Has the "example" of successful election rigging in Florida in November 2000 spread INSIDE the two parties? According to the New York Times in some precincts of Harlem not a single vote was cast for Barack Obama. That seems, well, difficult.
The investigation is under way, but the larger topic of the integrity of the elections in a federal system is not in the news. This is truly surprising, given the amount of literature created not only by the stolen election of 2000, but also by the strong suspicions cast over the critical results of Ohio in 2004, suspicions that are still alive today (see this). You can also find an analysis of various issues of 2004 presidential elections (in Italian) here.
Among the analysis of the Florida case, we recommend Jeffrey Tobin's Too Close to Call: The Thirty-Six-Day Battle to Decide the 2000 Election and Vincent Bugliosi's The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President Of course, those books were hardly alone: in a more scholarly fashion, the issue was tackled by Robert Watson (Counting Votes), Mark Whitman (Florida 2000: A Sourcebook on the Contested Presidential Election), Kathleen Hall Jamieson (Electing the President, 2000),
Cass Sunstein and Richard Epstein (The Vote: Bush, Gore, and the Supreme Court), Jarvis's Bush v. Gore: The Fight for Florida's Vote, and, more important, Roy Saltman: The History and Politics of Voting Technology: In Quest of Integrity and Public Confidence. Saltman traces the evolution of voting technology, highlighting how the antiquated systems in use today are a legacy of the 1950s. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to disentangle the responsibilities of federal, state, and local authorities in monitoring and counting the votes. It would be even worse if the various factions inside the parties took advantage of these obsolete and undemocratic procedures to rig the primaries, too.
