Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
Maybe this will come across as yet another Australian telling the Yanks how to suck eggs at this democracy thing (because I&#x27;m sure you haven&#x27;t had enough of us tut-tutting you about your gun laws or health system), but I believe there are several key factors that mitigate against large-scale electoral fraud in Australia.<p>1. We have a single federal, non-partisan (ie. beauracratic not political) electoral commission, governed by federal laws that ensure that every federal election is managed the same way, uniformly across the federation (doesn&#x27;t matter what state you are in). The Australian Electoral Commission is truly the jewel in our democracy. Check out <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aec.gov.au&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.aec.gov.au&#x2F;</a><p>2.  We don&#x27;t use voting machines. Our system (whether via polling booth or postal) is entirely paper based. We have one of the slowest counts in the western world but also one of the most accurate. A slow count isn&#x27;t an indicator of fraud - it&#x27;s an indicator that the system is working.<p>3. We have compulsory voting. As another commenter pointed out, one fraud vector is harvesting real people&#x27;s votes when those people haven&#x27;t actually voted. Compulsory voting largely eliminates this vector. It also has the benefit of &quot;centralising&quot; the political compass as most people tend to be fairly reasonable. In optional voting systems, the political distribution is skewed to the edges due to the correlation of motivation-to-vote with more-extreme-political-position. Do you want to encourage centrists and discourage extremists? Implement compulsory voting.<p>4. We have preferential voting i.e. candidates are ranked. It&#x27;s not the candidate with the greatest primary vote that wins the parliamentary seat for that electoral area, its the candidate that is &quot;most preferred&quot; i.e. garners the greatest overall preferences compared to other candidates. e.g. in the recent election some government MPs lost their seats even though they had a higher primary vote, because the rest of that electorate preferred the other gal&#x2F;guy. I may vote Green as my first preference but my 2nd preference is for the Labour person and then the climate-change independent candidate ahead of the incumbent.<p>But like so many other things in the US, the cultural history of the primacy of the individual&#x27;s right to vote or not, and the primacy of the states to define their own rules for how elections are run, along with the benefit to the political duopoly of your current system, means the chances of the US implementing any of the above is probably close to zero. Then again what do I know? Literally a month before the Soviet union fell apart I insisted to my then-girlfriend who was Lithuanian, that they would never be free and to stop wishing for fairy tale endings.