[Lula-chat] Witness to vote-flipping

[Christopher Smith]

Peter Benjamin wrote:
> At 10:36 PM 9/12/2006, you wrote:
>   
>> Now, the catch is that a) in particular is not entirely independent of
>> fixing the process, as voter turn out is tied to confidence in the
>> system. But the key thing is b), which is important to keep in mind.
>> Ultimately, even if fraud tips the balance to the victor, for them to do
>> it undetected, even the fraudulent winner has to have had something
>> close to winning support from the electorate. 
>>     
>
> This is called the slippery slope downwards 
> to criminally run elections.  The logic of 
> letting the lessor candidate "rule" is bad.
> Any fraud should be detected and prosecuted.
>   
First, in a lot of these cases, they guy who theoretically would win
fair and square is the "lesser" candidate by a lot of measures,
including simply having a more mathematically correct mechanism for
measuring the public's will. Secondly, I would never suggest that fraud
shouldn't be detected and prosecuted. It most definitely should be. The
failure to do so undermines the voting process. My point was that the
political consequences tend not to be as severe as people suggest.
> We have now had 7 states have irregularities in two
> presidential elections, where the "wrong" person won.
>   
Well, we've had irregularities in pretty much all 50 states in pretty
much every Presidential election as far back as I've checked, and we've
had ethically questionable stuff going on on a much grander scale. In
most cases there is little evidence to suggest that they tipped the
balance one way or the other, as their tends to be fraud on all sides,
and closely competing candidates tend to cancel each other out. In the
2000 election, it looks like any fair count of the votes in Florida
wouldn't have changed the ultimate outcome (of course, there were
questionable things going on preventing and stacking votes as well, but
it's hard to identify which were criminal and which were just
questionable, and whether either would tip the scale). Aside from Ohio
in 2004, I haven't seen any claims of fraud significant enough to tip
the balance. So far the only two Presidential elections that might merit
an asterix are 1960 and 2004, and the case for the 2004 one still seems
pretty weak. Even if there was some criminal activity going on with the
Ohio elections that actually tipped the balance, it is clear that our
President handily won the popular vote, so while he might be able to
qualify as the "wrong" candidate, in a lot of senses he wasn't the
"lesser" one.
> The international body that rates fair elections has
> down rated the United States into the bottom 10% (or
> there abouts) ... thinking of that, conclusions are:
>   
Can you cite the source (like all good things, there are several
international bodies to choose from ;-)? Most of the ratings I've seen
tend to focus more on the design of the elections, and rather than look
at fraud specifically they tend to look at fairness. So they look at
things like voter turnout, voter education and awareness, campaign
finance rules, variances in voter turnout based on democracy or economic
background, voter eligibility rules, variances in voting processes, the
voting style (our first past the post approach tends to be considered
one of the least fair approaches), and the big one that kills us every
time: gerrymandering (thank you Voting Rights Act!). These are all areas
where we do horribly, and areas that we need to make substantial
improvements (many of which are probably more sorely in need of
attention than concerns about voting fraud), but none are cause to
suspect fraud.

--Chris
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