Vote 'Fraud'
 

So one of the things that tends to come up around elections are allegations of fraudulent voting. People voting multiple times, 'the dead rising to vote', that kind of thing. This was reportedly a pretty big deal in Wisconsin in 2004, after the election there turned up a bunch of irregularities which were alleged to be voter fraud.

Anyway it turns out there has in fact been a five-year Justice Department effort to crack down on this scandalous and democratically subversive behavior, only to find out it doesn't actually happen, ever. Yes, individual screw-ups and system glitches, but nothing even remotely like an actual organized effort to throw an election in favor of one or another party.

This has apparently become a big deal as a result of US Attorneys evidently having been fired for refusing to prosecute said vote fraud cases due to there being no actual evidence on which to base such prosecutions.

It also seems worth noting that this vigor for the prosecution of voter fraud has come at the expense of prosecuting voting discrimination, which has apparently ceased under the Bush justice department.

Anyway this all sounds terribly important and I thought it would be something worth Discussioning.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/wa...7ba&ei=5087%0A

And I've heard some ppl claim that the push to prosecute the voter fraud you outline, Fifth, to detract away from the voter faud ppl suspected in the new touch machines & other irregularities. I do vaguely recall reading an article, stating that they found a number of problems w/ Ohio after the fact. (I'll try to do research on this.)

SWB

As a demonstration of how easy it was to commit voting fraud, someone in New Zealand registered his dog as a voter. They only found out after he told the papers. Who doesn't love beauracracy?
As for organised vote rigging I imagine it would be awfully difficult to make any real difference without anyone noticing. One would need to rig a lot of votes.
Also the LA times article doesn't explain much how African and Native Americans are discriminated against in voting. Is this to do with electorate drawing, poll booth locations and mannings or what? I would like to know more about this. I know the big picture of the American system with electoral colleges and such ( which is crazy by the way!) but not the little bits such as how these are drawn.
Indigenous votes are a big issue where I'm from so I'm curious to find out how it works in other countries. In NZ the native population are the Maori and they choose to be on the general roll or a special Maori roll with their own Maori only electorates.

In general, the lack of voting stations, poor staffing, and low funding can be used to disenfranchise voters. If there's only one station with three people working there who can only afford to be open for three hours, very few people can vote. The fact that the state legislatures can gerrymander the districts in any way they want so that minorities are divided into smaller parts which are overwhelmed by majorities of people who voted for them also leads to much of the discrimination. (If I make any mistakes, by the way, feel free to point them out. I'm operating on a lot of TV and a recently finished course on American Politics.)

As far as what's going on here, I really wish I could be shocked. I actually fully expect any government to act in such a way, so that they can maintain power. Their main problem seems to be that they got caught. It's wrong, to be sure, but I've come to expect such behaviour from any government. I guess all that Machiavelli I read last semester is paying off. Looks like cynicism and politics just seem to go hand in hand.

I remember reading a lot on how the voters were kept from voting during a recent election, too. In one place (I forget where) Republican supporters dressed up as officials and told minority voters that the polling station was closed. Democrats did it too, to be sure, but that's just the example that sprung to mind. It may not have been government sanctioned, but I would be sure that they were operating on some level of cohesion.

Could you provide a link? I'm sorry, but unless you can actually back up something like that, its fairly hard to belive. Kinda like how my brother attempts to related 2nd hand stories of how ppl have been killed for wearing seat-belts, or survived because they weren't wearing them.

Stories of voter faud, like the one you suggest, sound more like urban myth to me.

SWB

Well, it isn't like things like that would do anything. Hell, in an election, one extra fraudelent vote is never a problem. People choosing not to vote makes a much bigger impact then fraudelent voting ever will.

Well, from what I can tell, it's not so much that voter fraud is never committed insomuch as there has never really been any sort of vast conspiracy to commit large-scale voter fraud in order to tip an election one way or the other. Too much time and effort, anyway, when gerrymandering and voter disenfranchising has proven so much more effective in the past.

http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/1/...ectid=10346922

All hail Google. Here's another urban myth I want to resolve...I heard somewhere in the states someone put a tree up against a human runner, and the tree won. But since a tree can't really take the seat, it defaulted to the man.

Can't remember what level of government it was, probably municipal, but it was still funny as hell.

Of course, being registered to vote & actually being able to get away with it are two different things. Plus, this sounded more like low tier government stuff, like city council.

And still it doesn't really apply to US politics.

SWB

All hail Azisien for saving me some work! Actually it was national election. And once someone is registered to vote here they get sent a little voting card. All you need to do to vote is hand in that card at a polling booth, no identification or anything. Thus he could have easily shown up to two polling booths and voted twice. He didn't because the point was he was showing how one could do things like that. But it was only little of course.
As POS said actual vote-rigging way too much effort. Just look at Northern Ireland up until relatively recentely. We'll park all the Catholics into a few electoral regions and pretty much nullify thier votes.