Assembly Must Act to Eliminate Voting-Machine Manipulation

By Ivy Main

McLean. Let’s say you are a campaign manager whose candidate is running for a seat in the General Assembly. Your guy is in a tight race, and he may not win merely by running an honest campaign on the issues. Fortunately, you don’t care about honesty. You are completely unscrupulous and will resort to anything to give your man an edge. You’ve already tried negative campaigning, distortions, and promising the impossible. It’s time for dirty tricks. What are your options?

Here are three: (1) You can inflate the number of votes for your guy through vote fraud; (2) you can decrease the number of votes for the other guy by voter intimidation; and (3) if neither works, you can try to change the actual vote count by manipulating voting machines.

Let’s start with vote fraud. This is different from old-fashioned vote-buying that, though attractive, still limits you to one vote per voter. The point of vote fraud is to increase the votes per voter by having them vote in place of other people.

It’s a great idea, but pulling it off isn’t easy. You need a lot of corrupt supporters willing to impersonate legitimate voters, and the legitimate voters must be people who won’t be voting. Maybe you’ve got the corrupt supporters, but finding people for them to impersonate will be difficult. Virginia is quick to purge voters from the rolls when they die, get convicted of a felony, or move.

AND THEN there is the risk of getting caught people know the neighbors who share their polling places, and they may notice if someone shows up claiming to be Mrs. Jones when Mrs. Jones looks nothing like her and, moreover, is dead.

Vote fraud just isn’t that common. As far as we can tell, there hasn’t been a proven case of vote fraud in Virginia in 40 years.

So what’s a slimebag to do? If you can’t increase votes for your guy, decrease them for your opponent. Your goal is to prevent some of the other guy’s supporters from exercising their constitutional right to vote.

The time-honored method for this is voter intimidation. It works wonders for suppressing the vote, but you have to match your tactic to the people you’re trying to scare. If your opponent has an edge with well-off white men, you have a problem. You could ask the IRS to announce it will use voter lists for random audits of tax shelters. Good luck with that.

If, however, the well-off people are your voters, and your opponent appeals to poor people, minorities, and immigrants, then you have lots of options. One popular technique involves putting up flyers in targeted neighborhoods announcing that people will not be allowed to vote if they are behind on their rent or child support. Having a police presence in precincts where minorities live is another good tactic. No matter how law-abiding they are, people who see police officers as a potential source of harassment may decide that voting isn’t worth it.

THE BEST OPTION for disenfranchising poor people, though, is legislation requiring voters to show a government-issued photo ID at the polls. Your middle-class supporters have these because they are necessary to a lifestyle that includes cars, bank accounts, and plane travel. But many poor voters, especially those without cars, don’t. If Virginia required photo IDs for voting, some people would be disenfranchised. Those people could represent your candidate’s margin of victory.

Virginia does not now have this requirement, but the idea has support in the legislature from people who say they are worried about vote fraud. So even though vote fraud is difficult to pull off, your candidate should say he is gravely concerned about the possibility. If the legislature follows through, then you will suppress the turnout of your opponent’s voters by much more than vote fraud could increase the votes of yours. Not bad.

But say that voter intimidation and an ID requirement are not enough, or that these tactics don’t help you, because your voters are the poor people whose votes would be suppressed. Never mind the voters, change the votes.

This is the ultimate dirty trick, though you can do it only in counties that use computer-based voting rather than paper ballots. Paper ballots, even if they are tallied by computers, are available for hand recounts, and this makes them hard to manipulate. But if you can change the software in a computer to have it count more votes for your guy than for his opponent, then you don’t need to win the election — you can steal it.

How hard is this? That depends on who you ask. But there is a growing concern among computer professionals and election officials nationwide that election machines could be manipulated by outsiders through hacking, or deliberately misprogrammed by insiders with access. You should look into both.

AND IF YOU succeed, you will probably get away with it because Virginia does not require its machines to print receipts for voters to verify their votes have been recorded properly. Virginia doesn’t even require Election Day audits of randomly selected machines, which likely would reveal the existence of problems.

So you see, you have some options to explore. But better hurry. There are fair-minded people in Virginia who would like to take away your opportunities to game the election. The Assembly is considering election-reform bills even now.

We all agree, it’s time for action.