How to Rig an Election

This sort of thing is why I was drinking beer and taking aspirin on election night. In the story below, you've got to think hard about what's really going on here...

1. On the day of the election, there was a SHORTAGE of official ballots.
2. People went to polls and couldn't vote.
3. The call went out for emergency PHOTOCOPIES of ballots so people could vote.
4. The Democrats requested that voting hours be EXTENDED for more voting.
5. Many people voted with the photocopied ballots, and no name on the ballot.
6. The Democratic candidate is down 8000 votes.
7. "Bags" of ballots get suddenly found.
8. Democrats call to have people deputized to count the ballots.
9. Guaranteed, it will be found that many (all?) of those ballots were photocopied.

You see how they gamed it? They made sure there was a shortage of ballots before the election, and everything else fell into place for manufacturing ballots after the election. If you think I'm being paranoid and conspiratorial, you are living in a fantasy world. The low-level hacks who work for the political parties spend considerable time scheming to concoct methods of vote fraud that appear innocent or are unprovable.

Similar things are done in other states. They did a variation on this in Minnesota to give Al Franken the election there two years ago--whenever the votes were shy, they just manufactured and "found" a few more ballots. Just enough to put Franken over the top.

Of course, what Harry Reid did in Nevada was way over the top. He manufactured an unbelievable number of votes out of thin air. I'm guessing on the order of 100,000. He reversed his polls by 9 points in one day. In my opinion, he did it so egregiously to make a point -- don't mess with him, he's got to the power to do whatever he wants. (This told me he is much more, incredibly more corrupt and dishonest than I suspected. Downright evil, I'd have to classify him. The kind of guy who would be a lawyer to Al Capone.)

When I voted, by the way, there was a guy who was trying to vote twice at the (almost deserted) polling place -- he claimed he'd gotten a mail-in ballot he hadn't sent in. To their credit, the people at the polling place handled him pretty well. There was also a woman who was trying to vote in two counties. This is another shortcoming of not requiring ID and not requiring every voter to have ONE physical address. In past elections, by the way, I've also found, when I got to the polling place, that my registration had magically disappeared, so I couldn't vote.

If the Republican's had any brains at all, they'd recognize that in any race to stuff the ballot box, they are on the losing end. At the top of their agenda should be election reform -- to nationally mandate identification for voting with some kind of uniform system. Had this been done, they wouldn't have lost more than a few seats in this election, including the Senate seat in Colorado.

(Why don't they do it? For sure, they are guilty, too, and my theory is they are afraid of how the chips may fall against them by making the system more honest -- net gain or loss? But I think they are already losing big. They've got nothing to lose.)

One idea I've had is to make ballot receipts mandatory, so a recount can match a ballot with what a voter actually voted -- and require the matching be done in a recount. It could be online. A second idea is to give every voter *two* ballots (say, carbon copy) and have him send them to two separate locations for counting (by mail or other). Both have to match for a vote to count, and if only one gets counted, the election office has to contact the voter to get it straightened out. So what if it takes a week or a month to count ballots, as long as it's done right? By this system, you could do a lot more mail-in ballots and early voting, and let voters check their ballots online.

One thing that should definitely be disposed of, though, is all those electronic voting machines. They're designed like a crooked slot machine. The only way electronic voting should be allowed is with some kind of verification system right back to the voter. You've simply got to have a way for a voter to verify that the vote he cast is the one that was counted.

But in any system, you've got to get the human element out of the counting as much as possible. (I can think of much better systems, by the way, using mathematical methods of error correction and cryptography, but too hard to push through.)

More could be done, but it doesn't require a lot of effort to eliminate 90% of the fraud. The disenfranchisement by fraud that goes on this country right now is becoming staggering, and we're descending to the level of a banana republic.

http://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/elections/2010/races/race-2/Bag-of-Uncounted-Ballots-Found-in-Bridgeport-106727208.html


Bag of Uncounted Ballots Found in Bridgeport

BY Bob Connors
In what has become one of the stranger twists in an already bizarre Governor's race, a bag of uncounted ballots was found in Bridgeport Thursday night.
Republican officials were approached by Democratic operatives and told about the surprise ballot bag, according to Bridgeport GOP Chairman Marc Delmonico.

“It adds to the inconsistencies from the Democratic Party in Bridgeport. It just keeps adding to it,” said Delmonico. “There’s nothing odd about it; there’s certainly nothing missing about it,” said Ed Maley, a representative for the Democratic Party.

Delmonico said Democrats asked to have several people deputized to count the uncounted ballots, but Republicans objected, claiming that wasn't proper procedure in the vote-counting process.

“These ballots are getting extraordinarily heightened scrutiny. They’re being dealt with in a public fashion, an open public process so that everyone can witness it,” said Mark Anastasi, the city attorney for Bridgeport.

Instead the GOP asked police to take custody of the bag of ballots until the matter could be sorted out.

The votes could be pivotal in the race for Governor, in which neither candidate has conceded defeat.

Wednesday, Secretary of the State Susan Bysiewicz declared Democrat Dan Malloy the "unofficial" winner, but numbers released by her office show Republican Tom Foley still leading Malloy by more than 8,000 votes. Those totals do not include any of the vote totals from the City of Bridgeport.

Bridgeport has become the focal point of what has turned into a circus of an election.

A ballot shortage led to long lines on Election Day, and a judge issuing an order to keep polls open until 10 p.m. Tuesday, two hours longer than every other town in the state.

Because of the shortage, many of the votes cast Tuesday were done so on photocopied ballots.

Election officials began counting those ballots just after 5 p.m. Thursday when the new bag of uncounted ballots was discovered.

Bysiewicz said she didn't expect the vote totals from Bridgeport to be submitted to her until Friday at the earliest.