Re: Attentions à l'anonymat et aux mafias !

Ce n’est pas seulement un problème en théorie, ça s’est vu en Italie selon l’article suivant : http://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-00142440

This author was unfortunately unable to find an online reference to the fraud that was unveiled sometime in the 80’s in Italy , and led to the modification of the election procedures that reduced the number of preferences to only one, even if they still can express three in the european election, but the following story should not be too far from the actual events (if you have an Italian friend over 40 years old, he will remember it too).
In various towns, it had been observed a high number of votes for the local political boss during the elections conducted using paper ballots similar to the one in figure 1, with the possibility of expressing up to 4 preferences. It was also observed a high usage rate of preferences in the ballots.
Taken together, these hints may be interpreted as pointing to some kind of fraud being performed taking advantage of the preferences system, but it is not evident: after all, a high usage rate of preferences may simply indicate that preferences are useful for the voters, and hence used! Indeed, it took a long time before the actual fraud procedure was largely understood, leading to a change of the system: the father of this author served as a volunteer officer in an electoral precinct for over 20 years, and actually recalls remarking in several occasion people taking notes of the preferences expressed in the votes during the public counting phase, but only realized what was going on when the whole affair become public in the ’80s.