Fraud found lacking in electoral system.

• Position: Your Life

Caution should be exercised in giving too much importance to charges of voter fraud in U.S. elections and supposed incompetence in administering elections. The process in the overwhelming majority of elections is working well, maintains University at Buffalo (N.Y.) Law School professor James A. Gardner. "We have to be careful about political propaganda being spread about how voter fraud and, to a lesser extent, incompetence in the administration of elections threatens democracy," cautions Gardner, the Law School's vice dean for academic affairs.

"This simply is not true. There are more than 500,000 elected officials in the U.S. Virtually every one of these elections comes off without a hitch. The news media has a tendency to focus exclusively on the extremely rare--but dramatic--cases in which the outcome of a very close race is put in doubt by a very small number of possibly tainted ballots or a malfunction of voting...