--- Alberto Monteiro <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > How curious. Here in Brazil it's much more common to > have > cheating in the smaller cities than in the bigger > ones. Like > places where "secret vote" means that the voter > doesn't know > who he is electing: he signs and puts the paper into > the > urn (?) without reading what has already been > written there. > > Alberto Monteiro
Well, in the US universal literacy _predates_ democracy, so tactics like that can't really work. Electoral fraud in the US is usually a product of a situation where a single party has held power in a region for a prolonged period of time. It is made easier when the population is highly transient and difficult to keep track of. And it is made almost trivial when political jobs are awarded by the party in charge. That describes American big cities quite accurately right up until the 1970s. Quite a few people think that the election of 1960 was stolen for John F. Kennedy by a combination of his father's money and the Democratic Party machine in Illinois and Texas, for example (I'm skeptical myself, but acknowledge the possibility). It's not unheard of right now - there were very plausible accusations that the governor's race in my home state of Maryland in 1994 was stolen by the Baltimore-based Democratic Party machine (there were all these Baltimore precincts with 100% turnout, for some strange reason - it's been a while, but I remember that eyebrows were raised at what happened). Republican areas of the country tend to be more sparsely populated, more stable, and wealthier, all of which make electoral fraud harder. It still happens, though - as I recall, there were plausible accusations of Republican voter fraud in Arizona in the 1960 election. ===== Gautam Mukunda [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Freedom is not free" http://www.mukunda.blogspot.com _______________________________ Do you Yahoo!? Shop for Back-to-School deals on Yahoo! Shopping. http://shopping.yahoo.com/backtoschool _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
