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Stealing elections is a full time industry. As one of the lecturers in a course that I took on Responsibilities of Election day workers said: RECOUNTS ARE WON BEFORE THE ELECTION NOT AFTER!

1. In one election, the line with the candidate names was slipped one position to the right. Therefore no votes were cast for the leading name on that line in some of the districts. That candidate received NO votes in that district.

2. In one election that I worked, the person in charge of Election Integrity received Court permission to spot check the voting machines BEFORE they left the county warehouse where the machines are stored. (20) machines were checked from districts where suspicious results happened in prior elections. (7) of the machines were found to have non-zero totals. Instead they were set to 950 to 980 (1000 vote counter). This meant that the first votes would not count until enough votes were cast to bring the counter to 000. This also meant that the TOTAL VOTE counter for the machine would not be less than the number of votes received by any candidate.

3. It is important to make sure that any candidate challenger know the common non-English language of the district. I worked in an election where we had prepared for this. The person running the voting machine was telling voters who the preferred candidate was, in his non-English language. The incident was recorded with copies filed with the on site election official, the County Board of elections and the candidate campaign staff. The forms were prepared in triplicate before the election. The paper trail is essential in all challenges and recounts.

There are many more examples and rest assured that the introduction of new electronic machines will spur the adoption of different schemes to rig an election. The industry is alive and well.

I remember being a poll worker at a polling place in San Francisco where bus-loads of elderly Chinese (wearing buttons for the Dem candidate) were brought in by a radical union and handed over to a legally permitted Chinese-speaking “assistant” who showed them on a paper who to vote for and in some cases even went into the voting booth with them to “help” them. There was nothing we could do about it.

It’s a little harder to get away with this in Spanish, because more non-immigrants speak or read it, but it’s very easy in a place that has a large group of immigrants in a less-familiar language, such as a Chinese dialect, an Arabic language, Creole, etc. And it happens every election.