Redstate

We had a case where a very small town with less than 100 eligible voters had well over 100% turnout because a strip club owner had his strippers and his customers voting absentee, listing the club as their address. His goal was to install his friends as the city government. He got investigated for a while, but in the end he ended up with nothing but a slap on the wrist. As far as I know, nothing at all happened to all those people that were willing participants in the fraud, registering to vote and actually voting illegally.
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

(Caveat: I'm just an ordinary user here, with no right to speak for the site gods)

People (including me) do that all of the time. The issue is relevance versus originality. It would start to get old fast if you quote the same paragraph from your blog every time some particular issue comes up.

A good practice in a comment would be to quote a relevant paragraph from your own blog as part of a multi-paragraph comment. Alternatively, you can make a blog post here in response to some front-page story, quote both and stir.

As long as you're adding to the conversation and not just trolling or astroturfing, everybody's happy.

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Gone 2500 years, still not PC.

and create his own thread inclusive of all comments, pro and con, and 2 or 3 threadjacks thrown in.

Envisioning when all that is Left is the Right.

Ah yes, the verifiable paper trail... Yes, that would help, but it would unfortunately only be a minor start. There is way too much corruption in the voting system to allow any particular verification system to work (at all). When corrupt politicians control the voting booths, do you really expect any difference in the results. We have been at the mercy of these corrupt people for way too long...

Yeah, I know, it sounds like a conspiracy theorist at work, but the facts tend to justify my statements.. I have given up on REAL voter results.

Formally known as Deagle... "Golf is a way of life..."

Corruption is only known when it is "known" (ie. commonplace)... I believe that the voter corruption is so vast that it will only become the "known" problem when it is found to be so evasive that it can't be ignored by the MSM. So...it will remain a minor problem...

Formally known as Deagle... "Golf is a way of life..."

Actually, a paper trail per se is of no use whatsoever. What is required is that at the instant a ballot is cast there be two copies generated, one electronic and one paper (or other tangible medium). Voter looks at paper, drops it in the box. That's the official ballot. Electronic ballot gets transmitted (in random batches, and not over the public Internet). Paper ballots get sent separately.

The reason this works is the principle of least common mechanism. It's really pretty hard to defraud the voting process itself, but it becomes immeasurably harder when you have to corrupt both the electronic version and the paper one, when the two are never in the same place after the voter looks at the paper one.

Now, you may see a potential weakness here, which is that the voter only looks at the paper copy, not the electronic one. That's why the paper one is the official ballot. The key is that anyone tampering with the electronic count would have to also tamper with the paper count and get them to match exactly. It's not impossible, but it's hard to imagine a situation where it would pay enough to be worth the effort and be small enough not to get caught. It wouldn't work on even a State-wide scale (say for Governor or Senator), and smaller offices would just not be worth it.

Influencing voter registration, either by suppressing eligible voter registration or allowing ineligible registrations, is a different matter. That's what the Democrats are doing, while accusing the Republicans of doing something that is really hard, even with today's cheesy voting system.

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Gone 2500 years, still not PC.

I'd add in a shredder on the front that, if they look at the paper ballot and decide they don't want it that way for any reason, that they feed their paper ballot into the shredder which shreds it in front of them, and allows a changed vote and reprint.

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(Formerly known as bee) / Internet member since 1987
Member of the Surreality-Based Community

Just give them sheets where they fill in the circles or arrows with a pencil and stick it in a machine (or a box) when they are done. I never understood the need to bring voting machines into the mix, other than to waste a whole lot of money buying machines that the poll workers won't be able to keep running. HAVA sure made a few people a lot of money, though, and that's what counts. Wonder how many congresscritters and state officials got additions put on their houses out of that deal?
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Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself. - Milton Friedman

There will never, ever be such a thing as a fully verifiable paper trail from voter to vote until we decide ballot integrity is more important than ballot secrecy.

Blaming computers is to miss the issue entirely. Votes are tamperable because they are fungible, being indistinguishable and detached from the voters who have real names and wishes.

Hooray!

isn't required when you vote? Heck, I need an ID to rent a DVD at Blockbuster but voting just requires one to grunt, point to a name in a book, and scribble something that looks like a signature.
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"Enlightened statesmen will not always be at the helm." -- James Madison

What matters is the count. We do it precinct by precinct, so if there are two, independent means of counting then while the ballots are fungible, the counts are not.

But the charges of fraud in counting are a complete red herring. The real issues will always be registration, since it will always be easier to fake an ID (or 1000 IDs) than to tamper with a ballot box.

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Gone 2500 years, still not PC.