Elections officials in Cudahy, California have agreed to plead guilty to tampering with city elections:

http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2012/07/cudahy_officials_agree_to...

They simply opened the mail-in ballots and discarded the ones they didn't like.

I believe this practice is widespread, as it is difficult to prove. Elections offices are only open to the public part of the time, and access is usually restricted only to the reception area unless a citizen has filled a Public Records Request or gotten a court order and is accompanied by staff.

I've written a brief rundown of what I believe happened here in San Diego:

Was San Diego Mayor Sanders Elected? http://fubarandgrill.org/node/1417

We don't know what's going on inside the offices of elections officials any more than we know what's going on inside the central tabulators that supposedly count the votes. The entire elections process is insecure because it lacks oversight, and the results are, with the exception of fewer than 10% of the ballots cast in the US which happen to be in areas that still have public oversight, completely unverifiable.

People who vote are very trusting souls. They're basically gambling, only there are laws about rigging slot machines and there is oversight and enforcement of those laws, while with voting machines, even if the laws existed, there could be no effective oversight due to the fact that voting machine and central tabulator hardware and software are proprietary corporate secrets. Casting your ballot on paper is meaningless, as it will be processed through at least two computers (if it is processed at all and isn't just thrown out), an optical scanner and a central tabulator, both of which are easily hacked in ways that cannot be traced even by computer forensics experts.

If it wasn't for the fact that lives, such as those innocents killed by order of government officials who were never really elected by the people, can be lost, that trillions of dollars can be misspent, and that the future of our country depends on what the government does, voting might be relatively harmless. Why not vote for your friend or someone you admire and respect who is running for school board, or for somebody you hope might at least attempt to represent your wish that legislation or court rulings might grant you temporary human or civil rights? The reason is because when you vote, even if you cast a blank or spoiled ballot, you become part of the turnout that authorizes and legitimizes whoever the voting machines, the Electoral College,  Congress, or the Supreme Court says won, to do whatever they wish while they are in office. The only accountability the Constitution provided at the federal level was the impeachment process, which Congress has never succeeded in using.

In other words, when you vote for your friend who is running for school board, or for a candidate who has been crusading for your fondest cause, you are authorizing the government to borrow billions of dollars from China, to drone bomb innocent children, to bail out the rich, and to deregulate any profitable industry that donates to political campaigns no matter how much harm it may do.

It isn't a choice between the ballot and the bullet. In a military superpower, the ballot is the bullet.

Were those Germans who voted for Hitler but did nothing else to harm anyone, guilty of the evil he did? Most people would agree that they were not. However it would be untrue to characterize them as having been compassionate. A lack of awareness and consciousness is not a lack of conscience, but conscience cannot function without both consciousness and awareness. If you don't know what's going on, your conscience won't have any objections to it. A truly compassionate person would want to know the potential results of their actions before they acted. To act without bothering to find out what the results of your actions may be, is irresponsible and far from compassionate. In fact, it could best be characterized as uncaring and apathetic. That's what, at best, those who voted for Hitler in Nazi Germany were, and that's what people here in the US today are if they are willing to cast ballots that may not be counted and cannot be verified, for officials who cannot be held accountable for crimes against humanity. Everyone has seen the pictures of the tortured and of the victims of drone bombs in the media, so unlike Nazi Germany after WWII, nobody here will be able to claim that they didn't know what their government was doing.