Other ways to depress turnout require confederates in control of the voting apparatus so that the allotment of facilities to conduct the election can be skewed to reduce availability of those facilities in selected areas to make voting more difficult and increased in those areas that the fraudulent candidate sees as more solidly in his favor.
Then there is good old-fashioned election fraud. In this age, the intention to engage in election fraud is frequently telegraphed by the dishonest candidate's admonishments against, or intention to oppose, voter fraud, a crime that is astonishingly rare, but played up by those who wish to deceive the electorate
The methods for election fraud are many, but in this day the most common is the manipulation of data streams from those eminently hackable electronic voting machines, especially those without a paper trail to provide a check on the electronic results. Of course, election fraud has always been with us, sometimes elevated to an artform as in the electoral depredations of Tammany Hall.
It's what inspired Josef Stalin to say, "It's not the people who vote that counts, it's who counts the votes." We may safely conclude from this that Josef Stalin didn't have much trust in democracy.
Up to now, I have been leaving it to the reader to conclude who does and who does not trust democracy, understanding that they are well capable of rendering that judgment, but to refrain from naming names seems like an act of ignoring the elephant in the room. We all know that these various cheats and frauds are those that are predominantly employed by Republicans in this century, so I might as well make the general statement, Republicans do not trust democracy, and they have good reason not to.
They understand as well as anyone that the direction in which they intend to move the country is one that is unacceptable to a free and open society. To trust in democracy is to take part in their own destruction, and they will not countenance that without employing every dirty trick, telling every lie and violating every public trust and every applicable law to advance their narrowly selfish aims.
It is up to us, the People of the United States, to perpetuate our democracy, our values and our society by stepping into a voting booth and choosing candidates who do trust democracy. By doing so we can make our democracy worthy of the trust that we all place in it.(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
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