Comment

The Myth of Voter Fraud Continues

23
BishopX11/19/2011 6:47:53 am PST

re: #16 Sergey Romanov

Not really. You are indeed lucky, as a country, if the voter fraud is indeed rare (though a small amount of uncovered cases doesn’t mean that’s all the cases there are), since the holes in “voting security” are just begging to be exploited. Given the amount of incredibly close elections you’ve been having recently every vote counts indeed, and 10-100 votes can change the whole election. If that’s what it takes, then it would be very realistic for a less scrupulous group of people to go around several polling places and fraudulently vote in someone else’s name (whether it has or has not been recorded in history hardly matters; the point is that it may happen).

I think you’re lacking a little bit of historical context here. The last major case of fake voting took place 90 years ago. Since then the most prevalent forms of voting fraud have been disenfranchisement and ballot stuffing. Part of the reason America has such low standards of proof for voter identification is that disfranchisement (legal and extra-legal) has been such a big issue. The reason voting IDs need to be freely available in the US is because there is a constitutional amendment banning poll taxes (i.e. requiring that you pay to vote). This amendment is in place specifically to stop politically motivated disenfranchisement. It is one of two constitutional clauses relating directly to voting (the other establishing a minimum age) which should tell you just how important this issue has historically been.

The part of this is as Odbicut has pointed out, fake voting is hard. There are much easier ways to illegally influence elections, and we don’t have terribly good controls in place to stop some of them. One good example of this is electronic vote tampering. Many states use electronic voting machines (as opposed to paper ballots) which are basically retrofitted ATMs. Some of these are incredibly insecure and have the potential for a single actor to influence thousands of votes.

The third peice of this that you seem to be missing is voter registration. You do actually need to prove that you are you in order to register to vote. Which makes fake voting much more complex.