These two sentences from Dan McLaughlin’s article on close elections are the most important, I think:
For whatever reason, when statewide races are decided by less than 1 point, Democrats win almost three-quarters of the time.
And
When the margin opens to 1-2 points, that advantage dissipates, and the Democrats win only half the races…
This is also true for races with 2-4 point margins; Dan also notes that there’s a better-than-average chance for Democrats to win races with 4-6 point margins, but I think that that might be something else entirely different. The major thing here, however, is that I think that a lot of people get themselves overly concerned over margin of fraud: they remember the shenanigans that go on with the sub-1 point races, and wrongly assume that it also happens all the time when it’s a 4-point race. Which is not to say that shenanigans are not being tried; merely that, if they are, they are not nearly as hypothetically successful at 4 point margin elections as they hypothetically are at sub-1 point margin elections.
Mind you, this is something that I’ve been saying for a while, so possibly I’m prejudiced to see things that way.
Moe Lane
Also worth noting that the same shenanigans take place in Dem primaries in the rotting urban cores…
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Mew
Oh, it doesn’t surprise me at all. TBH I suspect that the fraud is, in general, a combination of tiny instances of fraud that don’t add up to all that much, percentage-wise, and a handful of people that manufacture ‘enough’ votes to win the close ones, and it’s probably infeasible for a group of 5-10 people to manufacture 100k votes before we go to all electronic voting.
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I do figure that percentage-wise the MOF is much larger in the small states though.
Ballot boxes “found” in the trunks of cars of election officials after the polls have been closed for hours can manufacture several thousand votes per.. especially in urban districts…
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Older relatives, who were in a position to know, spoke openly of “rigging the voting machines”..
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I agree that, in its’ current implementation with no “hard copy” for validation, electronic voting is going to be a problem.
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Mew
Boxes of ballots found only work in a recount. It is much better to vote early and often to avoid a recount:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LEQpHfnJz-c
Chicago rules, Freddie.
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In Illinois, in statewide races, Chicago reports a few precincts early, then waits out the GOP strongholds in suburbia before “finding” whatever votes are necessary to exceed the “margin of recount”.
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Note that the opposite happened, supposedly by accident, during one of the Walker recall elections .. one of the GOP strongholds *under*reported right up until the last hour, then claimed “spreadsheet error” and reported *much* larger numbers.
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Mew
Hugh Hewitt wrote a book on this topic: If It’s Not Close, They Can’t Cheat
Summary:
Democrats always cheat, but the amount of cheating they can get away with doesn’t vary a whole lot.
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Our baseline for Democratic voter participation includes cheating, so it’s difficult to say how large a percentage of the Democratic vote is fraudulent.
Begs the question – does the volume of cheating change with the technology used?
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Voting machines were easy to rig – pick a polling place and “a guy” fiddles a little with a single machine, and every pull of the lever for any candidate for dogcatcher picks the Dem. (or, in the primary, the “right Dem”)
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Scantron-style fill-in-the-oval is harder .. gotta stuff fake ballot boxes and then “find” ’em in trunks of cars, or send around a group with a list of known non-voters (hospitalized, on vacation, dead) to make that work.
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Colorado’s move to vote-by-mail appears to be an end-run around Voter ID laws .. and it introduces a whole new level of fraud: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/390893/james-okeefe-strikes-again-john-fund
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Mew
It does indeed.
What was the push behind Motor Voter, early voting, and voting by mail, if it was NOT fraud?
Indeed. I’d be happier with Motor Voter if you had to present your drivers’ license to vote ..
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Mew
Since 2008 dozens of Democrats have been convicted of voter fraud, one of the primary reasons is they couldn’t keep their mouths shut. Many of them literally bragged about it! At this point I assume that there is some form of voter fraud ring in every Dem Precinct in the country. On the plus side they only seem able to do a maximum of a few hundred votes each.
The best idea I’ve seen for how to do tamper-proof voting goes like this:
The electronic device you vote with not only tallies your vote, but it also spits out a piece of paper listing everyone that you voted for. You review the piece of paper, and if it’s correct, you hand the paper to an election official that puts it into a box. This box is designed with two locks: one locks the main box lid, the other locks the input slot that ballots are put into. Election officials from both parties inspect the box before voting starts to verify that it’s empty, and the main box lid is locked and sealed. After the polls close, the input slot is locked and sealed as well. The electronic device reports its votes like you would expect, but the official vote is on the pieces of paper that went into the box, which is only opened in case of a recount or failure of the electronic device to report its votes, and is only opened in the presence of representatives of each candidate or party.
This won’t do anything to stop someone going to the voting booth and voting in someone else’s name, but that’s a different part of the voting process not covered here.
“This won’t do anything to stop someone going to the voting booth and voting in someone else’s name”
Democrats assure me this is so rare it can be ignored.