Makes you wonder how many illegal aliens, dead people, and other equally ineligible voters would likewise disappear if each state enacted strong voter ID laws.
And if we were actually serious about voter fraud, we would of course demand that all voting machines would have real audit trails.
But curiously, for some strange reason, people who loudly display the most concern about the integrity of our voting system never have much to say about either of those issues...
The drawback is that sometimes it can take hours to count the votes.
It's still not 100% perfect. The ScanTron machines are really accurate but there is still a <1% error rate in ballots and in a really close election you will get some variation from doing it a second time. And then you get the idiots who filled in two bubbles, or connect the dot, and so on, and who knows what happens there. Hopefully just a rejected ballot but who knows. The usual recourse if a machine screws up during the test is an upset student coming to talk to the professor but you don't have any way of validating how your ballot was counted.
The problem is that when you start letting humans interpret a contested election it all still goes to shit real quick. You suddenly have lawyers fighting to interpret what each individual voter meant with each individual ballot and it just takes forever. We tried that with the 2000 election and it sucked pretty hard. In the end it may be the most accurate but it literally takes months to play out even with just a disputed county or two, let alone a whole state/province.
Constitutionally, we hold elections on "the first Monday after the second Tuesday of November" and the electoral college (which actually counts) votes on "the first Monday after the second Wednesday in December". No I am not making this up, they are based on arcane 18th-century logic about when farmers would be done with harvest and what day they could come into town and shit like that.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Election_Day_(United_States)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_College_(United_Stat...
Anyway, the point is there's a hard constitutional date limit and the only way you go past that is the Supreme Court pulling an equal-protection ruling about how halting the recount would invalidate people's votes. Which just comes down to a party-line ruling anyway, like it did in 2000 when they halted the recount.
Not that a party line vote means it's an invalid or unscrupulous election. It's quite expected the team stands together. It'd take something really extraordinary to get a defector.
Anyway, the president in 1876 wasn't determined until March 1877. http://elections.harpweek.com/09Ver2Controversy/DayByDay.htm
Edit: It's much better to fallback on a parliamentary process like this, where we can only blame ourselves for having voted in X team to be in Congress, thus making the decision should there be a contested election. When it shifts to who can convince judges to do recounts is when it becomes totally nebulous like a flip of the coin, rather than an "oh well that's unsurprising".
But no doubt there would be all kinds of outcry about faithless electors should the Electoral College on Dec 19 end up picking someone other than Donald in a way that departs from the expected outcome, even though that's the actual #1 reason why Madison and Hamilton went with the Electoral College system - that voters could get it wrong. Giving less populated states effectively more than 1 vote for 1 person, was a far lesser consideration.
Taxes involve real money.
By analogy, it's as asking someone to be a drug mule, and if they're successful they get to wait in an extra line at the DMV. Would you take that deal?
https://web.archive.org/web/20090124050328/http://www.factch...
The intention was to keep people (read: southerners and Republicans) from using a sharpie to mark out every LaQuan and Shanice who registered to vote, but the flip side of that is that they have to let people register as Mickey Mouse too. And they get paid for every signature they turn in regardless.
Shocker right here: a lot of those registrations are bad and Mickey Mouse doesn't actually turn up to vote.
Considering the polls (no, the polls weren't that wrong for the election results, the analysis was).... the only way we are in this universe is if all polling organisations are also in on this.
Considering states + cities run elections, this would mean several tens of thousands of people would need to be in on this plot too.
A conspiracy which requires conplicity of tens of thousands of stakeholders seems a bit unlikely.
There's an alternative "many independent conspiracies " view, but smaller conspiracies would be more fragile to single whistleblowers. If one congressman were winning through vote fraud, one person with a bit of evidence would be enough for there to be real coverage (unless the media's in on it, but see prev. paragraph)