T.Kenji Sugahara wrote: > There is an assumption that is being made here.... the assumption is > that the mail carrier knows which choices are made on specific > ballots. Otherwise, if the carrier misdirects mail from certain > districts the mail carrier could be misdirecting ballots that could be > in favor of the mail carrier's perspective. The mail carrier attack depends on the mail carrier knowing the demographic of the district they're working, which is often less difficult than it might seem. For instance, a Democrat mail worker in Prineville or Pendleton could safely dump 40% of the ballots they are supposed to deliver, safe in the knowledge that most of them would have been Republican votes. The converse is true for liberal neighborhoods in Portland and Eugene. > If there is a larger disappearance from specific counties, then you > could make the argument that there is a higher statistical likelihood > that ballots favoring one party would more likely have disappeared. But American voter turnout is so poor and so erratic that it would be hard to detect the attack. The attacking mail carrier has to balance how many ballots they lose against detection: lose 100% and it will be noticed, lose 10% and they have no impact, lose 40% and it may well work. > However, to have that much of an impact, that sort of voter fraud > would become apparent quite quickly (by comparing historical voting > records). In addition, tampering with ballots themselves would be > pretty apparent, and quite time consuming for the individual > hypothetical partisan carriers. You don't have to tamper with the ballots, just lose them on a district-by-district basis for heavily biased districts. Toning it down a bit: IMHO, digital voting from the likes of Diebold is a MUCH greater threat to the legitimacy of democracy in America than vote-by-mail. Vote-by-mail is vulnerable to small-scale fraud that has to be done on a distributed grass-roots level to be effective. Digital voting can be completely and surrepticiously corrupted by a voting machine vendor who favors one party. Crispin
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Thu Sep 11 2003 - 17:29:34 PDT