Yo, Dan Morris, real life buddy and 'chiasm commenter'! This was going to be a comment on Steak Cheval but your stupid comments thing doesn't let me enter more than 1000 characters, and I've got like at least 1400 characters' worth of things to say! Plus I know some other Folks who have audibly expressed similar fears in recent weeks, so, like, blogit!
non-Dan Morrises: please first read Dan's original post, about being afraid of election fraud in this Highly Fraught Election Year. Coincidentally but also perhaps not coincidentally, this fearful revelation shares blogspace with an anecdote about his recent influx of dozens of previously undelivered issues of The Nation... Anyway, I have once again preserved my signature 'comments style' no-caps format for (fake) authenticity's sake:
ok, I'm no election fraudologist or anything, but while this may be 'the most HOTLY contested election in recent memory' or whatever, it's obviously not the only HOTLY contested election, like, ever, and Karl Rove is NOT in fact the first somewhat unscrupulous presidential campaign manager. there's always a lot to lose or gain in a presidential election for a lot of different people of widely varying scruples, and although our election machinery is pretty shitty it's still significantly less susceptible to fraud than the old days of paper ballots and what have you. electronic voting machines seem to pose a special new type of problem that needs addressing, but that's not what you're talking about here and I don't really know much about that stuff anyway. someone's working on it, I'm sure!
of course, I guess this all goes out the window if you assume that this NEFARIOUS administration has SO degraded the moral fibre of the country that there are a dramatically higher number of unscrupulous people willing to commit acts of voter fraud than in previous years. you may believe this I guess but I don't think it's a very realistic statement to make!
one more thing - the most important thing! - to remember on the fraud front is that elections are contested between two parties of heterogeneous composition, not, like, between The People and The Powerful. on the positive side, there are lots of watchful eyes from partisans on both sides to discourage rulebreakers - and, due to the aforementioned HOTNESS of this election, there will be even more watching even more closely than usual - and not only at home, I mean, aren't there going to be some international observers or some similar craziness?
moreover, believe it or not, some of the frauds will be on your side. the partisan rage is boiling at least as hot, probably hotter, on the Dems side this year, and I'm sure you know as well as I do that people with the Right politics (by which I mean Left politics, of course!), weirdly, don't always do the Right thing. so not only will the 'fraudulence quotient' of the results be minimal/acceptable because although there are always enormous incentives to cheat for a certain more or less fixed number of unscrupulous political operatives there is always the threat of being caught as well as actual cases (such as the one cited) where wrongdoers are busted, but because fraud on one side will be at least partially cancelled out by fraud on the other. so like, stay alert, but I wouldn't lose sleep over it. election fraud is a nuisance, like prostitution or legalized gambling, we just have to try and make sure it doesn't get out of control, but let's not worry about it too much, right? life's too short! no, really, life is too short!!!