BH) What's the most egregious documented case in the last few decades of
ballot-counting fraud used to significantly influence a federal or
state-capitol race? (BH
HH) the Ohio 2004 Presidential election was the most egregious case --
and that case did not involve mail ballots. In that case, the Democrats
accepted the result even though the election had been stolen from them.
The corrupt election departments then cheated on the recount! Minor
officials did eventually go to jail, I believe. (HH
Prosecutors in the case did not claim that pre-selecting the recount
sample changed the election outcome -- let alone that the election was
deliberately "stolen". One of the two election clerks convicted was a
Democrat, and it seems they were just trying to get out of having to
hand-recount the entire county's returns and not just the 3% test
sample. The difference in Ohio between Bush and Kerry was 120,000 votes.
Why shouldn't we wish that elections were more hackable instead of
less? Hackers tend to be more libertarian than the rest of society.
Would hacked elections really be worse than the outcomes currently being
driven by the nanny state's hordes of rent-seekers?
For a paper by Rivest (the R in RSA) on secure verifiable un-sellable
voting without cryptography, see
http://www.usenix.org/event/evt07/tech/full_papers/rivest/rivest_html/.
I'm not sure I agree with the assumption that vote-selling -- the main
theoretical problem with absentee ballots -- should be illegal.
