Reply #12: You're probably just not old enough to remember rigged elections in the pre-electronic era

[frazzled]

The political machine is the most important machine to consider when considering the rigging of an election. When a corrupt political power is intent on rigging the outcome of an election they can do it with paper ballots. We saw it in Iran, and it's been going on throughout history. Is it easier to rig an election with electronic machines? Sure. But that doesn't mean that electronically counted votes necessarily lead to rigged elections. New York City elections were rigged with lever machines, and we certainly remember all the dead people who purportedly voted in Illinois long before the idea of an electronic voting machine was even a glimmer in anybody's eye.

The 2000 Florida election was rigged by using a number of means simultaneously: pushing people off voting rolls, non-existent recounts in precincts, judging ballots inadmissable, adding overvotes after the fact to valid paper ballots, etc. etc.

We should be more concerned about the political systems doing the counting than the counting mechanisms themselves. Retaining 80-year-old lever machines is not the answer to preventing election abuse and fraud.