Election fraud?

Does anybody believe that systematic election fraud has been committed? The answer is yes, to judge from the storm of comments and anecdotes blowing over the blogosphere.
We should remember that our constitution does not promise exact elections, but "fair" elections. Now "fair" can be both an innocuous word and a loaded ideogram. It may mean fair to all parties, to all voters, or to all and sundry. No system, let us face it, can be set up to guarantee 100% objectivity. The best that can be expected from any system is that it satisfies a majority of the participants.

The electoral system is the heart of the Democracy. Therefore it has to satisfy a majority of the individuals that participate in that Democracy. The workings of the Democracy are provided by the population: they manage and work the polls, they vote and adjudicate the votes. We cannot simply confront the system and talk of "them"; "them" is us.

Which means that, in order to understand the workings and outcomes we should engage in more than just pulling the lever and then going home to criticize the outcome. "I voted for my guy and s/he did not win. Ludicrous! The system is corrupt!" Into this state of mind flow torrents of anecdotal evidence of malfunctions, malicious interference, misperceptions and plain muddles.

The election system in every state depends on a balance of bipartisan actors, poll workers, county and state boards of elections (each party represented at each level) checking each other out, and jointly deciding outcomes, sometimes disputatiously, sometimes not. The authority of the topmost official in that pyramid rests less with the appointing predominant party, than in the perception of the fairness of his/her decisions. To what extent can a Republican Secretary of State (as in Florida) sway the election results by administrative measures in the thick of a mangrove of bipartisan election officers, watching jealously over their parcel of power, however small.?

The parties, and the campaigns, will obviously try to nudge and game the system to their advantage by a myriad of devices (redistricting, regulations, registrations, etc.) using the resources of power available to them. Due to the nature of the system the results will always be incremental, never momentous.

Given the size of the system (a 200 million electorate), the diverse locations and differing mechanisms and procedures, what seems a torrent sizes down to trickles, amplified by repetition.

A deliberate and massive subversion of the polls would require a conspiracy of multitudes, cooperating up and down the hierarchy of electoral decision trees.

But, as I have pointed out before, a danger, a decisive danger looms. By adopting electronic voting machines the Democracy is outsourcing and privatising its very heart: the vote count. Electronic voting is with us to stay. For-profit privately-owned corporations are writing the code by which the machines tabulate the individual votes into an aggregate that will determine the outcome of elections. As long as the code remains the property of the machine manufacturers, shielded from scrutiny by proprietary copyright concerns, the appearance of the possibility of fraud will loom very large over the system.

The various manufacturers of voting machines have an interest in being perceived as nonpartisan, indifferent to voting outcomes, mere tools of Democracy. To foster that perception they have to find a way of certifying their software, open up the code that runs their machines as is being done increasingly in the general software world, or providing a reliable way to replicate the voting results by external means, such as a printed individual paper receipt stored within the machine that would enable a recount. The state assemblies around the country have to come up with procedures of conformity to be followed by potential vendors to ensure minimum standards. If they fail to do that they will have hollowed out the core of their legitimacy: the trust in the electoral outcomes.