This post is mostly directed at Bricker and those who agree with him, regarding the need for stricter measures to prevent voter fraud. As I understand it from reading his posts, one of his primary concerns is that of ensuring voter confidence – that is, although there is little evidence of voter fraud in any significant quantity, we cannot prove it hasn’t been more widespread, or that it won’t become more common in future elections. Essentially, it’s a sensible preventative measure that establishes confidence that our elections aren’t being influenced by people voting unlawfully.
With that in mind, for people who agree with the above, how do you feel about voting machines (Diebold, et al.) and their inherent vulnerability to tampering? I find the two issues extremely analogous. In both cases there is an obvious threat to the integrity of the vote. In both cases there is no current hard evidence that the threat has been meaningfully realized, but it could be going on undetected, now or in the future. And in both cases, the confidence of the electorate is being undermined by the possibility and ease of fraud.
Would Dopers who are proponents of strict voter ID laws also be in favor of disallowing the use of vulnerable voting machines, until such time as neutral technically-minded observers declare them safe? I think it’s beyond question that voting machines are easy to tamper with. I’m not saying it’s definitely happened, since it’s unproven, but the machines have been found extremely suspect:
I personally find the continued use of unsecured voting machines to be much more worrying than the current alleged voter fraud, because I can more easily see them as a path to an election result that differs from the true will of the electorate. What say you?
It’s hard to agree with your thesis without knowing what the alternative is and why it’s better? IIRC, there was a big push for a “paper ballot” as an augmentation to the voting machine, but I’m not really up on where that went.
I absolutely think that voting machine fraud is the more serious problem. Until there is a reliable means to ‘double check’ their counts and that is performed on a routine basis, I think that efforts to address the potential for machine tampering should be the priority.
Since voter fraud is a virtually non-existent problem, and Bricker and his ilk would never have even heard of it if not for the right wing propaganda machine, it doesn’t seem possible to me that it could cause a lack of voter confidence. Further, the solution to voting machine fraud (actually vote counting fraud in general, and other voter access issues) resolves the improbable potential problem of voter fraud.
If voter fraud is really such an issue, I would be much more supportive of working out a national solution instead of State by State piecemeal solutions that scream partisan.
IMHO, the voting machine fraud is a much greater issue.
Obviously, voting machine tampering is a much bigger concern than personal vote fraud, by orders of magnitude (namely, the orders of magnitude by which the former can outdo the latter in affecting the results for the same amount of effort).
The solution is a two part paper ballot, and a proper validation process. By incorporating technology, the process of validation can be done more easily and completely. The media and politicians will just have to wait a little longer for the results.
I don’t think voting machine fraud is much of a problem so much as voting machines seem to cause problems for poll workers, who are often not very adept technically.
But I’m in favor of anything that reduces vote fraud, even if it isn’t a huge problem. In any case, we don’t really know how much of a problem it is, since we don’t really try to find out. The media actually seems to expend more effort tracking down illegal votes than the authorities. And the media never seems to have any trouble finding them.