A rational judge! And she was appointed by Clinton!

The mail-in “ballots” in California used to have a signature line on the envelope (the one that brought the ballot to my house) below the following statements:

I certify the I am the person named on the ballot envelope.

I certify that I live at the address printed on the ballot envelope.

I certify that I am LEGALLY ELIGIBLE to vote in this election.

That last one… It’s no longer on the envelope… ‘Wonder why…

This cheating thing… It’s REAL, folks…

Here’s the thing that gets me… We know election fraud has been a problem for a long time (hence the jokes about the dead voting in Chicago.) So why hasn’t there been a massive push to tighten up the requirements on voting registration and voting such that fraud is pretty much impossible? (Yeah yeah, because the politicians want it this way, I know.)

Elections Canada has a pretty simple system that works reasonably well:

1. Voters are registered in advance (you can tick off a box on your taxes that says you grant the CCRA permission to send your contact info and citizenship info over to Elections Canada, or you can do it manually.)
2. Prior to election day, you’re mailed a voter’s info card which you should bring to your polling station (where you physically vote.)
3. Advance voting and official-voting-day: Bring your voter’s info card and/or government issued picture-id. They check your picture against your face, check the address on the ID against their polling station list of all valid voters that can show up there to vote, cross your name off the list, pull a ballot from the book, write the serial # of the ballot next to your name in their records, tear off the serial number and put it in the serial number box, and then hand you the now unserialized ballot, which you go mark behind a privacy shield, fold, and put it in the ballot box.

If you want to vote at a polling station that isn’t assigned to you, you can, but you have to swear out an affidavit that this is the only vote you’re casting, and why you’re not voting at your assigned voting station. Any affidavits are then checked in the weeks after the election ballots are counted, and if they find you voted twice or more, you’re going to have some explaining to do. (And yes, we have prosecuted people for this.)

Each polling station counts the ballots and allows a representative from each party to be there to observe and object if a ballot is spoiled, not marked correctly, etc… If all agree on how a ballot is marked, it’s counted to the candidate/party as marked. The numbers are tallied and sent up to the riding (you know this as a district.) The Ridings send their tallies upstream to Election Canada who totals them and that’s it. It can all be done in a day.

The ridings can compare the totals they sent with what Election Canada publishes, so theoretically there’s no “magic numbers” showing up out of nowhere (no electronic ballot box stuffing tricks.)

The serial numbers and lists of voters prevent physical ballot box stuffing because if you have more votes than you do serial number tabs, you have fraud, plus you have the list of voters with hand-recorded serial numbers, so you can’t just stuff extra boxes of serial numbers + extra boxes of votes.

It may not be perfect (nothing is) but it seems to work pretty well.

Now nothing changes the fact that 99% of all politicians are lawyers, and most of the people doing the voting… aren’t. Never liked that fact, because it means people used to gaming the legal system are responsible for writing the law. Fox. Henhouse. Yeah. Different issue though.