Selling votes for liquor, food or cash is a common type of fraud.

The price of one bona fide, registered American vote varies from place to place. But it is rarely more than a tank of gas.

Indeed, as a rising furor over voter fraud has prodded some states to mount extensive efforts against illegal voters, election-fraud cases more often involve citizens who sell their votes, usually remarkably cheaply. In West Virginia over the past decade, the cost was as low as $10. Last year in West Memphis, Ark., a statehouse candidate used $2 half-pints of vodka.

At the high end, corrupt candidates in Clay County, Ky., once paid $100. But that was probably too much: It attracted one woman who already had sold her vote. The man who bought it first was outraged, and he beat up the man who bought it second.

It may still be possible to steal an American election, if you know the right way to go about it. Recent court cases, from Appalachia to the Miami suburbs, have revealed the tricks of an underground trade:

Conspirators allegedly bought off absentee voters, faked absentee ballots, and bribed people heading to the polls to vote one way or another.

What they didn’t do, for the most part, was send people into voting booths pretending to be somebody else. That little-used tactic has been targeted by new voter-ID laws, including the one in Pennsylvania, which will face a crucial legal test Tuesday.

In West Memphis last year, prosecutors said Hudson Hallum, a Democrat running for the state legislature, paid absentee voters with cash, whiskey and vodka and at least one with a chicken dinner. Hallum won his primary by eight votes, after taking 85 percent of the absentee ballots, and went on to win the general election.

But it looked fishy, and it didn’t last. Hallum pleaded guilty and resigned his new seat in the state legislature last month. “While I ran for office for all the right reasons,” Hallum, 29, said in a statement, “in order to win the election, I made awful decisions.”

In other cases, it wasn’t even necessary to pay.

In 2010, for instance, Jerry Bowman, the sheriff of Lincoln County, W.Va., simply showed up at people’s homes and told them whom to vote for in local Democratic primary races. In some cases, he just filled out the ballot, according to a “stipulation of facts” that Bowman signed.

Bowman didn’t pay a cent, prosecutors say. Apparently, having the sheriff in one’s home was motivation enough for many voters.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/decision2012/selling-votes-is-common-type-of-election-fraud/2012/10/01/f8f5045a-071d-11e2-81ba-ffe35a7b6542_story.html

Stealing a US election? Nothing’s easier!

“American elections are a disgrace. It's like looking into a kitchen of a world-class restaurant and losing your appetite at what you see, because we have an election system, a voting system that is completely non-transparent,” said Mark Crispin Miller, Professor at NYU and author of “Fooled Again, How the Right Stole the 2004 Elections.”

The process largely to blame is the out-dated electronic voting system.

“In the states where all they have is electronic voting – it could be a real problem. If you don't have some kind of back up source to verify the vote count – it could be a problem,”said Jeanne Mirer of the National Lawyers Guild.

Brad Friedman is an independent award-winning blogger who has covered the U.S. election system for years. Speaking to RT, he said the problem is actually a pandemic, and change is long overdue.

“Every single state in the union uses electronic voting. A third of the voters this year will vote on 100 percent unverifiable touch screen voting systems. The rest of the country, by and large, will vote on paper ballots, but those paper ballots are also counted by electronic systems. Unless you can see inside a computer, there is no way to know if those computers have tallied those ballots correctly,” said Friedman.

Several experiments conducted on electronic voting machines have proven that simple key strokes and some knowledge of science and computers could flip results. Experts say the accuracy of the vote count – even with paper trail – is a myth.

“In 99 plus percent of the cases, those ballots never see the light of day – they are never examined, never recounted. Basically American elections at this point have virtually zero claim on public confidence and legitimacy,” said Jonathan Simon.

The rules and specifications of how elections are held vary locally, and state by state.

“Four-thousand different counties, each of them use a different system, a different type of voting system, each of them have different flaws, different vulnerabilities,” said Brad Friedman.

One particular company that makes electronic voting machines in the U.S. has earned a dubious reputation for unverifiable results, as records vanish into thin air.

“I go to an ATM, and there is a Diebold machine, I get a confirmation slip – and I go around the corner to vote – and there is no record,” said author, social critic and political activist Naomi Wolf.

Meantime, Diebold and other voter machine production companies are known to have strong partisan affiliations.

“They are not accountable to any voters. They are not just private, but private and extreme in their political sympathies. Democrats don't actually win that many elections. To be precise, democrats almost never win close elections. And the trick there, is to see to it, that a race looks or is close,” said Mark Crispin Miller.

Improving the election process in this digital age doesn’t appear to be on anyone’s agenda, including Barack Obama’s.

“Our President…who won't ever talk about election fraud and denies that it has ever happened, even when members of his own party have been the victims of it,” said Miller.

While the number of reported flaws grows with each passing election.

“Over the past decade, since 2000, when Congress was pretending to want to make things better, what has happened is things have gotten much, much worse,” said Brad Friedman.

It appears stealing an election in the U.S. may be a candidate’s certain way to secure a win..
http://rt.com/usa/news/us-election-voting-system-785/