Electoral fraud
Overview
 
Electoral fraud is illegal interference with the process of an election
Election
An election is a formal decision-making process by which a population chooses an individual to hold public office. Elections have been the usual mechanism by which modern representative democracy operates since the 17th century. Elections may fill offices in the legislature, sometimes in the...

. Acts of fraud
Fraud
In criminal law, a fraud is an intentional deception made for personal gain or to damage another individual; the related adjective is fraudulent. The specific legal definition varies by legal jurisdiction. Fraud is a crime, and also a civil law violation...

 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.
Quotations

It's not the votes that count. It's who counts the votes.

Josef Stalin

You won the election, but I won the count.

Anastasio Somoza|Anastasio Somoza, Nicaraguan leader, in 1977.

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.

Scott Ritter

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?

Barbara Boxer

There will never be a voting machine, that is proof of tampering by itself.

Herbert Schulze Geiping, managing director of HSG Wahlsysteme GmbH / Nedap Germany

Trust is good, control is impossible.

Tim Pritlove, Chaos Computer Club|CCC member, on the voting machine|voting machines used in german elections.

Either democracy disposes black box voting or black box voting disposes democracy.

Rop Gonggrijp|Rop Gonggrijp on Black Box Voting|Black Box Voting

I know who I voted for. They also know. But only they know who received my vote.

Amilcar Brunazo Filho

No one votes unassisted on a computer; everyone is "assisted" by anonymous programmers.

Mark Ortiz, former candidate for U.S. Representative North Carolina, 8th District

 
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