Hi Joey,

One form of fraud that many people are unaware of and is often possible in paper voting systems is the selling of votes as follows:

  1. steal a blank voting form, and fill it in as the vote buyer prefers
  2. give that to a prospective vote seller
  3. the seller then goes in to vote, and swaps the pre-filled and blank forms in the privacy of the voting booth.
  4. the seller then returns to the buyer, and sells them the next blank ballot
  5. repeat (in parallel) from step 1.

In the UK, the people running the ballot stamp the voting papers on the back as they hand them out in a way that allows them to recognise how long ago a ballot was handed out, and the folded paper is checked before it's allowed into the ballot box.

It is not clear from your post if this fraud would be viable in the system you just used.

Cheers, Phil.

They did remove a stub from the ballot and attach it to the registration form. I forgot to look at the stub to see what the point was. They may have stamped it that morning, or done so w/o me noticing. It's also possible they're printing the ballots on the fly, if so the stub might always have the current date. They may have checked this, quickly, before waving me on the the voting machine. But, I don't see how that would let them check that the ballot I turned in was the one matching the stub. --Joey