How Elections Are Stolen

These are some of my thoughts as to the nature of stolen elections, at the national level, in today's society.

Anyone who has paid attention to the news over the last four years has watched the GOP systematically demonize ACORN and various other left-leaning organizations for supposedly submitting fraudulent voter applications. I have discussed before the reasons why this is a bogus charge and why the fraud was not committed BY ACORN, but AGAINST them. Regardless, voter fraud of that type is an extremely inefficient way to attempt to alter the results of a national election in today's society.

The way elections are stolen in today's world is not by stuffing ballot boxes or by having people commit voter fraud. With the sheer volumes of voters in any of the states that matter, you'd have to do an amazing amount of tweaking, the conspiracy would have to be enormous. It would come out.

The way elections are (or could be) stolen is through insecure voting systems. Read up on it, there are numerous stories about the ways in which voting machines and central tabulating machines of various voting systems out there can be quickly and easily hacked, untraceably altered, etc.

There was a situation with voting machines 8 years ago in which someone determined that one particular voting machine would report itself as "clean and empty" if the SUM of all votes cast equaled 0, so if you wanted to adjust the results, you start the machine out with, say, 1000 votes for one candidate and -1000 for the other. The sum is 0, the machine reports itself clean and reset, and you've just effected a 2000 vote swing from one candidate to the other.  Do this with all of the memory cards for every machine in every district that leans towards the opponent of "your guy" prior to voting day, and you end up with an election that reports itself to have started out clean, but tilts your state towards your guy.

Or take the multiple reports of "man in the middle" setups, such as that in Ohio in 2004 where it is documented that votes passed at one point through a Republican controlled server between the voting machines and the final tally.

Or the fact that one voting machine company stored the votes unencrypted on the tabulating machines, making it extremely easy for someone to go in and manually switch votes untraceably.

Or the fact that in Ohio this year, some of the regional tabulating machines sent their results to the central tabulation unit in an unencrypted text file to the central location to be certified.

Or the highly illegal last minute "patch" of one of the Ohio voting machine systems at the last minute this year, which clearly was not used to change the outcome (because those in control of the change were Republicans and the result went to the Democratic candidate). This is not to allege that they did, or even intended to, alter the results of the election, but that if unverified, un-certified code can be installed on voting machines and central tabulators days before an election with little transparency or oversight, clearly it'd be easy in another instance for that code to be intended to alter the results reported by the machines.

THAT is how an election would be stolen, if one was, in today's society. It wouldn't be by "literally dragging" unconscious people into a polling place, nor by a few fraudulent voter registrations and someone voting a few extra times.