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Polling Booth
Your sword
is the power of your vote. Your shield is the polling booth.
The shield will fail to protect your vote from
the cheats and thieves who lay siege to every election if
those, who run elections, are like three blind mice.
They see no
evil, hear no evil, speak no evil.
What do
experienced election veterans say?
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Australian Prime Minister, Billy Hughes, 50 years a
member of Parliament Fraud occurs in every election
in Australia.
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Pat
Bradley CBE OBE, Chief Electoral Officer in Northern
Ireland, and election inspector for the United Nations
in 22 countries, said I have never seen an election
where there was no fraud.
What Fraud Would You Expect to Occur in a Polling Booth?
Impersonation a person pretends to be someone else
This is to
gain a ballot paper by false identification on the electoral
roll.
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Someone
legitimately enrolled but known to be absent
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A real
person who has died
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A real
person who has moved to another electorate but has not
re-enrolled there
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A
person likely to be voting at another booth in the
electorate
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A
person known not to vote for religious reasons
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A
person who is a known non-voter for other reasons.
Ballot stuffing voting more than once in the same name
This
involves acquiring multiple ballot papers.
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A voter
could take his ballot paper out of the booth to a
copying machine and produce multiple copies to palm into
a ballot box. This is possible in Australia where the
same coloured paper can be bought from common stock and
water-marked paper is no longer used.
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A voter
could be marked off in multiple booths to gain multiple
papers.
People managing or counting votes in booths
An election
is as honest as those managing them. Otherwise, fraud can
occur.
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By
stacking them incorrectly 10 votes for one party over
90 for another
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By
spoiling them with old tricks like the pencil under the
thumb
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By
conjuring some ballots into bag or pockets in a close
election (one seat was won by 7 votes in the 2007
federal election in Australia)
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By
merely counting them incorrectly
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By
filling out extra papers in a back room during voting.
Assisted voting due to language, illness or blindness
The vote
recorded is not necessarily for the candidate the voter
preferred.
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Where
votes are recorded through electronic or mechanical
means, the voting machinery maybe altered so that a vote
intended for one candidate is recorded for another.
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An
immigrant, who relies on a relative to explain the
choices, may also have his/her vote used and abused.
You may
well ask why, if the polling booth can be breached by so
many cheats, thieves and rogues, how it protects you at all.
The answer is that it protects your vote far better than any
other device yet invented to prevent fraud in elections.
That is why it is used in parliamentary elections world-wide
today.
So why do
they allow enough people to vote outside a polling booth:
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Where
the votes cast are not secret votes
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They
are not protected from fraud as adequately
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They
can wholly decide the result of a single or entire
election.
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