The SCOTUS’s involvement in the 2000 race was minimal. All they said was the rules in place at the time of the election had to be followed. Al “the cheater” Gore couldn’t cherry pick districts to recount or claim unchecked ballots were actually intended for him. If Gore were an honorable person, he wouldn’t have kept the charade going for week after week trying to steal it. Actually, if he had resigned like he should have when Clinton was impeached, he’d have won in a cake walk.

Seems there are two ways to cheat: voter fraud and counting fraud. I have to show a photo ID where I vote and be on the rolls a certain number of weeks before the election. Seems like this makes it harder to cheat, not impossible, but harder. If you wanted to cheat where I lived, you’d have to submit voter applications with an address and zip code in this district a month or so before the election. Then when you show up to vote that day, you have to have a photo ID showing that same address. Seems like that minimizes cheating on a large scale. Certainly it could be done, but the districts are small enough and the volunteers are typically from the neighborhood, so they’d probably spot something  irregular like 5000 first time voters showing up.

But there is always going to be frauds and cheats anywhere money and power is involved; more so with power than money perhaps. Technology may or may not help, not sure. JFK cheated his way into the presidency so I suppose it could happen again.

If every person’s  voting records were recorded would that change anything? Let’s say you got a printout of how you voted and in a close election where the Dems cheated (because they always cheat…!) what would happen then? If the machine vote said 50,000 votes for candidate A and 49,900 for candidate B, but you think candidate B was cheated, what would be the mechanism for proving this?  Would you ask everyone to bring in their printouts? That’s not going to happen.

So  is JOG’s  comment the right one:  Its not the people who vote that counts, its who counts the votes that counts.

before it was yanked and burned that hundreds of voters mostly black were stopped and not allowed to vote.

Ohio in 04 thousands of absentee ballots were not counted....Facts Both.  

neither one of those things is true.

WebsterMark wrote on 07/29/12 at 04:56:15:

What level of information is made public?  My contention is that a full disclosure of the vote record would make it very easy to bust fraud. Anyone would be able to download the list of names voting for X candidate, load it into MS Access and total up the votes for himself.  Other kinds of fraud, such as fake names, dead people's votes (and even ID fraud that occured at the poll) could also be easily checked by the people in the area the votes hail from.  

That's the mechanism for proving/disproving fraud.  And yes, technology makes it easier to catch.  But unfortunately, people are more tolerant of vote fraud than having their contact info and vote published like that.

justin_o_guy2 wrote on 07/29/12 at 08:43:23:

Not really.  There'd always be enough people who opted for secrecy, who's votes could be flipped.  It would only take about 10-15% secret votes to change the result of just about any election. So you're stuck with either full disclosure from everyone, or the potential for vote fraud and a neverending source of conspiracy theories.

Boule’tard wrote on 07/29/12 at 09:08:54:



You so easily project your opinion on the behavior of others., Walking out & being counted doesnt dissolve the anonymity. No one says ya have to give your name, & I also doubt seriously many care about the privacy of their vote. I dont know anyone who wont say who they voted for, Its POssible for it to be needed but the great majority dont need their vote secret,IDK of anyone who would mistreat someone for how they voted, do you>? Anyone here ever meet anyone who [praised the fact that the vote is secret because if it was public theyd be likely to suffer for their vote? No? Me neither..That said, I still support the secret ballot,

justin_o_guy2 wrote on 07/29/12 at 10:35:34:

Well you just said you'd not volunteer your information because your boss might not like it and there'd be consequences at work.  Whether or not that is hypothetical,  yeah I think it's safe to say at least 10% of the voters would also guard their info, spoiling the idea of the open ballot.

the point here seems to be that votes are rigged on an individual to individual basis but rather through larger schemes, so there's no real evidence of any significant individual voter fraud, yet the repubs continue to insist on punishing individuals, I'm not against requiring voter id, I am against making anyone pay for it IN ANY WAY (cause that's a poll tax and that's been against the law for a LONG LONG TIME now)  they should just supply voter id machines at the voting places and when you go to vote you can get your id that day, yes this would make it a long day that first time but then they'd have the photo id to vote.

see republicans don't mind individual mandates, as long as it's for id . . .