In this article we're going to cover an area of fraud that is a growing concern in the United States. This is election fraud.

To first understand how election fraud can occur you first have to understand what election fraud is. Election fraud is the hampering, tampering or in any way the interfering with the normal election process to place an individual in a public office such as congressman, senator or even President of the United States.

So, just how is election fraud pulled off?

The number of ways are virtually limitless, but for the sake of keeping this article relatively short we will cover the most common ways to commit election fraud.

The most common way to commit election fraud is with the actual tampering of the voting booths. In today's computerized society most of the voting establishments are computerized. The voter walks into the voting booth and is basically confronted with a panel of LCD buttons to press. With each press a vote is logged into their computer database. With today's technology it is not hard to rig these machines to take a vote given to one candidate and apply that vote to another without being conspicuous about it. Because computer tampering is beyond the scope of this article we're not going to try to explain exactly how this is done. Suffice it to say, it happens.

Another way to commit election fraud is by hiring people to vote a particular way. The person out to commit the fraud will give these people some incentive to vote for their candidate, either in the form of some monetary gift or maybe a cruise to the islands. While some may see this as simply good campaigning, paying someone to vote a certain way in the United States is fraud, plain and simple.

Another way to commit election fraud, and this is a little harder to do, is dual identities. A person will register to vote in more than one county or city. They may even have multiple identities made up. The purpose of this is to get to vote more than once. They'll vote once in the city where they actually live for candidate X and then vote in the other city where they don't live, again for candidate X. This is basically voting twice for the same candidate and is fraud, again, cut and dried. This type of fraud does take some cunning to pull off, which includes falsified identification, which is another type of fraud.

Another type of election fraud, which isn't as common today as it was back in the 1920s, is through intimidation. This is where workers for the candidate, or even just independent persons who want to see their own agenda go through, will station themselves outside a voting place and threaten people to vote for their candidate otherwise...and what follows is some kind of threat. Strong willed people will probably just blow this person off. But the weak voter, fearing harm, will cave in to the threat and vote for their candidate. Again, this isn't as common as it was at one time but still in the more underprivileged areas of the United States this still does go on.

Nobody really knows how serious election fraud is, including the government itself. But many safeguards have been put in place to help make sure election fraud doesn't happen. We'll go over these safeguards in a future article.