With the Trump nonsense about an election being ‘rigged,’ I wanted to explore how it might actually be done:
Suppose that “Candidate X” is a candidate ten times worse than Trump, yet leading in all the swing states by an average of 3-5% (in other words, substantial but not too substantial) and headed towards victory on Election Day unless someone stops him.
Assuming that the following conditions apply:
Candidate X will ruin America and the world in a way that not even Trump could (saying “I wouldn’t rig, and would just let him win” is fighting the hypothetical);
Assassination is not an option;
You have a budget of $1 billion and a loyal ‘team’ of 1,000 highly skilled people to help you with the election-rigging;
How would it be done?
Seems that the most plausible way to do this would be to target swing states that have voting machines and then carefully hack or tamper with them in such a way that diverts a modest (just barely enough) number of votes away from Candidate X to swing those states the other way.
And also, you could have some of your folks work as poll workers, whose job would be to discreetly ‘replace’ ballots marked for Candidate X with pre-marked ballots for his opponent instead.
Or perhaps the best way to rig would be, not to tamper with the ballots or machines themselves, but rather, with the reporting of the data. Have your people put into power to be the data-reporters instead; so that the vote tally, even if it is 52% for Candidate X, can be mis-reported to the election commission as 48-49% instead.
How much time would I have? Meaning, am I starting this in the summer before election year, giving me a good 15 months to rig the results, or is this a month from the election?
Gerrymandering and contra-gerrymandering. My Dutch newspaper had an article last weekend about how the Republicans get about 6 percent more seats in the senate then they should have. How is that even legal?
Do you mean the House of Representatives? The Senate seats are state-wide elections; those can’t be gerrymandered.
But due to the fact that Wyoming gets the same number of Senate seats as California, this does give the Republicans an edge, due to the fact that Republicans dominate rural, low-populated states such as Idaho, North and South Dakota, Montana, etc.
Support a third party candidate who has similar views as my opposition. This even has the advantage of being perfectly legal.
This exact tactic has even been used successfully in Maine’s 2014 election for Governor. The GOP of Maine gave money to Eliot Cutler, and put out campaign ads for him. Mr. Cutler was a liberal independent. He split the left-leaning vote, and got Lepage re-elected.
You cannot gerrymander the presidential election. Nor, as someone else pointed out, senatorial elections.
Gerrymandering has to do with how congressional districts are drawn, and in most states the legislature has control of that. Whoever controls the legislature can gerrymander congressional districts and their own legislative districts. So it can be a self-perpetuating thing. The only solution is to give the district drawing power to a non-partisan commission, but only a few states do that.
I would target said candidate’s strongholds and suffocate the airwaves with confusing messages about what day to vote. Maybe not as egregious as Alec Baldwin telling Trump supporters in his SNL skit to vote on November 35th, but if you are suffocating the media with confusion about when to vote, you may convince just enough people to go at their appointed time (e.g. “Only Republicans should vote on November 9th” or “Don’t be a victim of voter fraud - Vote November 9th ONLY! It’s the only way to secure your vote!”).
Just make sure that a certifiable fuck-nut runs for one side and someone relatively sane runs for the other. Use the billion dollars to buy-off other potential runners.
any resemblance of the above scenario to the current situation is purely coincidental.
Probably easier to spend your $1B and 1,000 supporters planning something like a massive campaign of bomb threats at polling locations frequented primarily by your opponents. Maybe plant a few smoke bombs or something, enough to make people think there’s a real danger.
That raises an interesting question. How would we respond as a country to something like that?Suppose someone not directly affiliated to either candidate or party did something like that (maybe including real bombs) in order to disrupt voting in targeted districts. Such a person would be very likely to be caught, and would seriously damage their own side, but what if they succeeded in disrupting voting during a close election in a way that was widely seen as affecting the final outcome. Would there be any recourse?
What if it were a person tied to a campaign? They would irreparably damage that candidate’s reputation, but would there be any recourse beside impeachment of the candidate following his or her assumption of office?
What about other forms of election rigging where it is perfectly clear that something happened, but there is no way to undo it without redoing the election?
One political party might have a loud mouthed, buffoon in their primary. The news media could breathlessly report every thing that candidate says with little op ed criticism. Lets assume there is ample video of this buffoon saying stupid stuff 10 to 20 years ago. Persuade the news media not to do their due diligence, search their archives, and release that damaging video during the primary. Save it for the general election.
Knowing of course that the offensive buffoon could easily be knocked out of the general election race at any time, by releasing all that old video. Humiliating the buffoonish candidate and his party.
A very efficient way to ensure the other party’s unpopular candidate can still win.
Strictly hypothetical of course. It wouldn’t ever happen.
I don’t know. I assume there would be lawsuits over it, but there is a pretty clear timeline established for when votes have to be certified and things. It probably comes down to which party controls things like the judiciary, the House of Representatives, etc. The scale of the disruption probably also matters. There are already lawsuits, every year, over disruptions. Either polling places run out of ballots, or there are long lines, etc. Usually we don’t think of those as swinging an election. The New Black Panther voter intimidation thing comes to mind. One buffoon with a club wasn’t the difference-maker. However, if, for example, 20% of polling places across the major swing states had to close because of bomb threats or attacks, and it was obvious that that had swung the election significantly, I don’t know what would happen. Constitutional crisis is, I think, the phrase we would use to describe it.
The basic principle is we have a census every ten years and then we adjust our congressional districts so that they all have an equal number of people living in them. (This is for our House of Representatives. Our Senate follows the two per state rule without regard for population.)
While the idea is that we’re just adjusting for changes in population, the process allows manipulation for political purposes. You can create an artificial majority by arranging to have as many districts as possible where your party has a slight majority and the opposing party has a slight minority.
