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Trumps Bogus Election Rigging Claims

08/23/2016 09:42 am ET | Updated Aug 23, 2016

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Inge Fryklund
JD, PhD. Former Chicago prosecutor, international development
professional, and member, Board of Directors, Law Enforcement Against
Prohibition (LEAP)

Trump has warned that the election process is rigged, and if he loses, it will
mean the election was stolen from him.
How does Trump think election rigging would actually occur?
We already know that voter impersonation (allowing one person to vote
multiple times), while possible, is just about non-existent. A recent study
found 31 incidents of voter impersonation out of a billion votes cast between
2000 and 2014. Not exactly enough to cause a Trump loss.
Perhaps Trump means that there would be ballot box stung, or fraud in the
count, or his votes switched to Hillary Clinton. Widespread vote rigging of this
sort, however, is flat out impossible because the U.S. does not have a unified
national election system.
We have a massively decentralized and locally controlled hodgepodge of

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election systems, with roughly 9,000 separate city and county election
jurisdictions. Every state has its own rules about how voters are registered,
how voter eligibility is established at the polls (photo ID, signature
comparison, personal knowledge, etc.), and how the vote is tabulated (in the
polling station, at some central location). The voting process itself (paper
ballot, punch card, electronic of various types) varies even within a state.
Maybe Trump means that a vast conspiracy covering hundreds of polling
stations will occur. But that is impossible given the way elections are
monitored.
Party and candidate observers (good government watchdogs too) are
allowed by law to observe and report on the voting and counting process.
The Republican and Democratic parties are already prepared to deploy
observers come November. Third parties may also field observers. In a

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presidential election year, all Congressional Representatives, one third of the

Senate, and a wide variety of state and local ocials are on the ballot. Every
candidate has a powerful interest in using observers to guard against

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shenanigans on the part of opponents.

Observers typically have a copy of the voter list for the polling place, and
check o voters as they arrive. This guards against duplicate voting. If the
party or candidate has already identified likely supporters, workers can spend

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the afternoon chasing down their missing voters, perhaps driving them to
the polls or oering to babysit.
Observers keep a close count of the total number of people both for and

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against their party who turn out to vote. At the end of the day, when votes

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are counted in the polling station, with all observers watching like hawks, the
grand total of counted ballots has to be reconciled against the number of
issued ballots and people who came to vote. This plethora of observers is

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very dierent from what I saw in Afghanistan, where a complete absence of

observers (and voters) in insecure rural areas allowed massive ballot box
stung by election ocials.

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As the counts for each oce are announced, observers immediately phone
results in to their respective headquarters, which aggregate totals to produce
city, county or statewide results. (For the Presidential race, state law
determines how the statewide vote translates into votes in the Electoral
College.) If the ocial totals do not match observer totals, candidates
immediately demand an investigation and use social media to complain.
Preventing election rigging is a very local process with a lot of checks and
balances.
Given how American elections work, which Trump undoubtedly understands,
why is he pushing a false narrative about massive fraud? As we used to say
in Chicago, he is laying a mattress in case he loses. However, deliberately
undermining faith in our perfectly serviceable decentralized electoral
processes in order to save face is hardly showing the concern for this country
and its institutions that we should expect from a president.
The author has worked and done fraud investigation in Chicago, the Balkans
and Afghanistan.
Follow Inge Fryklund on Twitter: www.twitter.com/IngeFryklund

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