Been following this for quite some time --others are too.

I remain only moderately confident in our current process as a whole. My concerns largely surround both having an enduring record of the votes cast (paper ballots), and the management of those records through final tally. (custody)

Since this issue first came to a head, there have been successful fraud cases proven in the courts. Most of these proven would have had a minor impact on the election at best, and that's perhaps the biggest argument the critics have.

The other one is that most fraud is not directly linked to any specific campaign.

And I agree with that one.

This article highlights where the core of the trouble is right now. (custody)

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080221-analysis-evotings-success-rests-on -chain-of-custody-issue.html

If we set aside the tech, and just focus on the chains of trust possible within existing law, we have a fairly significant problem in many areas of the country.

Combine that with the extreme difficulty prosecuting and getting access to the people and processes used, and we've got a situation where bad things can happen.

Where they can happen, they will happen. This is one of the core truisms of security. Of course another truism is that security is all about prevention, and that's not perfect. It's also about good records keeping so that a breech and it's impact can be known quickly, ideally so that it can be remedied quickly.

Additionally, there are some things being confused, making this issue difficult. Let's talk about voter fraud -vs- election fraud.

The former is all about the mechanics of people actually voting. Voting more than one time, in more than one place, under more than one name, etc...

IMHO, from all I've seen and researched, this has happened since we've had elections and is not statistically significant, but for caging efforts. Those are actually a prosecution problem more than anything else.

Election fraud is the bigger issue. The electronic stuff only magnifies this. To be clear, we've had this too and sometimes it's significant, most of the time it isn't. (or so we think, I'm not really sure as the transparency is not there in a lot of cases, or comes long after the fact, which is kind of the same thing)

One very serious difficulty surrounding effective advocacy on this issue is establishing clear motive. The campaigns haven't demonstrated they are at fault. Neither have the party establishment, though both have engaged in caging.

After reading recent posts on this, and doing some thinking about my own worries, I think perhaps I've got something to tie this together!

Poor chains of custody make the process vulnerable to poor ethics. Most of our election law is good enough to deal with the process. Make no mistake in that I remain convinced we don't need so much tech, but that can actually wait to be proven out, given we address custody issues.

In a nutshell, I think the problem lies with people more focused on their issue than in maintaining the process itself. Let's take the 23 percenters for example:

Many of them subscribe to a personal authority that lies above the system. Many of them have issues they value above all else.

These things unbalance the ethics required to make the process work for everyone and the lack of solid chains of custody and trust give them places to act.

If these people are in positions where they can act, it's likely some of them will. (and have in recent elections)

Recent party politics have shown a high degree of unity on some messages, meaning there does not need to be a central authority forcing these actions. It can be grass roots, "for the greater good" kinds of acts.

Going back through recent fraud claims and claims of untrustworthy results eventually leads to a custody problem, and that's usually where the cases peter out. Records lost, shuffled, not know to be definitive.

Small amounts everywhere, but few large enough to really say, "hey, they flipped it!" That's the backbone of the "let's just have an election and not worry about this crap" push being seen.

That's also a very good reason to push for large votes, so that elections are not so close as to make these things significant.

Agreed on that, in that more voting more often is generally good for the process and for us.

However, I do think it's worth thinking about the very large number of close elections and their significance. Distributed efforts, like those I've alluded to here, are significant when taken as a whole.

Combine that with some unspoken, "for the greater good" kinds of reasoning, and there is a case for election reform.