Citizens exercising their right to vote is not “fraud.” Counting their votes isn’t “fraud,” either.
Preventing eligible voters from voting is fraud. Not counting their votes is fraud. Stopping vote counting before all the votes are counted is fraud. Overruling the voting results in legislatures or courts is fraud. We could see a great deal of fraud, or attempted fraud, in this election — but it won’t happen at the ballot box or in election offices.
Kayleigh Rogers, a reporter for Five Thirty Eight, correctly points out that America’s election system is a “Rube Goldberg machine” prone to “glitches that can slow things down,” such as crashing voter registration portals, malfunctioning voting machines, and mechanical failures in vote counting machines. Rogers wrote,
“I guarantee that something will happen on Election Day,” said David Becker, the executive director and founder of the Center for Election Innovation & Research. “Election Day is the culmination of a process in which 150 million Americans are doing the same thing in a process run by about 1 million volunteers. There are going to be problems and mistakes.”
It doesn’t take tampering for it to happen. Accidents, human errors, and mechanical breakdowns virtually ensure there will be glitches in the voting process and tallying of votes. (See article here.) And you can count on our nation’s Demagogue-in-Chief and his partisan enablers and followers to conflate these into allegations of “fraud” and “stolen election” if they lose.
But these mistakes and glitches aren’t fraud, either.
There’s no such thing as a perfect election. Roughly a million election workers and volunteers will be performing the routine tasks required to operate polling places, collect ballots, and count them. It’s unrealistic to expect that nothing will go wrong, and nonsensical to argue that the usual things going wrong somehow invalidates the election results.
“I do think because we’re in this environment, ordinary problems that of course we’re going to see in every election get blown out of proportion,” said Lawrence Norden, director of the election reform program at New York University’s Brennan Center for Justice. “They’re easy to use for disinformation, [to suggest] that there’s some bigger problem with the system or that the system has been hacked. But these problems are just going to happen when you’ve got 10,000 separate election jurisdictions, all with different technology,”
Rogers wrote. Keep that in mind when the Republican b.s. starts to fly. Read her article here.
Photo: Election workers in Everett, Washington, in 2016; from an Everett Herald story describing Washington’s election process titled, “Ballot counting: Lots of security, many eyes and no internet” (read it here).
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It would be good if these folks would first off recognize it is 50 separate elections. That there are differences between the states. That in spite of all the technology available, the most accurate and fair maybe the old fashion manual count with officials from parties at the offices counting takes place. That it comes down to individual integrity and a healthy dose of self interest in creating a magic hand that minimizes fraud.
Your comment fails to address the topic of shady characters exploiting mistakes and glitches to delegitimize election results.
It is a democracy these shady characters some of whom are members of the fourth estate are supposed to make such comments. We do still have freedom of speech or have the party right thinking people taken over?
We actually have 50 elections. Some maybe close, and we do have other elections than the one for President. It is in these close elections that glitches have to be looked t. Skepticism is fine, but if new ballots just keep turning yp, or officials seem shady could be the election officials who count are dirty. If they succeed then they are guilty of something, but not fraud.
The best system maybe the voting box (we do have recorded incidents of ballot stuffing by officials in elections) and hand counting with party officials in observance ready to duke it out. It can be messy but s likely the most accurate way to count votes. Pricey and time consuming, both of which many politicians abhor (and those trying to steal an election find extremely difficult to get around).
The problem is for elections to be stolen it has to be an inside job. A voter voting marking their spouses ballot up identical or voting in two states is voter fraud, but is not going to swing an election. A close election can be swung in a state in a county or a couple counties by manipulation of votes at ballot counting machines, which can be programmed to give false results. Which machine in which county impossible to know, but you can betcha a dirty county official knows or gave access to the machine weeks or months before the election. No paper ballots makes it easier to perpetuate the theft.
It won’t be Russians, Chinese or Iranians who steal our election, but Americans the experts in stealing elections around the world, and if that doesn’t work there is overthrowing governments.
So now your shtick is making false allegations about our election processes?