There’s a lot of blogosphere buzz about the elections in Minnesota, where Norm Coleman’s lead is vanishing before “huge chunks of votes appearing and disappearing”. You can read about the entire process here at Power Line ^[1]. There has been a lot of talk about deficiencies in the electoral system, from voting machines to registration and whole host of other issues. Electoral fraud has been around for a long time. But I’ve often wondered about two things:

• At what point does electoral fraud effectively make representative democracy a sham? Why is X percent tolerable and not Y?
• Is fraud in fact part of the political process; that is to say the toleration of fudging or fixing is part of the “political judgment” of the electorate because they “let it happen”?

Open thread.