This election season, with all the talk about "rigging" by Donald Trump, who blames it on the Democrats, and by the Democrats, who blame it on the Russians, it is important to understand what "rigging" is. There are different kinds of rigging. One main kind is voter fraud, where people who shouldn't be voting try to vote, or people vote more than once, by hook or crook. Such as looking up the names of dead people and casting fraudulent votes.



Voter fraud hardly ever happens on a scale that can swing an election. It is risky, with a high chance of getting caught.



The other main kind of fraud, and much more worrisome, is election fraud. This includes fraud which occurs at the vote-counting level which is run by election authorities. Marxist dictator Josef Stalin once said famously, "Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."



When the paper ballot votes are counted incorrectly by the machine, accidentally or by design, a very large number of votes can be added or subtracted from any candidate to "flip" the vote count, and the election. Voter fraud is for amateurs. Electronic ballot box stuffing is how the pros do it.



Now here is where you are not going to believe your good fortune, as a person concerned for fair elections. When those paper ballot vote-counting machines were installed, between 2000 and 2010 with the passage of HAVA - the Help America Vote Act - politicians with cheating on their minds must not have known that three of the most popular models of paper ballot vote-counting machines automatically make digital images of the ballots, at lighting speed, as the ballots are fed into the machine. These images are then stored in a file like you see on your Windows Explorer.



Yes, a pdf digital image of every ballot fed into that precinct vote-counting machine should exist, and is stored for anyone to examine and count who gets access to them.



The point was to have a back-up to the paper ballots inside the ballot receptacle, and it was brilliantly conceived. And most people don't even know about it.



What this means is, you can ask your election department, or any election department, to provide you with copies of these files, which after all are as easy to copy as doing a "cut-and-paste" to a thumb drive. Each machine, usually one per precinct, makes a folder.