Voter Fraud versus Election Fraud

There are quite a few ways to crock an election.  The one Republicans are fond of claiming, voter fraud, is fairly easy to understand: a person turns in a ballot using a false identity.  Once upon a time, this was fairly easy to do but with the advent of computer identity checks, it is now all but impossible.  Recent studies have found a few dozen credible cases, nation wide, in all the elections since 2000.  Nearly all of these are a family member casting a vote using an absentee ballot for a recently deceased loved one, typically forging their signature.   This is illegal, of course, but one or two such votes per election isn't going to affect anything.   It may even help the mourner with their grief.

Much more common is election fraud.  There are a whole bunch of ways to do this.  Many of them rely on a cooperative election official, although sometimes, inattention is sufficient.

The easiest to understand is ballot box stuffing.   A bunch of ballots for the preferred candidate are produced and put into the ballot box.  If ID checks are being done, a source of identities of people unlikely to vote is needed.   Back in the old days, this could be obtained from the local obituary column.  In some areas, black people weren't allowed to vote themselves, but their ballots would be cast, almost certainly voting for a different candidate than they themselves would have chosen.

There's a modern version of this.  Most vote counting machines have a mechanism for loading an initial vote count.  This is done in case the count was stopped mid-process for some reason, it can be restarted without having to start from the beginning.    The movie Hacking Democracy documents this.  This was found to have actually happened in the presidential election in 2004 in Ohio, although the specific precinct was recounted and the 5000 bogus votes removed.  119,000 votes would have swung that particular election.   The recounts that Jill Stein pushed for might have detected such a problem.  The one that actually was completed did not, although there was enough interference it might have been missed.

Even more insidious is voter suppression.   There are quite a few ways of doing this, and the Republicans have been doing nearly all of them.  Basically they involve some way of removing a legitimate voter from the list of registered voters.  Stringent Voter ID laws are designed to make it difficult for some communities to obtain the needed ID and easy for others.  For instance, a lot of poor voters do not have a car, and so don't have any use for a drivers license.  By simply making it inconvenient for such people to get the photo ID, lots of voters can be suppressed.  For example by making sure the nearest office where they can get the ID is a multi-hour bus ride away.

Another is to create a list of people who's registration might no longer be valid.  For example, they moved out of the state.  Or they were convicted of a crime.  In the election of 2000, the Republicans used a process called Caging to produce a list of people who seemed to have moved:  a flyer about some Republican issue was sent to voters suspected to vote for Democrats.  The envelope was marked "do not forward, return to sender".  They thus obtained a list of voters who had moved, had gone away to college, were on duty in the military, etc.  At least 36,000 voters were suppressed in Florida this way in 2000.  Bush won the state by about 500 votes.   The new version of this is called Crosscheck.  Voters deemed likely Democrats who had a similar name as someone who had moved, often in a different state, would discover that their registration had been rescinded, often discovering for the first time when they went to the polling place.

There are also a number of strategies to keep voters who would have voted for your opponent to do otherwise.  The most obvious is third party candidates. By splitting the vote, they reduce the chance of the other side to win.  In 2016, Jill Stein probably took votes only from Hillary, and Gary Johnson probably split the votes close to evenly.  Had they not been on the ballot, the result in Wisconsin and Michigan would have flipped and Pennsylvania might have too.  Ralph Nader had the same effect in 2000, and John Anderson came close to doing it in 1980.  Nader, Stein and Johnson probably weren't trying to do this--they were "useful idiots"--but Anderson almost certainly was doing it to help Reagan.  This election is widely seen as a Reagan landslide, but it wasn't.   Without Anderson, Reagan still would have won, but by less than 1% in the popular vote.

Republicans have long known that they can benefit by getting people to not vote.  Older, more conservative voters, especially those who are retired or have a very predictable schedule tend to always vote, where younger, busier people sometimes skip it. Making the election seem dishonest and ugly always helps conservative candidates, and Trump exploited this to the utmost.  His constant lies about Hillary and their half-hearted repudiation by the media made a lot of voters think there was something actually wrong with Hillary.  Trump was awful, but Hillary, somehow, was worse in their minds.  A pox on both your houses they said, and either voted for the liar or didn't vote at all. Turnout was down about 7M relative to the election of 2008.   The vast majority of those who didn't turn out tend to vote D...probably 4-5 million Hillary votes.

Gerrymandering and Undrerrepresentation

A lot of people have come to recognize that Gerrymandering (the chopping up of political districts such that a favored party has a dominant majority) is a big problem in a lot of states.  A few states have tried to address this with nonpartisan or bipartisan districting commissions, with rules about irregular border and a few other things, but nothing really works.

A separate but related problem is that the present two party system strongly protects those two parties and does not allow third parties.  The libertarian and green party both have several percent of the voters, but do not hold a single seat of the 435 in congress.

My idea is that the delegation that each state sends to the congress must contain a partisan mix corresponding to the actual party vote in that state's US congress elections.   So, for example, a state has 10 districts, and the statewide vote is 40% Democrat, 40% Republican, 10% Libertarian, 10% Green, the states delegation must be 4Ds, 4Rs, 1L, 1G.  How the state chooses to implement this is up to the state.  Fixing Gerrymandering would be a start, but it does nothing for the parties that have significant votership, but no clear plurality anywhere.   My thinking would be to reduce the number of districts to 8 and have two "at large" candidates for the two smaller parties. 

Perhaps a better option would be to have even fewer districts--say, 5--and have the other 5 selected at large based on getting fair representation.  If some of those districts are severely gerrymandered, one of the two majorities may be getting severely underrepresented, and at-large representatives could be used to fix the balance.

The way voting would work would be you'd have your district elections as always, and there would also be an at-large election.  Candidates for the districts would also be allowed to run in the at large.  You specify (vote for) your party, and then you vote for a district candidate, and some number of at-large candidates according to the number at large seats available.   If a party needs at-large representatives, the at-large votes from voters matching that party would be tallied to select the candidate--the top vote getter from voters of that party would get the seat.  This would allow voters to cross party lines.