Electoral fraud

Electoral fraud is illegal interference with the process of an election. Acts of fraud tend to involve affecting vote counts to bring about a desired election outcome, either by increasing the vote share of the favored candidate or depressing the vote share of the rival candidates.

Unsourced

• It's not the votes that count. It's who counts the votes.
  • Josef Stalin

• You won the election, but I won the count.
  • Anastasio Somoza, Nicaraguan leader, in 1977.

• Elections have been used in the past to cover up inherently non-democratic processes. Stalin had elections, as did Hitler. So did Saddam Hussein. The Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and Ba'athist Iraq were not burgeoning democracies, but totalitarian dictatorships. The point here is that elections don't bring democracy.
  • Scott Ritter

• Why is it, when 638 people voted at a precinct in Franklin County, a voting machine awarded 4,258 extra votes to George Bush? Thankfully, they fixed it, but how many other votes did the computers get wrong?
  • Barbara Boxer

• There will never be a voting machine, that is proof of tampering by itself.
  • Herbert Schulze Geiping, managing director of HSG Wahlsysteme GmbH / Nedap Germany

• Trust is good, control is impossible.
  • Tim Pritlove, CCC member, on the voting machines used in german elections.

• Either democracy disposes black box voting or black box voting disposes democracy.
  • Rop Gonggrijp on Black Box Voting

• My provisional view is that the council was engaged in gerrymandering, which I am minded to find is a disgraceful and improper purpose and not a purpose for which a local authority may act.
  • Andrew Hosken, "Nothing Like a Dame" (Granta Books, 2006), p. 312.
  • John Magill, District Auditor of the City of Westminster, announcing his preliminary findings of an Audit into the accounts of the City for 1986/87 at a press conference on 13 January 1994. The House of Lords upheld the final Audit findings in 2001.

• I know who I voted for. They also know. But only they know who received my vote.
  • Amilcar Brunazo Filho

• No one votes unassisted on a computer; everyone is "assisted" by anonymous programmers.
  • Mark Ortiz, former candidate for U.S. Representative North Carolina, 8th District