor? yeah, right....). A similar method involves having people enter the voting booth with several ballots in their pocket which they then pull out and slide into the ballot box along with the legitimate original. Again, nearly impossible to prove. (absence of proof is not proof of absence). If you hang out in the right circles with the right people and slip a few drinks into them and then get them reminiscing about the old days, it can be quite instructive, even if the statute of limitations has long expired.
There was a classic episode on the original
Mission: Impossible TV series from the 1960s that involved the use of mechanical voting machines in a fictitious Central American country. At least the "bad guys" in this episode had enough sense to rig the election in such a way that it wouldn't be obvious from the results (in other words, you wouldn't have more votes cast than voters available from which to cast them). The machines in a few key precincts were rigged by setting the mechanical vote counter for the opposition candidate to a negative number. Our plucky IMF team snuck in and reset the machines to 0 - 0 so that the opposition vote would be registered honestly.
In today's world, it seems pretty clear that there is much less electoral fraud than there once was, and ironically, by there being less of it, people wind up being more upset by it when it does occur, because the inferential evidence stands out so much more clearly as an outlier that it used to.
Frankly, with a few glaring exceptions, I think as a practical problem the whole issue is overblown. However, as a symbolic issue, this is a great opportunity for people across the political spectrum (e.g., Rover and I have agreed !) to say that the appearance of integrity in the tabulation of votes is important if we want people agreeably to accept the outcome of a close election. Once a significant minority of people consistently start to feel they are being jobbed, they have less and less reason to accept the election result as legitimate and more and more reason to become restive. That is very unhealthy for a civil society in which we are supposed to bridge those differences so that we can work co-operatively toward the maintenance of a just society in which everyone has equality of opportunity.
