How difficult would it be for me to vote illegally?

General Questions
#1

I’m not planning to of course as I’m in a solid blue state but I was wondering just how difficult it would be to subvert the democratic process of one man, one vote under the following scenarios:

I am a legal US citizen but I want to vote more than once
I am a convicted felon but I would like to vote
I am an non-citizen who would like to vote

Under the following conditions:

I have planned this out many months in advance
I decide the night before.

I personally have never voted in the US as I am a non-citizen but I recall in Australia involved presenting one form of ID so your name can be ticked off the registration rolls and then you go into a booth and fill in your ballot.

It always struck me that the ballots seemed incredibly easy to forge so one could walk into the booth with a few pre-printed ballots in their pocket and, in effect, vote multiple times. I suppose this would be detectable by comparing the number of ballots entered vs the number of people who were checked off the roll but at that point, it becomes impossible to know which ballots were the invalid ones.

What about in places where you can vote at multiple locations? How do they ensure that you don’t just vote twice? What if you managed to get a fake ID?

Elections seems like an interesting security problem because you’re balancing the integrity of the elections against convenience and resource constraints. Just how easy would it be to fake a vote?

#2

I don’t have any experience in faking votes, but I imagine it could be pretty easy. I remember hearing all sorts of stories about people registering their pets or herds of livestock as voters. I don’t know if any of it is true, but worth a laugh at least.

#3

Easiest way I could imagine: Check out the obits the weekend before the election. Assuming you have access to a means to produce a fake driver’s license you could take advantage of the recent graveyard vote. With the ID for a valid registration, all you have to do, then, is just sign a mark on the voter register, and you’ve got your ballot/time in the booth.

#4

Is that the only reason? Illegality doesn’t come into it?

#5

Mnay places do not require picture ID to vote, so obits would work fine. Registering in multiple states is easy, some states may catch you registering more than once in the same state. I bet the list of felons is out of date and incomplete so that may not be a problem either.

#6

(I’m In Australia & an Australian) When I voted , I didn’t even need to show ID, they just asked my name, i said it and they marked it off, same for everyone i was with, wouldn’t be that hard to pretend to be someone else, or go in early, steal ballot, then return with 50 or 100 and slip them in. Even if they realized (there were to many votes), how do they know which votes are legit and which were fake?

#7

I work in hotels and I was shocked at the number of non-citizens who told me they registered to vote. No one checked. It’s easy.

I am still registered in two states. And I travel, with early voting, it would’ve been easy for me to schedule a trip and early vote in IL and vote in the other state. But I figure they are both going for Obama anyway so what difference will my vote make.

I do think early voting only encourages this.

Before you’d have to fly date of the election. Now you can schedule your trip to vote.

#8

Something tells me this thread will soon be locked.

#9

I am concerned about this. With absentee voting, early voting, and paperless voting it is coming when the vote will be fixed. When I first voted absentee I had to have a reason why I was not going to be able to go to the voting location. I am now a perminate absentee voter, after not being able to vote one year because of computer problems.

The mass collection of voter registrations just before an election is dangerous.

Inorder to vote more than once you would need to be registared more than once.

#10

Nuh uh. In Australia, you can just rock up to the polling place without ID. You tell them your name, and they cross you off the roll (this is important as voting is compulsory here). They will ask you the stock question, “Have you voted already today?” Of course, if electoral fraud is your motive, you’ll just say “No”.
Later, your multiple attendance will be found, but it could be that another person has used your name vexatiously, so you probably won’t be in any bother. However, if the tally in your electorate was down to a margin of one individual vote, things would get interesting…

#11

If you live in Ohio, they allow registration and voting within minutes this year. You do not need identification to register, but you need it to vote. I imagine the checks are not great here, and if you had some illegal fake IDs with varying addresses, and went later in the day to several different polling places, associated with your fake addresses, it would not be hard at all, either as a citizen or a non-citizen, convicted felon or not. Seeing as poll workers I have seen over the years don’t tend to be the sharpest knives in the drawer, I doubt the checks are good enough and fast enough to catch it before the numbers are due to meet media demands.

#12

Sounds like a lot of trouble for nothing. The “one man, one vote” thing was subverted a couple hundred years ago. :frowning:
Peace,
mangeorge

#13

In most states when you have served your time and probation is done, a felon can vote.

#14

I’m not aware of anything that would prevent you from registering and voting multiple times. You could use the addresses of friends or relatives who already live in the places that you wish to vote in. Around here, you could easily vote in Maryland, DC, and Virginia. West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Delaware, and New Jersey are within easy driving distance.

#15

I thought about this during the 2006 elections and decided it would be pretty easy to commit voter fraud on a small scale: My little brother moved a couple of towns away just prior to then, but hadn’t register in his new town yet because he didn’t think he was informed enough to vote in that election, which meant he was still on the voter rolls in my town. If someone he knew knew this, they could have claimed to have been him, because there are no ID checks in this state - you just tell them your name.

#16

Where are you going to get the ballots? They’re secured from the time they’re printed until voting’s over. Each voter gets only one. If they mess that one up, they have to turn it in to an election official before they get another.

So you might decide to “fake vote”, keep the ballot and make copies, come back and vote a bunch of times. That won’t work either, because any piece of paper that goes into the machine that isn’t a real ballot is shunted into a separate bin. They’ll be discovered when the poll workers count ballots, and those votes will be invalidated.