How could votes be rigged in 1st world countries today?

[Kalis]

The fraud seems to be mostly concentrated in postal votes, so just have a requirement that any postal ballot needs a photocopy of some ID with it.

Alternatively, as a lot of the problems seem to come from shitholes like Tower Hamlets, Slough and the Midlands, perhaps we could just bomb those regions.

[Berndorf]

There are near endless cases of voting fraud in us history. More relevantly and recently, during the democratic primaries in something like 30 states the results of the voting were more than 8-10% in Hillary's favor than exit polling showed which is a sign that many use to determine possible vote tampering(3% is enough to warrant an investigation in some cities/states). Given that Clinton also had the backing of the dnc chairwoman as her campaign manager this isn't really hard to believe. It is still going on and its quite possible that Hillary or the dnc stole the dem nomination from Bernie Sanders via voting fraud.

[Noxx79]

Updating my thread to reflect recent news.
The US looks like it has bigger vote fraud problems than the UK. This is an issue which crosses the parties from Al gores loss back in the 2000s to the questionable activities we have at the moment. This brings with it discontent in the voters who think candidates may have won unfairly.

Is there any reason not to go back to paper ballots with party members overseeing the counts?

Yes,

The cluster that happened in Florida in the 2000 election.

[JohnBrown1917]

Ask Hillary. She got it down cold

Good ol' conspiracy theories.

[Vizardlorde]

Resurrecting the dead isnt very effective, changing party affiliation of voters is only effective for primaries but not actual elections. That leaves "losing" or omitting ballots, altering ballots, or tampering with the ballot counting machines. Preventing people from voting is the most effective tactic to rig an election and its not considered fraud, but a valid strategy >.>

[Jotaux]

The electronic voting machines would make me nervous.

[the game]

If you'd watch the movie Black Sheep you would see that dead people are still capable of voting.

[anyaka21]

This is the part that scares me.

[Docturphil]

21st century. Simple system: online voting, with entering all the relevant information. After you've voted, you gain a unique electronic certificate; you can see your vote on the official election website. If you see that someone stole your identity and voted for you, you go to the police, show them your certificate along with ID, and they change your vote to the right one, while initiating an investigation. This system is almost impenetrable for a fraud, as everyone can track their vote in real time and quickly notice if something is funky.

Problem with that is a lot of voter fraud is often done with the identities of the deceased. I don't think they'll be checking the website for their name.

- - - Updated - - -

You might be able to vote 10 times depending on how far away precincts are and how much time you have. No state has ever been close enough to swing the election either way with less than like 5k votes. "Tipping point states" aren't usually close anyway.

Although if you know what state you need to go for, it's not that unfeasible. Say you have a large budget to pull from. Perhaps something like the budget for a presidential campaign. In addition to that, maybe the person running is quite rich themselves. Pay a bunch of people to commit fraud. Pay them say $100 each. You would of course have to pay some other people to find these people so they can't be linked back to the person running. Say you payed this person $5,000. Let's also assume you get 5,000 people to do this. That would cost a total of $505,000.

Now, if 5,000 people vote 10 times. That's 50,000 votes. You could probably even double that for a cost of $1,005,000 to 100,000 votes. That many votes in a state like Ohio, where their vote has been for the winning presidential candidate since 1960something (unverified, just what I heard), I mean that really could have a huge impact.

Now of course I'm pulling those numbers out of my ass, but it seems to me like it could be done and it could change the outcome of an election.

[Zandalarian Paladin]

It has happened before and will keep on happening.

Unless everything is a 100% transparent, fraud and corruption will always be there, whomever is at the head of state, no matter the country.

[Rotted]

I could be wrong here,

but I was under the impression if there was more than a single pencil mark / looks like its been rubbed out / indent in any spot with the exception of the one vote area, then its void to prevent this?

Either way, I guess its easy enough to bribe someone to miscount, although Id imagine there are other safeguards in place,

[Ahovv]

Electronic voting can be rigged. There are more than a couple posts on thedailywtf.com documenting some of the actual, real-world shortcomings of electronic ballots resulting from software engineering malpractice/incompetance. You'd think that a voting machine should be simple: you select an option and the number of that votes for that option increases by 1, like strawpoll. Insight provided by engineers who have worked on these systems agree that's how it should work, but that things are often made to work in other ways which could actually cause an individual's vote to be misappropriated. In other words, electronic voting applications are buggy.

But even assuming that electronic votes were secure (a big, super-generous assumption), there are potential problems when it comes to aggregating the data. For example, what if Russia launches another major cyber attack against US-based internet providers and cripples the ballot system and causes whole districts votes to not aggregate into the final calculation, how would we proceed? Ideally, voting stations could serialize their saved data onto physical medium and transport them to a centralized location for network-free aggregation, but that's making unfair assumptions about how well these systems are programmed to handle such a case.

Yet another problem with voting in America specifically is that there is no universally agreed upon system or interface for collecting votes. Different states do things in different ways. For example, in 2000, I voted in California. My voting was done by electronic machine. This machine had a rotary dial which you turned to make your selections, and a button to confirm each selection. In the same year for the same general election, Florida performed its voting by punching holes in physical pieces of paper. These two systems were very different. In Florida, their physical ballot system became a nation-wide controversy as it was contested whether some votes were legitimate. It was argued that sometimes the holes punched in individual ballots may have left parts of the chad behind and resulted in miscounted votes. This margin of error may have improperly given Bush the victory of the Presidential Election. Had Floridians had alternative, more modern or simpler ways to vote in those districts, the incidents following 9/11 may have been handled by a completely different President.

Finally, paper ballots are flawed, and for completely different reasons. As stated above, paper ballots can be flawed in their design, resulting in difficulty of use and/or misappropriation of individual votes. This is a difficult problem to solve; people with disabilities still need to be able to vote, but how do you accomplish that with paper or punch-out ballots? It might not be so simple. Also, there is the physical nature of these ballots. An accident--an electrical fire, for example--might toast an entire district's votes, literally. This is very bad; it means that either those individuals had been disenfranchised by an Act Of God, or that the entire state or possibly the entire nation needs to wait possibly weeks for the district to be allowed to re-vote. Neither scenario is ideal. In fact, both are a massive pain in the ass.

The fact of the matter is, even in first-world countries, voting is hardly a foolproof thing. There are still points of failure. There shouldn't be such points of failure, but there are. We live in an age where we should have fixed these things, but... we just haven't, sadly.

As a precinct judge in Texas, I can tell you it would be impossible for Russia to manipulate the outcome in the way you are describing. Paper ballots are secured in a strongbox and transported directly to the courthouse, where a dedicated team handles and records the data through multiple mediums. Electronic votes are not only counted at the courthouse, but also printed and signed by the judges and clerks at the precinct after polls close. Everyone at the precinct knows exactly how many votes were cast for each candidate (with backup proof if needed), so even if Russia managed to wipe our electronic data, it's already been printed ahead of time.

Granted, this is just how we do things in Texas. I don't know if other states have fewer layers of failsafes and security.

But again, keeping in mind the vast number of precincts per county, and the number of people who would have the information ahead of time, it is impossible in practice to manipulate the election.

[May90]

Problem with that is a lot of voter fraud is often done with the identities of the deceased. I don't think they'll be checking the website for their name.

It is not hard to implement filters taking care of that. SSN check, all kinds of database checks... When a person dies, the government makes a record of it, and that person's identity cannot be used for voting any more.

It is very hard to organize a fraud in an electronic system with hard control from both common people and the government, while it is much easier to do so with the current system, when the ballots go who-knows-through-who-and-what before the vote is counted.

[anyaka21]

As a precinct judge in Texas, I can tell you it would be impossible for Russia to manipulate the outcome in the way you are describing. Paper ballots are secured in a strongbox and transported directly to the courthouse, where a dedicated team handles and records the data through multiple mediums. Electronic votes are not only counted at the courthouse, but also printed and signed by the judges and clerks at the precinct after polls close. Everyone at the precinct knows exactly how many votes were cast for each candidate (with backup proof if needed), so even if Russia managed to wipe our electronic data, it's already been printed ahead of time.

Granted, this is just how we do things in Texas. I don't know if other states have fewer layers of failsafes and security.

But again, keeping in mind the vast number of precincts per county, and the number of people who would have the information ahead of time, it is impossible in practice to manipulate the election.

The only issue here is that with electronic voting machines, they can be tampered with, see my above video, and as thus completely manipulative.

[TITAN308]

I think people don't understand rigging in the proper sense.

I don't think rigging has to just cover physical items (like voting machines, losing paper ballots, voter fraud, etc etc)

Controlling the main stream media is one form of rigging, in my personal opinion. The mass population seem to stupid to think for themselves and are sure as hell to lazy to put in the foot work to verify if something is legit. Keep in mind, this is just one example.

[May90]

I think people don't understand rigging in the proper sense.

I don't think rigging has to just cover physical items (like voting machines, losing paper ballots, voter fraud, etc etc)

Controlling the main stream media is one form of rigging, in my personal opinion. The mass population seem to stupid to think for themselves and are sure as hell to lazy to put in the foot work to verify if something is legit. Keep in mind, this is just one example.

Everyone talks about "the mass population" as some kind of foolish mass of stupid people, implying they aren't a part of it, of course. I find it quite sickening. I've gotten a much better education than the vast majority of people, for example, and the thought that I was somehow better than an average person never crossed my mind.

[TrumpIsPresident]

Controlling the main stream media is one form of rigging, in my personal opinion.

There's hardly a tv show, movie, late night comedian, talk show host, or celebrity that isn't a Democrat voters or run by Democrat voters.

They hold such a huge influence simply because so many people take what they see on TV to be irreproachable truth especially when its delivered in a manner that lets people feel hip or cool by agreeing with it.

Cult of personality.

[TITAN308]

Everyone talks about "the mass population" as some kind of foolish mass of stupid people, implying they aren't a part of it, of course. I find it quite sickening. I've gotten a much better education than the vast majority of people, for example, and the thought that I was somehow better than an average person never crossed my mind.

I understand your point. With that said, I still stand by my statement. There are probably hundreds of thousands of really bright people out there. However, in a population of close to 325 million people, that may not amount to much.

Even if 100 million people were bright well thought out citizens, well, you get the point.

I blame warning labels as requirements on things like bottles of bleach.

[May90]

I understand your point. With that said, I still stand by my statement. There are probably hundreds of thousands of really bright people out there. However, in a population of close to 325 million people, that may not amount to much.

Even if 100 million people were bright well thought out citizens, well, you get the point.

I blame warning labels as requirements on things like bottles of bleach.

The vast majority of people might not be very well informed to be able to make a quality decision, but almost all people have some ideas, beliefs, views, dreams that make them able to make a well thought-out choice. I don't think saying that media is controlling people's minds is fair. This isn't North Korea, after all, where actually any alternative opinion is suppressed by the government with the use of force.

[Theinquisition]

Ask George Soros, he seems to have a pretty good track history of it.