Maggie's Farm

There needs to be more prison time for this kind of thing. The Florida debacle shows people aren't nearly scared enough about getting caught.

When I was an election judge, I adopted the approach I learned from the election judge I trained under, which was to be fanatical about ballot security. One or twice in my entire experience I was off by a single ballot at the end of the day when I obsessively matched the number of voters who signed in and the number of ballots missing from my original pristine, serially numbered pile. I personally signed every ballot to guard against the introduction of "extra" ballots, as required by Texas law. There's is zero, and I mean ZERO excuse, for this business of not being able to account for the total number of ballots by the end of election day. It sure as heck wouldn't happen in my county, let alone my own precinct.

This is one reason I distrust e-voting--no paper trail. The upside is supposed to be that it takes a smarter person to hack the e-vote machine than to fiddle the paper ballots during the excruciating process of looking for stray boxes of ballots for days or weeks after the election. Maybe. But there should be criminal penalties for "losing" boxes of ballots. It's pretty straightforward to keep track of them if you're even minimally honest.