- JB
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“It's almost irrelevant,” said Dan Sileo, professor of psychology at the University of New Hampshire and an expert on voter fraud. “Because of where we are now, the only people who could plausibly think that they could win an election by voter fraud, would be people who are either insane or would be motivated to use fraud to further some kind of agenda that they've been pursuing for some reason.”
With most voting jurisdictions using paperless machines, Sileo said, “It’s very hard for you to fake someone out,” if you know how to use a machine.
“If someone wants to vote and they have a good reason, they're not going to be stopped,” said Sileo, who also teaches online courses on voting integrity and compliance. “But if someone is just trying to cheat, if they are just trying to cheat without any particular agenda, I think that they're going to be stopped.”
The only way a fraudster would ever be able to cheat, said Sileo, would be if they had intimate knowledge of the workings of a voting machine or if they were able to get inside the voting booth and physically modify it. Even in that case, it would be easy to catch.
“I've never heard of a case of that kind of fraud in New Hampshire,” said Sileo. “I think it would be very easy to catch if it happened.”
The only way a fraudster could get away with it, Sileo said, would be if they had a lot of money.
“If it was really big, if it was really well-funded and organized, you know, if it was the kind of thing that was going to require a lot of money, then you could maybe think about it,” he said. “But I think that's the only way that it would happen.”
Sileo thinks that the best way to safeguard against vote fraud is for states to have paper ballots, precinct by precinct, so voters can see how their votes are tallied, whether they were counted correctly and, if they were not, why not.
And then there’s the biggest reason to ensure that our elections are as honest as possible: voters want the vote they cast to count.
"People
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