Election Essay

In John Fund’s reflection, the Department of Investigation went through a procedure to see how easy it was to commit voter fraud. The DOI had sent out agents to show up at 63 polling places all who “pretended to be voters who should have been turned away by election officials; the agents assumed names of individuals who had died or moved out of town, or who were sitting in jail. 61 instances, or 97 percent of the time, the testers were allowed to vote.” (Fund, pg 353) After gathering this evidence that voter fraud was possible and way easier than it seemed, they published a report which accused the city’s Board of Elections voting

As in the past, the media was covering the all important election. They had always relied on exit polls as the polls closed across the nation. In reality, the Florida results were just too close to call. Nevertheless, that did not stop the media from doing so. Not once, but twice, major news media outlets were erroneous in their report. Around 8pm, it was declared that Al Gore was the projected winner of the electoral votes in the state of Florida. However, a couple of hours later, the projection was retracted and restated as Florida as being too close to call. Then, just after 2am on November 8, the mistake was made for a second time. The major networks declared George W. as the winner. This even led to Al Gore calling the Governor to concede. However, as Gore prepared to address his supporters in Nashville, Tennessee, he was alert to the shrinking numbers in Bush¡¦s lead. The final total was now less than one half of a percent lead in favor of Bush. That immediately calls for a recount of votes under state law. Subsequently, Gore called Bush and retracted his concession. It wasn¡¦t over yet! One thing was, Al Gore had prevailed in the popular vote but without Florida¡¦s tally, the electoral vote was up in the air. The election wasn¡¦t over and the recounts began.

This lead to the exclusion of several thousands of votes that could have potentially won Gore the election, and their exclusion was enough to grant some semblance of moral high ground against the Republican opposition. The Democrats made the claim that they should have been allowed to vote under florida law, but any attempts to allow them their vote proved fruitless. After extensive decrying of the Republican party, the Democrats were soon found to be the target of several improper allegations themselves. A number of “Overvotes” had been detected on several ballots of other counties, and this lead the Republicans to accuse the Democrats of voter fraud and the inclusion of illegal votes. The continuous stream of slander from both sides dragged on ad nauseum, interrupted only by a series of supreme court decisions presumably brought about by the influence the Republican party has on them. Everything from attempts to exclude armed service votes to changing the criteria for vote counting were employed, and to great

That year, we had a highly disputed presidential election. Following its outcome, the United States Congress passed the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) in 2002, which ushered in comprehensive election reform. Under the law, states are required to follow mandatory minimum standards that included implementing new programs and procedures such as provisional voting; voting information and voter education; upgraded, tested and certified voting technology; statewide voter registration list; voter identification procedures; and an improved election administration system ("Help America Vote Act"). The Commission on Federal Election Reform advocated similar propositions in their 2005 report (69-70).

This year’s Democratic National Committee server breach attempts to compromise Hillary Clinton’s chance of becoming the first women to receive the United States presidency. The focus here will be on the motives behind the D.N.C. breach, whose systems are at risk, long and short term consequences of this breach, and how this breach could have been avoided. There are two theories on the motives behind the network breach. After the breach, there is an extreme likelihood that any system within the 2016 presidency campaign is or will be violated. Short-term consequences includes Hillary Clinton losing the race for the U.S. presidency. Long-term consequences in the United States include a continuing pattern of distrust between the citizens and federal government. Creating and implementing procedures that avoid phishing e-mails, social engineering tactics, and spoofed web logins could have saved the DNC from the public’s outrage over the D.N.C.’s leaked e-mails.

Ultimately many more instances were leading factors to the questionable, unsolved legitimacy of the election, which will never get closure, only closure that the ballots will obtain are that of the closed boxes in which they lay wrapped away in a

D) Are there any common features among the alleged poisonings? The most common feature in the alleged poisonings is that all the victims were anti-Kremlin however they cover a broad spectrum range from Russian journalists, lawyers, businesspeople, to Russian and foreign politicians. There are a few targets that have been, “longtime, self-declared foes of the Russian

National Voter Registration Day (NVRD) is the second largest organization that encourages voter registration through social media. In 2008, NVRD reported that six million Americans didn’t vote because they missed the voter registration deadline. NVRD use their website for online voter registration, share events, and provides general tool-kits for any social media platform. They engage and register voters by making the process easier to share and complete online. For Twitter, users can share tweets developed by NVRD to inform users Twitter friends about Voter Registration Day. They also provide social media graphics that are embedded with links to their website to educate eligible voters and mobilize volunteers.

In the past four months, the United States has been acclimating to the Trump administration. Since election day the Trump White House has been plagued with in house fighting, confrontations with the press, and various allegations (Huetteman). In addition to the in house problems, there are numerous global concerns. First of all, many people are suspicious of Russian hacking and involvement in the 2016 presidential election. The extent of the hacking and it involvement of the Trump campaign is now under investigation, where “the top Republican and Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee vowed to forge ahead by interviewing key players connected to Mr. Trump and pressing intelligence agencies to provide all relevant information,” (Huetteman).

“Given that someone who is dead, is in jail, or has moved isn’t likely to complain if someone votes in his name, how do we know that voter fraud at the polls isn’t a problem?” (Fund, 1) With the amount of the general public that have been held accountable for committing voter fraud I can say that it exists. The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now is an organization that, while it intentions are for the good and public, has been known for participating in several cases of criminal activities, during election their members are arrested for voter

Since July of 2016, the FBI has been investigating the Russian government’s attempts to influence the past election, including whether there was any collusion with Trump’s campaign to hurt Hillary Clinton’s chances at the presidency.

We also seriously concerned about the potential for voter fraud in elections conducted by mail. A state with Louisiana’s political history would be fertile ground for that.

When Trump’s campaign was just taking off, “a 35 page dossier written by an ex British Intelligence agent compiled many allegations about Trump and Russia, even including that Russia had blackmail over Trump” (Osnos et al. 4). Senator of Arizona, John McCain, “passed the dossier to the FBI in hopes of an investigation being placed on Trump” (Osnos et al. 5). This was the start of Trump’s vengeance toward director of FBI, James Comey. When the dossier was released to the public, Trump and Putin had some words to say about it. They both “portrayed the dossier as a fake and full of false accusations” (Osnos et al. 3). This made the accusations of Trump and Russia being the arbitrators behind the hacking more evident than before (Osnos et al).

One of the many upsides to electronic voting is the fact that the voting process speeds up. Now there is a machine doing all the counting and sending out all the information, people don’t have to count the votes by hand and send out the information themselves anymore. There is also the fact that basic election faults, like picking too many or no candidates can also be stopped easily by the machines themselves. Ballot tampering is also reduced as a problem in voting fraud because of electronic voting (Espinoza and Lin, 2007). In a place like Eaton County though, there really is no need for electronic ballots. It is not a huge place to be in the first place, and once again it would be a waste of time and money to do something like

“Vote counting is one of the most crucial stages in the election process. Failure to complete the count and transmit results in a quick, transparent and accurate manner can jeopardize public confidence in the elections and will directly affect whether candidates and political parties accept the final results.” (The ACE Encyclopedia)