Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy
Editorial Reviews
Book Description
The Florida Fiasco of 2000, with hanging chads, butterfly ballots and Supreme Court intervention, forced Americans to confront an ugly reality. The U.S. has the sloppiest election systems of any industrialized nation, so sloppy that at least eight of the 19 hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were actually able to register to vote in either Virginia or Florida while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11.
In "Stealing Elections," John Fund takes the reader on a national tour of voter fraud scandals ranging from rural states like Texas and Mississippi to big cities such as Philadelphia and Milwaukee. He explores dark episodes such as the way "vote brokers" stole a mayoral election in Miami in 1998 by tampering with 4700 absentee ballots. He shows how, in the aftermath of the Motor Voter Law of 1993, Californians used mail-in forms to get absentee ballots for fictitious people and pets, while in St. Louis it was discovered that voter rolls included 13,000 more names than the U.S. Census listed as the total number of adults in the city.
Election officials are trying to reassure voters by turning to computerized voting machines. But Fund shows that with the new technology come even greater concerns. Early in 2004, for instance, the state of Maryland, which has 16,000 new Diebold machines, commissioned a security expert to try to rig a practice election. He and his team broke into the computer at the State Board of Elections, completely changed the outcome of the election, left, and erased their electronic trail-all in under five minutes.
"Stealing Elections" gives us a chilling portrait of our electoral vulnerability--in the 2004 presidential election and on into the future. Writing with urgency and authority, John Fund shows how a lethal combination of bureaucratic bungling and ballot rigging have put our democracy at risk.
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Hanging chads, butterfly ballots, voting felons, and Supreme Court intervention. How bad is the U.S. election system? Bad enough that at least eight of the 19 hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had registered to vote while they made their deadly preparations for 9/11! John Fund explores the way "vote brokers" stole a mayoral election in Miami in 1998 by tampering with 4700 absentee ballots. He shows how the "Motor Voter Law" allowed Californians to use mail-in forms to get absentee ballots for fictitious people and pets. He discusses the fears of Internet activists that unscrupulous "Manchurian Programmers" could manipulate new computerized voting machines to alter the outcome in 2004. After reading Stealing Elections, Dr. Larry Sabato, Director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, said, "Unless we do some of the things Fund recommends, sooner or later we're headed for more disasters as bad or worse than what we saw in Florida in 2000."
--This text refers to the
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Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy
Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy,John H. Fund,Encounter Books,1594030618,Corrupt practices,Elections,Government - U.S. Government,Political Ideologies - Democracy,Political Process - Elections,Political Science,Political corruption,Politics / Current Events,Politics and government,Politics/International Relations,United States,Elections & referenda,USA
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