A while back, someone answered one of my posts with the comment that no one was worrying about Republicans rigging elections in 2010.
My thoughts then were (1) They certainly have done that since 2002, and (2) Maybe they will not bother to this time.
Then I read the post about documented evidence to prevent minorities and college students from voting in Wisconsin. What is planned as a "caging" operation. Its illegal, but it works long enough to decide elections.
Somewhere I have many notes on all of this. Let me just summarize from memory.
Up through 2002, the main method of rigging elections was to change cards in electronic voting machines. Georgia provided the best example, where the cards were switched in southern Georgia, winning the governor's chair and a senate seat for Max Clellan.
In 2002, the Florida GOP commissioned a computer expert to develop a program that would rig outcomes by hacking programs used to tabulate county returns. Apparently that program was ready by 2004.
This was widely used in 2004. That is why there were unheard-of discrepancies between exit poll findings and exact findings. There are all sorts of statistical studies that show that the results of the two always have a very high correlation. The best study was done in Utah, where there are few Democrats.
Oddly, the Ohio Libertarians unsuccessfully asked for a recount. The Kerry people did nothing.
At the time, I went through all the returns in the county where the head of the Ohio Libertarians resided and found many discrepancies. The head of the Ohio Libertarians probably favored Bush over Kerry but he was an honest man who wanted to keep the system pure.
The states developed post-election sampling techniques to unconver irregularities. But by 2008, the machine manufacturers had developed methbods to game the post election checks. They sent people around to the counties with fake data to feed the examiners. In Hocking County, Ohio, an honest county employee was fired for blowing the whistle.
As many readers know, Karl Rove's chief consultant on voting machines died in a strange plane crash some months later. People were asking him too many questions.
A friend, who just died, spent the last nine years studying election fraud. He was a trained statistician and had belonged to the national organization for voter registrars. He was ultimately ejected for asking too many questions. The new electronic voting machines made counting so much easier that they may just not have wanted to go back to the old ways.
A final point-- The programs sending and collecting and tabulating electronic voting machine data are all proprietqary and cannot be examined by public authorities. The largest manufacturers have ties to the GOP.