. Acts of fraud
affect vote counts to bring about an election result, whether by increasing the vote share of the favored candidate, depressing the vote share of the rival candidates or both. Also called voter fraud, the mechanisms involved include illegal voter registration, intimidation at polls and improper vote counting.
It's not the votes that count. It's who counts the votes.
You won the election, but I won the count.
Elections have been used in the past to cover up inherently non-democratic processes. Stalin had elections, as did Hitler. So did Saddam Hussein. The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Ba'athist Iraq were not burgeoning democracies, but totalitarian dictatorships. The point here is that elections don't bring democracy.
Why is it, when 638 people voted at a precinct in Franklin County, a voting machine awarded 4,258 extra votes to George Bush? Thankfully, they fixed it, but how many other votes did the computers get wrong?
There will never be a voting machine, that is proof of tampering by itself.
Trust is good, control is impossible.
Either democracy disposes black box voting or black box voting disposes democracy.
I know who I voted for. They also know. But only they know who received my vote.
No one votes unassisted on a computer; everyone is "assisted" by anonymous programmers.