@El_Tino Said 
What's with all this nonsense about people going to vote in person under someone else's name? Has this even happened anywhere?
The real potential for abuse is via absentee ballots.
"While fraud in voting by mail is far less common than innocent errors, it is vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention, election administrators say."
"In Florida, absentee-ballot scandals seem to arrive like clockwork around election time. Before this year’s primary, for example, a woman in Hialeah was charged with forging an elderly voter’s signature, a felony, and possessing 31 completed absentee ballots, 29 more than allowed under a local law."
"“Absentee voting is to voting in person,” Judge Richard A. Posner of the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit has written, “as a take-home exam is to a proctored one.”"
"oters in nursing homes can be subjected to subtle pressure, outright intimidation or fraud. The secrecy of their voting is easily compromised. And their ballots can be intercepted both coming and going.
The problem is not limited to the elderly, of course. Absentee ballots also make it much easier to buy and sell votes. In recent years, courts have invalidated mayoral elections in Illinois and Indiana because of fraudulent absentee ballots."
"“There has been not one case of fraud in early voting,” Mr. Sancho said. “The only cases of election fraud have been in absentee ballots.”"
"Election law experts say that pulling off in-person voter fraud on a scale large enough to swing an election, with scores if not hundreds of people committing a felony in public by pretending to be someone else, is hard to imagine, to say nothing of exceptionally risky.
There are much simpler and more effective alternatives to commit fraud on such a scale, said Heather Gerken, a law professor at Yale.
“You could steal some absentee ballots or stuff a ballot box or bribe an election administrator or fiddle with an electronic voting machine,” she said. That explains, she said, “why all the evidence of stolen elections involves absentee ballots and the like.”"
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/07/us/politics/as-more-vote-by-mail-faulty-ballots-could-impact-elections.html
every article I ever read about voter fraud has said the same thing when it cited reliable data. Voter fraud's effect is negligible and it is a tool used to cover intimidation tactics which are vastly more palpable.
What else is an extreme minority to do when it is losing its grip on its seat of power if not revert to threatening behavior under the guise of an honorable task?
Oct 08, 2012 @ 06:32:35
