Let's All Commit Some Election Fraud

[billroper]

shsilver reports here that an electronic voting machine reported a massively wrong total in an Ohio precinct in favor of Bush. I'm tempted to believe that this was a machine error rather than an attempt to cheat since the error was so large, but it never looks good.

Meanwhile, in Michigan, entertaining things were occurring with absentee ballots in Detroit. Here's the news report which emphasizes that the Republican vote challengers did something that they shouldn't have done and this is a report from a Republican who was actually there who claims that the Democrats were doing things that were much worse.

Do you think there's any chance of getting the sensible people together on both sides and producing a system that makes it a bit more difficult to cheat?

(Right now, the Votematic machines look pretty good to me.)

Comments

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

You mean you in Michigan don't have to have an equal number of judges who are from the two main parties in each polling location?

K.

[tnatj.livejournal.com]

Nope.

Election inspectors/poll workers are appointed by the local city commission in my area, here in southwestern Michigan. Theoretically, it is on a "non-partisan" basis (one of the reforms back in the early 1900s was the institution of the progressive non-partisan Commission/Manager form of city government in many of the smaller cities in Michigan). In fact, it is because these individuals have been doing it for time out of mind. They are generally elderly ladies, who are our "guardians of democracy." They tend to be extremely conservative.

Curiously, I've never seen a poll-watcher (Republican or Democrat) at our general elections. Angela, our local city clerk, oversees the voting process in Otsego, Michigan. If necessary, she can shoo away any and all non-voters, at her discretion. Overall, general election tallies are overseen and compiled by the State, through County Boards of Canvassers (generally Republican-dominated in western Michigan) and the Secretary of State's office (a Republican in Michigan).

This does not mean that things don't go wrong; we just don't (want to) know about it around here.

[minnehaha.livejournal.com]

You might consider working towards fair and honest elections where you live. I would.

K.

[jennlk]

The tricky part is finding people willing to be election judges. In small communities, it's hard enough to find people willing to be election judges without trying to make sure that you have an even number of Rep/Dem (leaving out the fact that most of the people in the immediate area are as likely to say no affiliation/independent as anything else).

This is the first election since we moved to Washtenaw County that there hasn't been a great cry from the County Clerk's office that "we need election judges!". (this includes the summer primaries of this year, and all the school and special elections, even the 2000 November election.)

In my personal experience, despite the fact that most of the election judges at the precinct are likely to vote Rep (at least based on conversations I've had with them outside of the polling place), the precinct as a whole has gone Dem (slightly) for the last bunch of partisan elections. It's more conservative than Wash County as a whole, but there's still a lot of farms out here. Our county clerk is Rep, but the county has gone Dem for the same period.