Fraud - Election Fraud
In this article we're going to cover an area of fraud that is a
growing concern in the United States. This is election fraud.
To first understand how election fraud can occur you first have
to understand what election fraud is. Election fraud is the
hampering, tampering or in any way the interfering with the
normal election process to place an individual in a public
office such as congressman, senator or even President of the
United States.
So, just how is election fraud pulled off?
The number of ways are virtually limitless, but for the sake of
keeping this article relatively short we will cover the most
common ways to commit election fraud.
The most common way to commit election fraud is with the actual
tampering of the voting booths. In today's computerized society
most of the voting establishments are computerized. The voter
walks into the voting booth and is basically confronted with a
panel of LCD buttons to press. With each press a vote is logged
into their computer database. With today's technology it is not
hard to rig these machines to take a vote given to one candidate
and apply that vote to another without being conspicuous about
it. Because computer tampering is beyond the scope of this
article we're not going to try to explain exactly how this is
done. Suffice it to say, it happens.
Another way to commit election fraud is by hiring people to vote
a particular way. The person out to commit the fraud will give
these people some incentive to vote for their candidate, either
in the form of some monetary gift or maybe a cruise to the
islands. While some may see this as simply good campaigning,
paying someone to vote a certain way in the United States is
fraud, plain and simple.
Another way to commit election fraud, and this is a little
harder to do, is dual identities. A person will register to vote
in more than one county or city. They may even have multiple
identities made up. The purpose of this is to get to vote more
than once. They'll vote once in the city where they actually
live for candidate X and then vote in the other city where they
don't live, again for candidate X. This is basically voting
twice for the same candidate and is fraud, again, cut and dried.
This type of fraud does take some cunning to pull off, which
includes falsified identification, which is another type of
fraud.
Another type of election fraud, which isn't as common today as
it was back in the 1920s, is through intimidation. This is where
workers for the candidate, or even just independent persons who
want to see their own agenda go through, will station themselves
outside a voting place and threaten people to vote for their
candidate otherwise...and what follows is some kind of threat.
Strong willed people will probably just blow this person off.
But the weak voter, fearing harm, will cave in to the threat and
vote for their candidate. Again, this isn't as common as it was
at one time but still in the more underprivileged areas of the
United States this still does go on.
Nobody really knows how serious election fraud is, including the
government itself. But many safeguards have been put in place to
help make sure election fraud doesn't happen. We'll go over
these safeguards in a future article.