Just curious really, but can a presidential election be rigged? If so how? I remember some controvercial things being said about Ohio and Florida when the current goofball got into office, but for the upcoming election now, what’s a possible scenerio for a national rigging of the election…
say for {{cough}}Clinton{{cough}} a democrat. How would the powers that are rig an election?
Why would the royal "they" want to rig it one way or the other in THIS election?
Nobody rigs national elections in this day and time. Bush won FL in 2000 legally under the rules. He won Ohio legally under the rules.
Any bitching by the losers are petty insults not deserving of national comment.
Hell, I’m teaching my 4 year old daughter that just because she lost doesn’t mean that someone else “cheated”. Apparantly no DEMS got that lesson from their fathers…
The controversy was over the courts (Florida) and the election machinery (Ohio). The court claim was that justices appointed by one party would issue rulings that favored that party’s candidate. The election machine claim was that the company that designed the vote tallying machines had programmed them to favor one party.
It remains a controversy because the claims made by both sides were possible but neither side was able to objectively prove its position or disprove the opposing position. So it ends up being a matter of who you want to believe.
The first thing is to get as many of the voters in a district that is likely to vote against you eliminated. Have the vote registrations of all ex felons voided. Void all the people with the same or similar names. (just to be thorough).
Change the polling locations at the last moment without notification. (same districts) Make sure there are not enough voting machines to handle the likely volume and shut them down every now and then. People will eventually get tired of waiting in long lines.
Have Diebold supply hackable voting machines.
You are ::This post cannot be displayed outside of the Pit::
Possibly the Dem kids had fathers who understand that sometimes people DO cheat, and you shouldn’t blindly dismiss allegations of cheating by someone who has lost as motivated purely by disappointment, but should at least take a look at the evidence.
For example, the state of Florida was forced to settle an NAACP lawsuit over the purge of thousands of black peoople from the voter rolls by DBT Technnologies which illegally denied those thousands the right to vote. Here’s my cite:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/09/04/politics/main520754.shtml
But that’s evidence, and you are clearly not the sort of dad who looks at evidence.
To answer the OP’s question: it is possible to rig a national election because the poeple do not elect Presidents, electors do. Generally electors vote for the person the voters choose, but because most states have a “winner takes all” outcome, if you win the state you win ALL of the state’s electors.
The number of electors each state has is based on population, so populous states like Texas, California and New York have many electors. This will be important later.
You cannot rig an election where the other guy has a huge advantage in terms of likely voters, and there’s no point in rigging an election where your guy has a huge advantage. The place to put all your vote rigging efforts is states where things are fairly close and a few hundred or thousand votes can make the difference. Places like Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004, both big states with nearly equal number of potential Democratic and Republican voters. (Now you see the importance of big states – just one can swing a national election, lets you focus your efforts nicely.)
It is of course illegal to directly prevent people from voting because of race, religion, etc., but there are ways around this. For example, in Florida they purged the voter rolls of all felons in 1998 and 1999, and also of all people with names similar to felons. This was completely legal, at least as far as the convicted felons go, since Florida disenfranchises convicted felons. (But the people who had names like felons – completely illegal of course.) And the thing is, felons tend to be disproportionately black. And blacks tend to vote Democratic. So the people with names like convicted felons who got disenfranchised were mostly Democratic voters. There were thousands of them. Bush won the election by 537 votes.
You can also get a friendly corporate CEO to provide you with hackable voting machines, as has been alleged in the case of Diebold, whose CEO actually publicly promised to deliver Ohio to the Republican Party in 2004. (There have been many allegations that Diebold machines are hackable, though to my knowledge no hack has been proven well enough to go to a court of law. The point of hackable machines, however, is that it’s impossible to trace the hacking on the models that don’t have paper trails.)
There are many other techniques for rigging elections and disenfranchising voters – in the South it was something of an art during the Jim Crow era. Hillary could use any of them. But mostly its the Republicans who are motivated to use them, as their voter base is rapidly shrinking. If they didn’t have the evangelicals, they’d be dead in the water.
You make it much harder for people that support your opponent to vote. Have one of your stooges get elected as Secretary of State in a large state. Make him enforce arcane rules about the weight of paper acceptable for voter registration, and then let the courts force him to relax the rules after many are already discouraged from voting. Have voter registration drives handled by your henchmen and have them throw out those of people they think will not support your candidate. Apportion the voting machines so that your candidate’s strong precincts have little or no waiting time while people in your opponent’s strong precincts have to wait three hours or more in line to vote. Enforce photo ID at the polls so that the underclass without photo IDs cannot vote. Have your henchmen challenge the right of people to vote at the polling place. Place calls and put ads in your candidate’s strongholds telling people that if they voted in the primary they cannot vote in the general election and will go to jail if they try. Make robocalls telling people if they wish to vote for your opponent, that they are supposed to vote on Wednesday. Use electronic voting machines that can be hacked as they are tabulated by anyone who can edit a dbf file. When your candidate is behind, transfer the vote tabulation to your party’s server.
I assume jtgain was able to register to vote without his registration being thrown out because of the weight of the paper or because the person handling registrations thought he might vote the wrong way. I assume jtgain was able to vote in 2004 with less than a three hour wait. I assume nobody called jtgain saying if he wanted to vote a certain way that he should vote on Wednesday. I assume nobody put posters in jtgain’s area saying that people that voted in the primary would be imprisoned if they voted in the general election. I assume no party hacks challenged jtgain’s right to vote at the polling place. I also assume that if any of this had happened to jtgain, then he might recognize that elections can be and are stolen in the US.
To be clear, the claim that Diebold machines are easily hackable is not reasonably questionable. It has been demonstrated on more than one occassion. The controversy is whether these eminently hackable machines were actually hacked.
These are all theoretical, of course.
Just like the Theory of Gravity.
Any claim of victory by the Republicans that doesn’t acknowledge how dodgy the victory was is not worthy of comment.
Hell you should teach your 4 year old daughter that just because she “won” doesn’t mean she didn’t cheat, if she did. Apparently no Republicans got that message from their fathers.
Thank you folks - my main reason for posting this was so people could see that blindly accepting the way things are or appear to be is not the status quo - or at least shouldn’t be.
I’d think there are shady deals going on all over the place, and tho totally legal candidates now are placing targeted mailing campaigns with smarmy info on them all over the place. My coworker in Salt Lake got a mailer from the Romney Campaign basically calling him a coward, someone who left his men in Hanoi etc…etc… I know it’s not illegal, but it is smarmy notheless. I know this doesn’t fit the conformity of “rigging” but it certainly fits the mold of dirty politiking.
If any of these allegations are true, that is why we have a criminal justice system. Florida is sufficiently a two party state where if there was a shred of evidence of any of this then heads would roll.
I note you mentioned voting on Wednesday. Surely you are seriously arguing that the lame joke that “Republicans vote on Tuesday and DEMS on Wednesday” that come out every election is evidence of cheating do you? And IMHO, if a voter is stupid enough to fall for that, then they are too stupid to engage in the democratic process.
Same way if some party hack tried to prevent me from voting. I would demand to cast a provisional ballot and contact my state representative, or the police. Again, because voters are ignorant of the law and their rights, doesn’t mean that I need to go out of my way to enforce their right to vote.
In order to make the claim that someone “cheated” you need more than anecdotal evidence.
If you can cheat someone, they shouldn’t engage in the democratic process? Isn’t that another variation of “It’s not wrong if you can get away with it.”?
No. I’m saying that if you believe these circulated emails about how the polling places are overcrowded so Dems vote on Tuesday, and Republicans vote on Wednesday, then your intelligence should be questioned.
Something else for people to ignore http://www.crisispapers.org/essays8w/snafu.htm
Good on ya!
While you’re at it, teach her that just because she disagrees with someon, that does not mean the other person is lying. I don’t think the Dems got that lesson, either.
The thing is people win. Sometimes they win fairly by playing within the rules. And sometimes they win because they cheated. Teach your daughter to be able to tell the difference. But don’t teach her to always say the people she likes played fairly and always say the people she doesn’t like cheated.
There is no discontent, thus no dissent, in the happy People’s Republic. Also no fraud. Don’t be ridiculous! :dubious:
Be sure to explain to your daughter that most voters voted for Gore, but in our country, that’s not how you win the election.