> ----------
> From: R. A. Hettinga[SMTP:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> At 9:33 AM -0400 on 5/30/00, Trei, Peter wrote:
>
> > If the person whose vote is being coerced has the
> > coercer looking over their shoulder as they cast it
>
> Just for fun, think about the mathematics of this proposition?
>
If you're the person with an abusive spouse leaning over your
shoulder, the mathematics are 100%.
If you're the ward heeler who visits 50-100 households on
election day, and checks that the residents vote "right"
(otherwise the local political machine will make things
difficult for them) the numbers are pretty good as well.
If the WH is better funded, she can let it be known that
there's a $50 bill awaiting each voter in the preceinct who
votes "right" from the PC in the heeler's office.
In the old days, you didn't fill out your own ballot - you got
one from the party rep outside the polling place, and were
observed dropping it in the box. At first color coding made
it abundantly clear which ballot you were using; later after
'white' had been mandated for ballots, the parties explored
the color space of off-white, white, pale gray, etc. Only when
the election process required the same form to be used
by all parties was this abuse eliminated...
The point has been made that paper ballots are also subject
to stuffing, removal, tampering, etc.
Perhaps, but in a system which pretends to fair elections,
it can be made very tough. The one election whose process I
observed carefully (rather than running in, voting, and leaving)
was a British one around 1975 (the house I lived in was a
polling station).
Representatives from both major parties where there for the
entire voting period. Having mutually suspicious observers
of the public parts of the process greatly enhances security.
After the period ended, the box was sealed (literally, with
sealing wax seals by the observers), and they all transported
it together to the counting station, where, once again,
mutually suspicious observers from all parties watched and
vetted the counting process.
I'm sure it was not totally immune to tampering, but the
system seemed pretty resistant to it.
Peter Trei
> :-).
>
> Cheers,
> RAH
>
