6. Testing and Assurance Activities of States Using DREs without Paper Trails 9
7. The Concept of an Audit 11
8. 1975 Recommendations for Internal Control and Audit 12
10. Some Currently Available Independent Verification Devices (IVDs) 16
11. Comparison of Partial versus Complete Independent Verification 18
12. Recommendations 21
References 24
1. A History of Election Frauds and their Implication for Today
A significant fraction of the work of administration of voting in the United States concerns efforts to ensure integrity of the process. Frauds have been perpetrated in both urban and rural areas, and the reason for them is clear. In this country, the winning of elections is an important road to political power. Over time, political bosses in metropolitan areas as well as in rural counties have been denounced as maintaining power through election manipulation.
A recent book by this author on the history of voting technology (Saltman, 2006) references many previous texts that have detailed frauds undertaken from the time of the founding of this nation through the mid 20th century. The book details, in addition, one allegedly fraudulent action concerning voter registration perpetrated before the 2004 general election; that situation has now generated at least one state law in response. There is no hard evidence that vote-counting fraud occurred in the 2004 election, regardless of conspiracy theorists claiming the opposite, but a few cases concerned with voter registration frauds and voter intimidation or bribery have been successfully prosecuted in the recent past.
A book published a year ago (Campbell, 2005) has the sole purpose of specifically detailing election frauds throughout US history. In a third book, a chapter entitled "Election Fraud: An American Vice" is included among others covering various aspects of US elections (Goldberg, 1987). The latter text reports one of the very few frauds known to have been carried out in a computerized voting situation. In 1985, in one precinct in Chicago, precinct workers ran a ballot card voted for their favored party through a precinct-located voting unit 198 times and another ballot card voted for the opposite party through the unit six times "for the sake of credibility." The extra ballots were covered for accounting purposes by the use of the names of voters who had not shown up to vote (Goldberg, 1987, p. 187-188). One-party dominance that is sufficiently severe to prevent a genuine bi-partisan presence at polling stations promotes the possibility of this type of vote fraud. Such a situation may occur in both urban and rural areas, with different parties dominant in the various regions.
Several types of election frauds may be distinguished:
(1) efforts to manipulate the number of persons voting, for example, by arranging for non-eligible persons to vote, by intimidating persons who could lawfully vote into not voting, or by deliberately providing incorrect information to lawful voters to induce them to appear at the wrong polling place or at the correct polling place on the wrong day;
(2) efforts by private groups to accept voter registration applications from all persons and then submit to official registrars only those that mirror the group's own political bias;
(3) efforts to bribe or intimidate persons entitled to vote so that they will vote a certain way; and
(4) efforts to manipulate the vote-count to cause wrong totals to be announced and certified, which may occur in connection with fraudulent use of voter sign-in records on election day.
This report concerns the assurance of integrity in vote-counting, and therefore is relevant only to fraud type (4).
There may or may not be attempts at vote-counting frauds today but, certainly, the history of frauds remains lodged in the public's consciousness and engenders suspicion as an a priori condition. Furthermore, the publicity given conspiracy theories now circulating raises more doubts. This situation requires implementation of additional measures to assure public confidence.
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