Could it happen here?

Last updated on: October 30, 2014 at 1:11 pm by Jane the Actuary

Could it happen here? 2014-10-30T13:11:00-06:00 Jane the Actuary

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There have been a lot of revalations lately:

An article at PJMedia and elsewhere that a cross-check of voter records and jury duty questionnaires in Maryland revealed that enough noncitizens voted (that is, individuals who claimed ineligibility to serve on a jury due to being a noncitizen, yet voted nonetheless) that, depending on the particulars in a given race, this could shift elections.

In North Carolina, Jame O’Keefe got campaign officials to openly state, via hidden camera, that there’s nothing wrong with noncitizen voting. National Review author John Fund also describes known instances elsewhere. Similar hidden-camera games got campaign staffers promoting double-voting for university students: once on campus and once at home.

And in Colorado, multiple pundits have written on the potential fraud that it’s mail-in balloting program invites, with “harvesters” able to collect ballots and selectively choose which ones to put in the mail, or the possibility of dumpster diving to collect unfilled ballots to fill out. (Though PBS says that the procedures in place to verify that signatures match the original voter registration, so no worries!)

Our elections fundamentally rely on an honor system. We rely on our elected officials to get this right, and to prosecute fraud — but if those same officials benefited from the fraud, how much can we trust that they’ll do their job? And what’s more, once an election has occurred, and the ballots have all been co-mingled, we have no means of removing those fraudulent ballots, no means of rectifying the situation. We are dependent on election results being decisive beyond the so-called “margin of fraud.”

We know that, back in the days of Machine politics, and Tammany Hall, ballot-stuffing occurred unchecked, but officials now insist that our system is now beyond reproach. And maybe it’s “good enough.” Maybe it’s just that the endless barrage of negative ads, of accusations that are clearly lies, means that it’s far more believable that people would engage in fraud, with the same “end justifies the means” mentality that produces these ads, and similarly produces the campaign promises that everyone knows are false (like the magically-timed “evolution” of Obama on gay marriage, or the “keep your plan” claims).

But isn’t it a bit scary that we don’t really have a fix for the fraud that does occur?

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