How many people are needed to steal an election?

[Will F.D. People]

I think it would take a lot more than 10 people to steal even one state if you are trying to do it with crooked vote-counting machines. I think the OPs original idea is that if you rig the machines, only a few people need to be in on it and then everyone else will go along merrily, not knowing that they are participating in stealing the election.

In every state I have lived in, elections are administered by the county. Within a single county, there are several different ballot setups due to different races in different parts of the county. If you have a crooked ballot counter, this counter has to be smart enough to understand each ballot setup in order to steal votes from the right place. I think to steal the election across the board, you would necessarily need co-operation in each county.

In Ohio it is harder to steal. As reported elsewhere in this forum, Ohio varies the order that the Presidential candidates are listed from precinct to precinct. Let's say there are 5 different orders that the candidates are listed; this means each county now has 5 times the number of ballot setups that the crooked machines have to comprehend. In some precincts Bush is listed on line 1, in others on line 2, etc. If the allegation is that the company who made the vote tabulator somehow built into the code of the tabulator a bias for one candidate, the nefarious code would have to be smart enough to be able to figure out which ballot line to add votes to in each precinct.

In Florida 2000 we heard how terrible, awful, disgusting, and disenfranchising punch card ballots are. They do have a paper trail, however, as do optical scan ballots. Before the election it was reported that Ohio is 80% punch card ballots. I believe the rest are optical scan. The allegations in Ohio that the machines that tabulate the votes have a bias can be easily checked, and this is going on with the Ohio recount. It seems to me if you are going to steal the election, you would choose a method that could not be so easily detected as merely reporting the wrong totals.

I think the easiset way to steal an election if it is close would be to manufacture absentee ballots. Consider a hypothetical Governor's election where the margin of victory for the Republican was 42 votes after the post-election state-mandated recount. Suppose the Democrat was strongest in the largest county in the state, and this county had a crooked election worker who wanted to throw the election to the Democrat. One stategy the crooked worker could use would be to find a bunch of Democrats who had not voted in the election and get them to fill out a fraudulent absentee ballot, dating it before the election. Or perhaps the election worker could just forge a bunch of ballots on behalf of people who did not vote. You could take a couple hundred of these absentee ballots and stash them somewhere like behind the Swiss Miss in the break room. And then you could make sure that the missing ballots were "discovered" and include them in the count.

I am not saying that my scenario has happened; I am just saying this it seems much more plausible that it COULD happen versus somehow rigging the vote counting machines for a bunch of ballots that can easily be counted by hand.

[Will F.D. People]

The allegations in Ohio that the machines that tabulate the votes have a bias can be easily checked, and this is going on with the Ohio recount.

Actually, no.  In many counties, the elections director is cherry-picking the sample precincts to hand-count to check the machines, rather than choosing them randomly, as required by law.

They are supposed to recount by hand if the hand- and machine-counts don't match in these precincts.  In practice, counties are replacing the machines and trying again until they get a match, then doing the entire recount by machine.

If the machine is crooked, it is going to have a biased result if the precinct is cherry-picked or not.

And even if cherry picking was evidence of fraud (which I do not accept), this means that it would take many people to be in on it. The OP was wondering how many or few people it took to steal an election. If it takes elections directors in many counties to cherry pick precincts in order to subvert a recount, this is evidence for the "many people" position.