OT: This Week In Voting Machine Security 3428
Kurt Ullman
The registration is done by the county registrar of voters (might be called different things in different states). However, just about anyone can collect registration forms and turn them in to the county. There is the danger that the person collecting the registrations could be selective about which ones they turn in. The mechanisms that I know of to prevent that are not very robust. (Voter is given a receipt with information about what to do if they don't get a confirmation of their registration from the county in N days.)
Yet I have not heard of this kind of things happening on any noticeable scale. So I am guessing that there are additional mechanisms in place that make it harder to get away with such fraud.
There are lots of ways that people can register to vote that don't involve things pbutting through partisan hands. Typically every public library, the county offices themselves, at post offices. More recently in some states, when you indicate a change of address for your drivers license, you can tick a box to have this address change information forwarded to the registrar of voters.
-j
In the US, the vote totals ARE released by precinct. Thus you get the X% of Y precincts reporting graphic. For instance from the...
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Under whose scrutiny? I should also point out that if there are suspicions of fraud over here, that's immediately a police matter under election law - with worse punishments than even the criminal law...