Most of the Republican friends tend to get the most up in arms over voter fraud... things like voting twice, or voting in some else's name, etc.  While certainly a problem, the reality is that anyone who wants to sway an election in any meaningful way will use election fraud... in other words they will do something to polling equipment, or to ballot counts.  That is the way in which you can involve the fewest people and have the most impact on an election.

But I digress.  I was reading a post on electronic voting machines linked by Schneier's fantastic blog:

Unsurprisingly, the vendors and their trade organization are spinning the results of these studies, as best they can, in an attempt to downplay their significance. Hopefully, legislators and election administrators are smart enough to grasp the vendors’ behavior for what it actually is and take appropriate steps to bolster our election integrity. Until then, the bottom line is that many jurisdictions in Texas and elsewhere in the country will be using e-voting equipment this November with known security vulnerabilities, and the procedures and controls they are using will not be sufficient to either prevent or detect sophisticated attacks on their e-voting equipment. While there are procedures with the capability to detect many of these attacks (e.g., post-election auditing of voter-verified paper records), Texas has not certified such equipment for use in the state. Texas’s DREs are simply vulnerable to and undefended against attacks.

I was struck by a thought.  A lot of people, especially after the 2000 hanging chad fiasco, wanted to switch the presidential election from the electoral college to a popular vote.  Although it was not envisioned for this purpose originally, might I suggest that the electoral college is also a way to reduce the impact (or at least increase effort required) of election fraud.

In a popular vote scenario, you can tip an election by increasing the percentage high enough in a few populous areas.  But in an electoral college system, an increase in any one area will only affect that state.  In essence, to be successful, you'd have to perpetuate much larger scale fraud in more states.

Or am I wrong here?  Has the fact that we've had so many close elections mean that one state might be enough to do it?