Is there any practical difference between rigging and hacking? Whether the election outcome is manipulated by government officials, one or both major political parties, Vladimir Putin, corporate insiders at the vendors that supply voting machines, some guy named Chad, or some collaboration between any of the above, it amounts to the same thing: the loss of voter's right to hold their elected leaders accountable.<p>Most election tampering requires a pretty big conspiracy and is therefore hard to pull off on a large enough scale to change the outcome without being caught, but electronic voting with no paper trail makes it possible for someone to do just that without more than one or a handful of people knowing about it, which I think makes it the biggest threat to the accuracy and credibility of elections in the United States.<p>Even in the absence of real election fraud, if the voters have no credible reason to believe it didn't happen, then the election system ought to be fixed. Ideally, the burden of proof should be on election officials to show that the results are correct, not on activists to prove fraud.