The GOP Voter Fraud Campaign Is A Ruse

So much talk about voter fraud, so little talk about election fraud.

For a few years now, we have seen concerted efforts by the GOP to deal with what they claim to be a voter fraud problem. Never mind that almost every study on the subject of voter fraud shows the problem to be either negligible or non-existent in every place they’ve cared to look.

What I find most interesting is that the GOP has almost completely ignored the voting machines and tabulation systems in any discussion of fraud in elections. Many of the voting machines in use are made by Diebold, and during the 2004 election cycle, there was some news about the CEO of Diebold promising to deliver the votes to the GOP. I guess the GOP didn’t feel like the voting machines were a huge problem then and they sure don’t seem all that concerned about them now.

But if I were the one calling for better detection of voter fraud, I wouldn’t be looking at the voters. I’d be looking at the voting machines and the tabulation systems that gather votes. In fact, I’d be calling for an open source end to end solution, for vote collection and tabulation. Why?

Computer science researchers often find flaws in our voting machines such as security vulnerabilities, programming errors and seemingly intentional flaws, all of which have been found in our voting machines. Take Diebold for example. Their systems run an embedded version of Windows. As far back as 2006, Princeton University researchers ran tests on Diebold machines to show how easy it is to steal an election.

Diebold has demonstrated significant partisan practices in the past as well, with other executives openly supporting George Bush for his 2004 re-election campaign. It is not likely that Diebold is the only company out there with a vested interest in steering elections their way, the practice may be widespread and bipartisan.

After the 2010 Census, many Republican majorities in state legislatures got busy redistricting their states to their advantage. But that wasn’t enough for them, it seems. They have also been working hard to limit voter access to the polls, cutting the number of early voting days available and voting hours and polling places. They have also loosened restrictions on observers at the polls, allowing them to challenge voters at the polling places. Their tactics are well documented with a few examples here, here and here. But if voter…