Buying Votes for Cigarettes

This weekend I picked up the new copy of John Fund's book, Stealing Elections, Revised and Updated: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy. Glenn and I had interviewed Fund for a podcast on voter fraud in October of 2006 and he had some pretty interesting things to say. You can read the transcript here (you will have to scroll down the page and click on "more" to get it). But here are some highlights from Fund in that interview that may be relevant to the upcoming election:

Well, in my book, "Stealing Elections," I basically say we have two problems. We have what political scientist, Walter Dean Burnham, calls the sloppiest election system of any industrialized democracy and because of that sloppiness people with bad motives have often a very easy time finagling the system, adding votes or subtracting votes. Sometimes you can’t tell where the sloppiness ends and where the fraud begins.

I do know that there’s a lot more scrutiny and the general public believes that there’s more fraud, if you look at the Zogby poll or the Rasmussen poll. Something like about twelve percent of Americans don’t believe their ballots are counted properly or the votes are stolen so that their ballots are invalidated.

In the introduction of his recent book, Fund points out that voter fraud can be found all over the US:

Election fraud, whether it's phony voter registrations, illegal absentee ballots, shady recounts, or old-fashioned ballot box stuffing, can be found in every part of the United States, although it is probably spreading because of the ever-so-tight divisions that have polarized the country and created so many close elections lately. Although most fraud is found in urban areas, there are current scandals in rural Texas and Minnesota.... Wisconsin officials convicted a New York heiress who was working for Al Gore by giving homeless people cigarettes if they rode in a van to the polls and voted.

Frankly, if I was homeless and someone did that to me, I would take the cigarettes and write in Philip Morris on the ballot.