Here’s how I would have done it.

1. Find a precinct where the poll workers don’t check IDs before handing out ballots. (This probably applies to the vast majority of precincts in the country.)
2. Obtain a list of all registered voters in that precinct. (This is freely available to all candidates.)
3. Station a volunteer at the voter check-in desk to mark down who has come in to vote. (This is perfectly legal.)
4. An hour or so before the polls close, send the list of who has voted and, by extension, who hasn’t, back to campaign headquarters. (Again, perfectly legal.)
5. Send out a group of new volunteers to the precinct to impersonate the voters who hadn’t shown up yet and vote on their behalf. (Not so legal.)

This scheme can only fail if (a) the poll workers happen to know the no-show voters and recognize my volunteers as imposters, (b) my volunteers have incredibly bad timing and show up at the same time as the people whose identities they are stealing, or (c) the poll workers suddenly decide to check IDs. I imagine the consequences of getting caught could be severe, but based on my experiences watching the polls the risk seems slight.

Given our country’s recent troubles with elections, it is astonishing to me that people anywhere are still allowed to vote without positive identification.

Disclaimer: this blog entry was written while I was volunteering as a poll observer for a political campaign, but the campaign is in no way associated with this post and I have absolutely no reason to suspect that any of the campaigns participating in this election have engaged in any form of vote fraud.

Sox-Yanks is about as close to nirvana as you can get in sports. But watching last night’s game was something akin to having your yoga class led by Richard Simmons. The role of “Guy you want to hit in the back of the head with a baseball bat” was played by Joe Morgan. Here is a transcript of Morgan’s 63-second description of a collision the previous day between Eric Hinske and Jorge Posada. It was accompanied by some slo-mo replays and telustrations which I can’t reproduce here, but believe me, they did not make Morgan’s analysis any less excruciating.

I want to show you something about that collision, Jon, because Posada got caught in an awkward position. There was no place for Hinske to go. There’s no place for Hinske to go, so he had to hit him. There was no – there was no plate. You know, catchers usually give you some part of the plate to slide towards. There’s no plate. The plate’s back here. So what is Hinske gonna do other than try to bowl him over, you see what I mean? You know, he had no choice but to run into Posada. I don’t think it was a — it wasn’t a bad play, you know, there was no place for him to go. See where the plate is? Now how’s he gonna get to this plate? You can’t slide. There’s no place to slide. Posada’s got it blocked. The only place you can go is try to run over him. And that’s what he did, so I don’t want, you know,  the Yankee fans to think that was a dirty play because there was no place for him to slide, there was no place to go. Posada usually will give you — the catcher will give you someplace to slide, but he got caught in a bad position, and there was no place for Posada to go and no place for Hinske to go.

I’m sending this one off to the “Fire Joe Morgan” blogsters. It’s a classic.

Don’t tell anyone I told you that Not On My Watch is part of the Asphalt Jungle Shorts. Apparently, it’s a secret.