How I would steal an election

[MineralMan]

12. Election fraud is possible in many ways.

The best protection is voting systems with a genuine paper trail, where the original ballots are preserved and secured in case a recount is needed. In Minnesota, we use hand-marked ballots and optical scanners.

The addition of mandatory recounts of randomly-selected precincts, with the precincts chosen at random after the election, is how this is tested for each election. Do the vote counts match between paper ballots and the machine tabulations in every precinct? If so, things are probably OK.

An additional check occurs, as it did in Minnesota in 2008 and 2010, when a recount of every precinct in the state was necessary to decide the winner for US Senate and Governor, respectively. What that recount revealed was that, while there were small differences, statewide, between the machine tabulation and the paper ballots, there was no evidence of any tampering. When challenged and rejected absentee ballots were inspected and recounted, the results of one election changed and the other stayed the same. The result was Al Franken and Governor Dayton taking office.

Without paper ballots that can be recounted, it is impossible to detect fraudulent vote-counting. There simply is no way. A federal law needs to be created requiring all elections with candidates for Congress or the Presidency must be done using paper ballots, marked by voters, which can be recounted if necessary. The law would also require the mandatory manual recount, after the election, of randomly-selected precincts to provide a check on accuracy. Since every two years, every House member stands for election, that federal law would be in play for every major election.

Simple.