Sounds like Lewis Carroll had a real fantasy love affair with Alice

Yeah it does a bit, eh :)

Its going to be a miracle if we can actually have a free and fair election this year.

On iritu, shylock and some others knew that some rigging had taken place and they were fine with that because the right guy won. It happens all the time, they said(!). That was an eye-opener for me.

Another eye-opener was my misplaced faith in the US Supreme Court. I was unfazed by the dodginess in the lower courts, dismissing cases for lack of standing, mostly, and laches, sometimes. I thought the US SC would sort it out. But no, they were worse! I was stunned, stunned, when they threw out the states' case (Texas and others) for lack of standing. How can a state not have standing in a case about an election conducted in that state?!

My hope is that enough eyes have now been opened in the US that these sorts of things are not attempted again this time around. What do you think?

I like the idea of making it a festive occasion

yes well we're all "suffering" together so we make the best of it. Another aspect is that the prime minister chooses the election date so historically he chooses a date in Spring (or sometimes Autumn) when the weather is pleasant and the voters aren't too cranky about being forced to the local primary school to vote. A sausage sandwich is traditional and when my kids started voting we did buy some.

how do you deal with cheating and the ability to cheat through various methods?

There will always be dodginess. We have it. But it is small.

We are seeing a progressive weakening of our election laws, sadly, and an increase in dodginess. But while growing they are still too small to alter the overall result.

The essentials of our system are:

* we use paper ballots, filled in by hand by the voter (the voter writes the numbers 1 to N in order of preference in the boxes printed beside the candidates' names, there must be a 1, a 2, etc) and deposited in a letterbox-style ballot box - there are any number of candidates on a ballot paper, typically half a dozen on a House of Representatives ballot paper and typically a hundred-odd on a Senate ballot paper (yes it is a very large piece of paper!) - there are no machines of any description - as a programmer I guarantee that the programmability of a device absolutely will be abused sooner or later

* after polling closes, the contents of the ballot boxes are counted by government officials in the presence of scrutineers appointed by the candidates - the results are phoned through to the central tally room (these days, I'm sure they use a computer network instead of telephones but the central point is that the counting is done locally in front of scrutineers, who may query, dispute etc on the spot and have the issue resolved)

* attending the polling place and receiving a ballot paper is compulsory - note that actually filling in the ballot paper is not compulsory - about 5% of voters deposit a blank ballot paper in the ballot box

* the electoral divisions all have essentially the same number of voters - the significance here is that in the US an electoral division for a presidential election is a county, where some counties have ten thousand voters and some have two million voters, and where rigging a small number of the largest counties in the country will control the overall result - our electoral divisions are periodically redrawn to maintain the similarities in populations - currently they are about 110,000 voters each

* the electoral roll is kept up-to-date - within practical constraints it is accurate

* voting on the day is compulsory, with commonsense exceptions made for voters who are incapacitated or overseas or whatever, totalling a tiny fraction of the vote which will not alter the overall result - unfortunately, this is no longer true and there is all sorts of watering down, with the relaxing of the restrictions on early voting and postal voting, and the increasing "trialling" of electronic voting

* we have a Court of Disputed Returns (which is actually Australia's highest court sitting as that Court of Disputed Returns) to hear and determine any disputes

Those are the essentials. I think that any election system which includes these features will be transparent and difficult to subvert.

We have a central body which oversees everything, the Australian Electoral Commission. I imagine a system elsewhere could survive without this central body but issues such as keeping electoral divisions the same size must be solved one way or another.

All of the above refers to Commonwealth (federal/national) elections. We have States, and the state elections are slightly different in detail but not in principle. Our local government elections are completely different. Our Constitution knows what the Commonwealth is and what States are but makes no mention of local councils. Local councils are created by legislation by State governments.

When I was 18 I was against the compulsory aspects. As the years passed I began to see the disadvantages of non-compulsory attendance and the advantages of compulsory attendance.