Rigging presidential elections — or just about any election — is a lot harder than some people apparently believe.
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To some extent, of course, that depends on the definition of “rigging.” But just about everyone who knows anything about U.S. elections says the sort of systematic fraud and manipulation suggested by Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is, for all practical purposes, impossible.
“This election is not being rigged,” Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio said in a Florida Senate debate this week. “There is no evidence behind any of this.”
In Oklahoma, said Bryan Dean of the state election board, “it’s just not possible with all the checks and balances in place.”
Dean believes the same is true nationwide. “Every state has a different system,” he said. “In some states, each county uses different voting machines.”
Tales of ballot box stuffing and voting from the graveyard are colorful and no doubt grounded in truth at one time. An early Tulsa mayor claimed to have won an election by having an accomplice pull a fire alarm and another dump ballots into the box while everyone else was distracted.
More recently, questions were raised about absentee ballots cast in a school board election at Cave Springs, in Adair County.
But experts say the most and really only effective way to influence elections of any size, even a century ago, involves voter suppression — that is, making it harder to register and vote.
For a while in the 1910s and 1920s, for example, Oklahoma permitted voter registration only within a 10-day window every year, and this was a time when voter rolls were maintained by thousands of precinct officers rather than county election boards. Registration required finding out who the precinct registrar was, tracking him down, and convincing him of eligibility — which was more or less at his discretion.
In terms of presidential elections, experts say the country is simply too big and the election system too disjointed to be systematically gamed. Each state runs its own elections, with responsibility and oversight diffused down to the county and precinct levels. There is no national election network and no exposure of original data to the internet.
In most states, including Oklahoma, the official overseeing elections is either an elected Republican or appointed by Republicans.
Each of Oklahoma’s 1,956 precincts has at least three poll workers, one of whom must be of a different political party than the other two. Only poll workers and voters are allowed in the polling area, and any type of voter intimidation or electioneering is prohibited by law.
Dean recommended voters with complaints about such behavior contact the election board or sheriff’s office.
Each voting machine’s tabulations are checked at the precinct, county and state election boards. Discrepancies are settled with paper ballots, which are kept in sealed boxes.
Dean said Oklahoma ballots can’t be counterfeited, and reports of voting irregularities are few.
“We have occasional cases, especially with absentee ballots,” he said. “Probably the most common is someone who asks for an absentee ballot, returns it, and then forgets and tries to vote on election day. There may be one or two of those in an election. I’ve never heard of it happening more than five or six times.”
Dean said the election board also sees a few cases every cycle of someone ineligible to vote submitting a registration form. Those usually turn out to be the result of a misunderstanding about eligibility.
Willful fraud, he said, is very rare. “Keep in mind,” Dean said, “it is a felony.”
