Vote Early, Vote Often

Leo: You know O'Doul and the Mayor, right?
Tom: I ought to, I voted for him six times last November.
Mayor: And that's not even the record.

— Miller's Crossing

Ballot stuffing.

Of course, some degree of this happens for every election in a large enough city or state. The question is whether it's widespread enough to truly influence the results of the election. Still, expect the losing side to cry foul play even in relatively clean elections. This trope occurs frequently as an example of Dick Dastardly Stops to Cheat, when the winning side does it even when they would have won anyway. One variety involves "ghost voting," which is where people stuff the ballot box with the names of people who had in fact died sometime before the election, usually those who were recently deceased. This variant in particular is often associated with the city of Chicago, leading to jokes about Chicago being a place where people come back from the grave to vote.

This should not be confused with a Military Coup, which is where the military of a country or some elements of it attempt to remove the current leader by force.

Real Life political examples must be at least thirty years old to be added.

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Examples:

Comic Books

• Golgoti tells the history of the titular fictional African nation compressed into one man's lifetime, from the moment the first European explorer arrives to the area. The local man who first meets the explorer later becomes a stereotypical corrupt Third World president. After he allows "free" elections under political pressure, the official election results are that all other candidates received exactly zero votes, while the president was re-elected by several million more votes than the country's entire population.
• Happens in Strontium Dog when they announcer a random draw to see who earns the right to a special bounty. Being (mostly) amoral bounty hunters EVERYONE tries to cheat. One attempt is switching out the box for one stuffed with only their name.
• Sensation Comics Wonder Woman: The Blue Seal Gang offers to fix the mayoral election for Rita Novelle in return for ten thousand dollars, and when she kicks them out of her office tell her they're going to ensure she loses and put her in the morgue for defying them. Despite their rather violent attempts to inverse this with voter suppression of her supporters she wins anyway and then survives the following assassination attempt.

Comic Strips

• Dogbert in a Dilbert comic:
  "The votes are in. I've been elected to the position of supreme ruler of Earth. I won in a landslide, thanks to low voter turnout and the fact that I voted for myself many times."
• Doonesbury: When Garry Trudeau put the question of which university Alex Doonesbury would attend to an online poll, MIT won hands down, as their students were very good at circumventing the blocks put up by Doonesbury Town Hall to flood the poll with their votes.
• In Thimble Theater, when Nazillia holds an election between King Blozo and General Bunzo, both sides commit as much ballot-stuffing as they can manage.
  Popeye: Tha's two milling votes an' they's only one milling people.
  Blozo: Both sides voted often.
• Standard for elections in The Wizard of Id.

Film — Animated

• Mentioned in An American Tail where the drunken Irish (mouse) Mayor of New York City attends the funeral of another mouse and notes that he was too young to vote, "But he'll vote from now on" and puts his name in a book of "ghost voters". Said mouse ("Honest" John) was a pretty obvious reference to the Tammany Hall political machine.
• In Wendell & Wild, the Klaxons plan to get their private prison approved by literally using the dead Old Guard as voters in favor of it. When the vote happens, this is represented by the revived members strolling in, casting their vote, and immediately leaving.
• Yogi Bear and the Magical Flight of the Spruce Goose: When the heroes vote over rescuing Dread Baron and Mumbly or not, each side gets 8 votes in spite of there being only 10 voters.

Film — Live-Action

• In Black Sheep (1996), Al loses the election and Mike assumes it's his fault. Then the results for the county where he and Steve were hiding out come in and he realizes that the total number of votes for that county exceeds the number of voters. He then sets out to fix this.
• Election does this in reverse. While counting ballots, Mr. McAllister throws two votes for Tracy in the garbage in an attempt to deny her the victory.
• Gangs of New York.
  Killoran: Monk's already won by three thousand more votes than there are voters.
  Boss Tweed: Only three? Make it twenty, thirty. We don't need a victory. We need a Roman triumph.
• The title character in The Great McGinty first comes to people's attention when he votes for the mayor 37 times. Of course, he only did it on the promise he'd get paid $2 for each vote, but still.
• Hairspray and 2007 remake: Amber's mother stuffs the ballots so Amber will be the lead dancer on The Corny Collins Show. Not only are there enough legitimate votes for Little Inez that Amber loses regardless, Mrs. Turnblad sees her doing it and manages an Engineered Public Confession.
• In Inherit the Wind, when Brady is told by the townsfolk that they all voted for him three times, Brady quips that he trusts it was in three separate presidential elections.
• Miller's Crossing.
  Leo: You know O'Doul and the Mayor, right?
  Tom: I ought to, I voted for him six times last November.
  Mayor: And that's not even the record.
• The trope name served as the tagline to John Sayles' corrupt politician comedy Silver City.

Literature

• Homeless drifter Puggy is recruited for this in Big Trouble along with a collection of other lowlifes. The are brought to the voting center(s) and told for who to vote in front of the ballot officials, who don't bat an eye. Of course, all this happens in Miami, and political corruption is a major part of the book.
• This is part of Chris' plan to humiliate the title character in the Stephen King novel Carrie (and subsequent film adaptations). Her friends on the prom committee will throw out the votes for the king and queen of the prom and stuff the ballot box with votes for Carrie and Tommy, and when they take the stage to be crowned, Chris will dump a bucket of pig's blood on Carrie's head in front of the whole school. It works exactly as planned, with the exception of one minor, overlooked detail — Carrie had telekinetic powers, and now she had reason to use them.
• The short story "Death and Suffrage" by Dale Bailey uses the aforementioned joke about voting in Chicago as the inspiration for its premise. It is about the dead — specifically, victims of gun violence — coming Back from the Dead to vote for a Presidential candidate who supports far-reaching gun control measures, and with the story being set in Chicago, the obvious joke is made. (It was later adapted into the Masters of Horror episode "Homecoming", albeit with an altered premise, the zombies now being fallen soldiers voting for an end to The War on Terror.)
• When the Dark Lord decides he wants to win by election in Grunts!, General Ashnak and his orc marines decide to help matters along a bit, just in case the Supreme Power Of Evil can't win over the population with his speeches.
• Hope Was Here: Hope works on the mayoral campaign for an underdog candidate. After her candidate loses the election, Hope looks over a list of voters and spots the name of a curmudgeonly man who had loudly insisted that he never voted. When she goes to congratulate him on turning out for the election, he insists that he didn't. She turns up enough discrepancies like this to force the incumbent mayor to resign.
• Pilgrennon's Children: In Pilgrennon's Beacon, the supercomputer Cerberus submits votes from nonexistent people to keep the current government in power.
• In the Alternate History novel Resurrection Day, the Cuban Missile Crisis leads to nuclear war and a devastated United States, and the late President Kennedy is blamed for it all. Someone mentions the story about the dead voting for Kennedy and wonders if they wanted some company.
• Years after the fact in the Safehold novels, a great many people find it interesting that the person who was in charge of counting the votes in the election that appointed Zaspahr Clyntahn as Grand Inquisitor would end up becoming his right hand man, and wonder if Clynthan had actually won the election at all.
• Done in The Stainless Steel Rat For President by both the Anti-Hero and the planetary dictator he's trying to overthrow.
• There's a section about this in one of the Sten books. It gets disrupted by 'Raschid', in a rather hilarious manner. 'Raschid' is actually the Eternal Emperor, and being several thousand years old, has rather more experience with politics and corrupt elections than anyone else.
• At the end of the last Temeraire novel, the titular dragon realizes that one of the new Parliamentary districts for dragons currently has a draconic population of zero. He decides to move there so he can run for public office and win in a walk.

Live Action TV

• This is a common accusation levied towards reality game shows that rely on audience voting.
  • American Idol is one of the most common targets of this in the US, especially due to the fact that people are indeed allowed to vote as many times as they want. A number of people have exploited this by employing "robo-calls" and "power-texting" to make thousands of votes — completely legal under AI rules, and often balanced out by different robo-callers voting for different contestants. What pushes the show into this trope, however, is a series of controversies over the fairness of the voting, most notably an incident in the season 8 finale involving AT&T (one of AI's sponsors) that may have cost Adam Lambert the victory. See here for more.
• 30 Rock:
  Jack: Why should I even bother to vote? New York will go for Obama even if I voted a hundred times, instead of my usual five.
• All in the Family had a contest for a beautiful baby, and Archie was quite willing to ensure victory. At the end of the episode Baby Joey and Baby Linda were both disqualified for too many phony votes. The group running the contest got a little suspicious, found that a judge signed a vote form, even though he was in jail three weeks ago.
• In Battlestar Galactica out of fears that he'd lead them to disaster, President Roslin attempts to prevent Baltar from winning the fleet's first (and only) election by replacing the ballots from one ship with fakes. She gets caught due to a typo, on the original ballots but not on the fakes, and is forced to step down. Her fears turn out to be justified when he has them colonize a marginally habitable planet, then leaves everyone to suffer in tents in a cold swamp while he loses himself in a stupor of drug abuse and sex for an entire year until the Cylons find them.
• In one episode of Blackadder The Third, Blackadder filled in for the single voter of a rotten borough and apparently placed several thousand votes for Baldrick. In the same episode he sarcastically comments on the system that allows this to happen: "Manchester. Population: 60,000. Electoral roll: 3"
• In season one of Boss Tom Kane's chosen candidate for governor is projected to lose the primary but Kane is not going to let that happen. He starts calling in favours and making deals with local ward bosses. A massive sabotage and misinformation campaign ensues where the other candidate's campaign signs are stolen and his supporters are directed to non-existing voting locations. There probably is no actual ballot box stuffing but the effect is similar.
• In Boardwalk Empire the corrupt politician and gangster Nucky Thompson is genuinely worried that his candidates will lose the election despite engaging in all the usual dirty tricks. He is not powerful enough to outright steal the election and the opposition is doing its own ballot stuffing. In season 2 his enemies use this to get him indicted for voter fraud and he faces jail time.
• Cheers had an example similar to the Parks And Recreation example when they held a drawing to decide that night's designated driver.
  Carla: And the lucky loser is...Norm Peterson.
  Norm: Great. First time I enter this thing and you can't pick (draws another slip) Norm Peterson or (draws another slip) Norm Peterson or (draws another slip) Norm Peterson or (draws another slip) Frasier Crane. At least somebody was honest.
  Frasier: I beg your pardon. I wrote Norm Peterson.
  Norm looks at the slip again.
  Norm: You're right. I wrote that.
• In 2006, Stephen Colbert (or rather, his alter ego on The Colbert Report) reported that Hungary was holding an online naming poll for a new bridge, for which the then-leading entry was the "Chuck Norris bridge". He then proceeded to suggest that his fans should stuff the ballot box with "Stephen Colbert bridge". Hilarity Ensued when it Went Horribly Right and "Stephen Colbert bridge" won with over 17 million votes — about 7 million more than the entire population of Hungary.
  • He tried again when NASA announced that it would put a particular name on a capsule intended for the International Space Station based on the number of votes. "Colbert" won in a landslide, but was denied victory. Instead, NASA shipped up a new piece of equipment, which has the acronym C.O.L.B.E.R.T.^note Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill Stephen was mollified.
• In Copper, set in 1860s New York City, had one character in charge of giving out alcohol, wigs and fake names to all the 'frequent voters' to help 'Irish' Jake McGinnis win.
• Played for Laughs in a Family Ties episode when a girl reveals her crush on Alex by telling him that when he ran for student council president, "I voted for you. Three hundred times. Sorry you didn't win." Later, his best friend Skippy makes the exact same confession.
• When Oswald ran for mayor on Gotham, he attempted this only for Edward to intercept the extra votes. Oswald wins anyway and Edward says he wanted Oswald to see he could win legitimately.
• In one episode of Grange Hill, a student helping to tally the votes in a student council election is introduced to the concept of 'spoiled ballots'. He then proceeds to destroy a large number of ballots in an attempt to grant his favoured candidate the win. He is found out because his number of spoiled ballots is so much higher than any other tallyer.
• In Justified the standard version is averted since the citizens of Harlan County are savvy enough that you cannot steal an election by stuffing the ballot box. Instead the candidates have to resort to other dirty tricks like bribing voters with alcohol and sexual favors, rigging debates by bribing the moderator and having the opposition disqualified by framing them for car bombings, drug dealing and nepotism.
• Mission: Impossible: In "Wheels", the IMF has to prevent a case of electoral fraud in a Banana Republic in order to ensure a fair result to the election.
• In one episode of The Munsters, the subplot involved Herman and Grandpa attempting to manipulate the upcoming city election using Grandpa's magic voting booth so that Herman's votes would be registered in every voting booth in the city. Unfortunately, it fails when Herman pulls on the lever, causing the booth to act as a shower stall.
  Herman: [To Grandpa] Well, don't just stand there! Hand me the soap!
• The Murder, She Wrote episode "The Cemetery Vote" centers around a corrupt politician who was rumored to have carried 'The Cemetery Vote' (in other words, picked up fraud votes from people who were dead prior to the election).
• In the Murdoch Mysteries episode "Election Day", identifying the Victim of the Week is complicated by the fact he was voting under a false name.
• Mentioned in Catching Trouble when it appeared on Mystery Science Theater 3000:
  Narrator: Don't you know you're wanted in Chicago?
  Tom Servo: For voting twice?
• Played with in a Parks and Recreation episode. They select the name of someone out of a hat to decide who has to do an unenviable task. It turns out everyone puts in Jerry's name rather than their own. Except Leslie Knope, who put in her own name... and several more of Jerry's.
• In Sabrina the Teenage Witch, Salem mentions that he helped Nixon get elected:
  Salem: "A lot of dead people voted that year. Twice!"
• In Scandal a major plot point is that the US Presidential election was stolen by hacking the control cards on voting machines. The matter is complicated by the fact that the winning candidate was not aware of the fraud and actually sees it as a personal betrayal.
• Inverted in Skins - Harriet and Doug only count the class president votes for Naomi and Crispin, knowing Cook received the most and not wanting him to win. However, Naomi secretly witnessed the decision, and when they declare her "the winner," she pulls Cook's ballots out of Harriet's bra.
• The Undeclared War: Inverted, with voter suppression instead appearing to happen in the last episode as Black and Asian British voters are knocked off the rolls, causing protests all over the UK.
• In Veronica Mars, a school election is rigged when different classrooms were given conflicting instructions on how to fill out the scan-tron sheets that were used as ballots.

Music

• Ray Stevens: The song "Grandpa Voted Democrat" is all about voter fraud, and how a man who always voted Republican in life had his name used for a fraudulent vote for the Democrats.

Stand-Up Comedy

• Jerry Clower told the tale of a sheriff who was known for sneaking around in the middle of the night collecting names of the dead at election time to use for fake ballots. He got called on it once... sort of. He'd recruited a not-so-bright fellow to help him write down names from tombstones, splitting the cemetery down the middle between them. The sheriff finished his half first and told the other guy they had enough names so they could go home. His helper replied, "Ohh no you don't! I'm tellin' you right now, we ain't leavin' here 'til we write down ev'r name in this graveyard, cuz these folks over here's got just as mucha right to vote as them folks over there on that side!"

Tabletop Games

• Ars Magica: Within the Order of Hermes, the Rhine Tribunal abuses the rules for proxy voting to award Masters and Archmages extra voting sigils from retired or dead magi, allowing elders to accumulate and bequeath a vast number of votes. When challenged, the Rhine elders voted to make it legal in the Tribunal. Rather than go to war over it, the Order's law enforcement agents decided to block the practice from spreading to other Tribunals while they wait for a chance to knock the system down in the Rhine.

Theatre

• From Inherit the Wind, regarding three-time presidential also-ran Matthew Harrison Brady:
  Bannister: You know, Mr. Brady — Colonel Brady — all of us here voted for you three times.
  Brady: I trust it was in three separate elections!
  (laughter)
• The election night newsreel in Of Thee I Sing shows John P. Wintergreen casting ballots for himself at more than one polling place. When he needs only four more votes to win, he casts all four of them. It's no wonder that his (unnamed) defeated opponent charges him with voter fraud in seven states.

Video Games

• Played for Laughs in Disgaea 4 with male ninja class's character introduction skit. He uses shadow clone jutsu to create an army of duplicates all voting for himself.
  Ninja: I used my multiply jutsu to stuff the ballot in my favor. "Always win by a landslide," that's my motto, zam!
  • The introduction skit for the magic knight also has this; She's inside the ballot box changing the votes to herself.
  Magic Knight: The problem isn't on the senate floor. It's in the ballot box. Because the ballot box is closed...And I'm stuck inside of it! Someone get me outta here!
• While there are no opportunities to follow the letter of the trope in Fallout 3, there is an opportunity to manipulate election results to help the candidate you want win (it just involves removing votes for the other candidates) in the Republic of Dave. Given that the current president (Dave) has some rather questionable policies and electoral rules in place, you may even feel morally justified in doing so.
• The Election Day heist in PAYDAY 2 is about sneaking inside a warehouse to hack voting machine to swing the votes the way a Corrupt Politician wants you to. Plan B if you get spotted has you instead rig the vote in favor of the other candidate, which given the obvious battle that happens during Plan B, would have the Corrupt Politician you are helping secure a Disqualification-Induced Victory.
• In Tropico, the electoral tribunal can interpret a fraction of opposition... er misprint ballots as votes in favor of "El Presidente". The fraud has some minor drawbacks but it is rarely needed outside the first game.

Web Animation

• RWBY: In volume 7, Jacques Schnee seems to be losing the election for Council seat pretty hard, at 30%-70%. Over the course of the episode, the gap slowly closes, and by the end Jacques has edged out a victory. Watts was manipulating the election results, and likely would have been found out quickly, but he also staged an attempted assassination and the increased negativity also drew a huge wave of Grimm to the city. In the confusion, no one has time to worry about the suspicious election.

Web Comics

• Done for comedy in Insecticomics. In an attempt to diversify the cast, Terrorsaur repaint Lazorbeak's gender was put up to vote. The Insecticons, being portrayed as playful but troublemaking trolls instead of the Horde of Alien Locusts they are in canon, sabotage the whole affair by voting millions of times each, with the end result that Lazorbeak ended up arbitrarily considered female due to comical levels of election fraud.
• Prickly City disdains this. The dead voted for Kevin, but only once. It's not Chicago after all.
• Shortpacked!: Inverted; Robyn loses her re-election because Mike was running the election booth in her home district, and simply didn't turn in the ballots. Without such a key part of her voter base, she didn't have a chance.
• unOrdinary: Terrence used his invisibility to take out a bunch of the Safe House votes for going downtown and stuffing a bunch for hiking in the ballot box, in order for the group to split with Blyke being with few others and no others with much fighting ability and be out of cell phone range on a hike for Specter to abduct him using the other Safe House members as hostages.

Web Original

• On the Dream SMP, Fundy attempts to rig the votes for the L'Manburg Presidential Election in favour of his party, Coconut2020, with approximately 120,000 fraudulent votes being supplied from the same IP address.^note Note that this was done without his running mate, Niki's knowledge. This gets defied when the fraudulent votes are disqualified during the election in the end, as he would have otherwise won the election if the fraudulent votes weren't disqualified. After the Disaster Dominoes that ensued in canon, many fans joke that none of the much more serious arcs following the Elections would have happened had the content creators just allowed Coconut2020 to commit voter fraud.

Western Animation

• Animaniacs (1993): Discussed briefly in one of the "Wheel of Morality" segments. The moral of the day, according to the wheel, is "Vote early and vote often". Dot's response is "How profound". Wakko's is to try to buy a vowel.
• In Batman: The Animated Series, Harvey Dent, while running for office of DA, reminds Gothamites, to "vote early, vote often. Just in different elections."
• An episode of DiC's Care Bears has Professor Coldheart employing this tactic to win the Mayor-for-a-Day election, promising "a holiday for rules".
• In one episode of Detective Bogey, the Mexican restaurant owner mentions the reason the mayor is always re-elected is that his brother-in-law is in charge of counting the votes.
• Eddy in Ed, Edd n Eddy tries it when he runs for "king of the cul-de-sac", but Edd anticipated that and replaces the real ballot box with a fake one.
• Inverted in the first Futurama movie where it's shown that the reason Al Gore lost the 2000 election was because Bender, in his hunt for Fry, blew up the box containing all his votes.
• Suspected vote tampering becomes motive for revenge in Non-Serial Movie "Wrath of the Spider Queen" for The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy. In a Once More, with Clarity moment, it's revealed that Grim did stuff the ballots...to try and help Velma Green the Spider Queen win. It turns out Boogey tried to cheat to win, but Grim wanted to help Velma win, but she thought he was cheating. In an fit of anger, Grim got his revenge on Boogey with such a terrifying display of power that everyone who didn't get to vote voted for him.
• Gravity Falls: While running for mayor in "The Stanchurian Candidate" stuffing the ballot box is one of the first things Grunkle Stan does, though since Gravity Falls uses birdseed instead of paper ballots it has no impact on the results whatsoever.
• KaBlam!: In "Going the Extra Mile", Ryan wins a contest where one lucky fan gets to spend the day on the set of the show with Henry and June. At the end of the episode, it is revealed that Ryan stuffed many ballots with his name into a box at a local mini-mart through security camera footage that Henry and June show the viewers.
• In one episode of Recess, Randall stuffs his name into the ballot box for the "Principal for a Day" contest, and when the winner is announced he starts giving a speech. But as it transpires, Principal Prickly rigged it so TJ would win, instead, much to everybody's shock.
• The Simpsons:
  • Sideshow Bob defeats Mayor Quimby by rigging the election with a large number of ballots cast by dead people, and even some by dead pets. Finding Snowball I's vote for Bob prompts Lisa to say that this time, It's Personal. The episode strongly implied that he would have won against Quimby anyway; even Homer and Krusty voted for Bob and polls were overwhelmingly in his favor.
  • Bart was implied to have somehow cast his vote for Krusty to become the Congressman for Springfield despite being 10 years old and thus ineligible to vote.
  • Also inverted once: When Homer's high school principal discovered that Homer had been elected class president, he had Lenny and Carl hide the ballot box because he didn't want Homer to win. The principal's reason was in Homer's best interest to save him from humiliation, he'd heard some of the popular students planning to vote for Homer, then laugh at him when he got up on stage. Unfortunately, this backfires as it's shown that if Homer had won, he'd gain the support of his fellow high schoolers, become the most popular kid in school (while still ending up with Marge, but also on Patty and Selma's good side), and he'd be on the fast track to a great life... without Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, since there would be no accidental pregnancies.
  • Homer was once elected king of the parade. Sideshow Bob attempts to warn Homer that he only won because someone (most likely Homer's assassin) stuffed the ballot box.
• Sonic Boom: When questioned on how Eggman was nominated for a good citizenship award in My Fair Sticksy, we get a cutaway to Eggman using a purpose built robot to stuff the ballot box.
• Dan Halen of Squidbillies reveals this to be another reason he cloned the town sheriff. Initially, presented as a means to control the county's law enforcement with Expendable Clones, he later uses them to try win an ballot initiative to legalize alcohol.
• While not in a political context (rather, in regards to someone getting Voted Off the Island), the Total Drama episode "Basic Straining" has Harold break into the ballot box and stuff it with votes for Courtney. The reason he did this was to get Revenge by Proxy against Courtney's boyfriend Duncan, who constantly bullied him. Needless to say, in "Haute Camp-ture", Courtney is determined to get her revenge on Harold after finding out what he did.

Real Life

• Richard J. Daley, the mayor of Chicago from April 20, 1955 up to his death in December 20, 1976, is the Trope Namer.
• Tammany Hall in New York City in the 19th and early 20th centuries were notorious for this and other forms of political corruption, especially under Boss Tweed in the mid-19th century.
• John F. Kennedy's close victory over Richard Nixon in the 1960 Presidential election was discovered to have ridden on some of this, most famously with the dead coming back to vote in Chicago. However, Nixon decided to allow him to win anyways, partly to show himself as a Graceful Loser and partly because the Republicans had also engaged in ballot-stuffing (which would've been revealed if they'd gone after the disputed votes for Kennedy).^note The aforementioned Mayor Daley of Chicago commented that "one of their precincts, outside of Peoria, where there are only 50 voters, just announced 500 votes for Nixon."
• This trope was part of the reason behind the Costa Rican Civil War from March 12-April 24, 1948. To put it simply, the opposition candidate Otilio Ulate was elected President in February of 1948. The legislature then tried to annul the election because of suspicions that Otilio Ulate won via fraud, causing a civil war when military supporters of his rose up against the government, which was defeated. Ulate was handed power by a provisional government the next year.
• Taken to extremes with Charles D. B. King of Liberia, who claimed to have received 243,000 votes....at a time when Liberia had only 15,000 registered voters. He got the "most fraudulent election" award in the 1982 edition of Guinness World Records for that.
• An online vote for the best children's cartoon of 2013 had many worthy candidates, including Young Justice, Steven Universe, Gravity Falls and others. The general numbers for the voting were around 20-40 thousand each ... until you noticed My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, which had in the region of 1.5 million. This was not helped by a) diehard bronies and b) older voters noticing that the site didn't stop you at one vote. One wonders if the site moderators noticed the disturbing discrepancy.
• The tiny unincorporated town of Dorset, Minnesota encourages this in their annual mayoral election. Each vote costs $1 and you can vote as many times as you want. Instead of counting the votes, the mayor is chosen by randomly selecting one of the cast ballots during the annual Taste of Dorset festival and the money raised by the election is used to help pay for the festival.
• Boardwalk Empire based its main character, Nucky Thompson, on real-life Atlantic City politician Nucky Johnson, who was effectively that city's version of Boss Tweed.
• There are strong suspicions Italy is now a republic because of republicans rigging the referendum to choose between monarchy and republic (polls showed monarchists winning by a small margin, and the government proclaimed a republic before the official results were announced. Also, pressure and threats on monarchists from both extremist leftists and die-hard fascists was confirmed), enough that king Umberto II could have conceivably tried to stay in power had he not preferred avoiding the likely civil war had he done so (and in fact his last acts as king helped defuse the civil war that was about to start anyway).
• For the 1957 Major League Baseball All-Star Game, Cincinnati Reds fans stuffed the ballot to elect Reds players to seven of the nine starting positions on the National League team. This led MLB to eliminate fan voting for the All-Star Game until 1970.
• Online voting for the National Hockey League All-Star Game has generated some interesting results. In 2007, there was an organized campaign to vote in Vancouver Canucks defenseman Rory Fitzpatrick as a starter, although he ended up finishing third in the voting - the two defensemen that finished ahead of him were future Hall-of-Famers Scott Niedermayer and Nicklas Lidström. For the 2015 game, Buffalo Sabres center Zemgus Girgensons was the top vote-getter thanks to a flood of votes from his native Latvia, while the next five top vote-getters were all from the Chicago Blackhawks.
• The 1948 election for the assembly of French Algeria was so rigged against the nationalists the term élection algérienne became a byword for "electoral fraud".
• The 1970 presidential elections of the Democratic Republic of the Congo had a turnout of 100.3%, meaning there were more votes than registered voters.
• Very common in the Philippines, in part because U.S. colonial attempts to impose American/Western-style democratic norms onto substantially different Filipino culture and power dynamics has resulted in political systems, including elections, being run in ways often... antithetical to democracy. (Then again, the American politicians who mentored Filipino oligarchs in the early 20th century were often Tammany Hall alumni themselves, something Filipino elites were presumably much more familiar and comfortable with.)
  • Some of the most-reported and most blatant cases of Philippine electoral fraud on a nationwide scale occurred in the 1949 general election, when the newly-formed Liberal Party cheated massively to assure wins at the polls. It was said that in many provinces, "the birds, the trees, and the dead voted" alongside the living and eligible (and human). ^note Meanwhile, while the dead voted, living voters were as often killed in the course of the campaign—the 1949 election was also notoriously violent. Then-Philippine President (and Liberal Party member) Elpidio Quirino was later defeated in 1953 by his then-Defence Secretary Ramon Magsaysay^note who was originally Liberal too, but turncoated to the opposition Nacionalista Party to run against him, whose campaign jingles directly invoked the spectre of election fraud, making the case that Magsaysay's own election would be clean and fair. (Of course, since no less than the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) literally backed Magsaysay's own election, one could argue Magsaysay was as guilty of electoral fraud as the rest of them.^note Not to mention the evidence that Magsaysay was totally not above coming to power via Military Coup in case he lost the 1953 election. The CIA was, in fact, willing to help him that far.)
  • Another instance of massive election fraud occurred in 1969. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was the general election in which Ferdinand Marcos, who had been president for one four-year term by that point, blew hitherto-unprecedented sums on his reelection campaign, which succeeded in winning him a second term—also unprecedented for a Philippine president during the Third Republic (1946–72), under election rules set down in the 1935 Constitution. He would, of course, go on to declare martial law in 1972, cementing him as a full-blown dictator. (It was in this period too that the term "guns, goons, gold" was coined, referring to the prerequisites of winning Philippine elections—which, following the 1949 standard, were not only extremely fraudulent, but often extremely violent to boot. Losing presidential candidate Sergio Osmeña Jr, son of a previous Philippine president, infamously complained: "we were out-gunned, out-gooned, and out-gold".)
  • At the other end of Marcos' career, when he called a snap election in early 1986 to salvage what little remained of his regime's legitimacy at that point, massive cases of cheating were reported on both sides, i.e. both in the regime and opposition camps; one of the charges were of malfunctioning computers tasked with tallying up the scores. It was one of the last straws that led to the People Power "Revolution" that finally ousted Marcos and his family from power.
• Election rigging was the standard procedure in Spain during Alfonso XII's reign (1874-1898), as the two main parties, Cánovas del Castillo's Conservatives and Sagasta's Liberals, put in place a "peaceful turn" agreement which saw them alternate power each term. The incoming government would be hand-picked by the king and would then enlist the local bosses (caciques) to instruct the locals how to vote to obtain the planned result. And some ghost voting would often be thrown in as well for good measure.
• Ngô Đình Diệm, President of South Vietnam, famously decided to solidify his rule with a referendum in 1955. It was rigged in just about every conceivable way, being organized mainly by him (police openly intimidated voters, the government constantly attacked the incumbent emperor in propaganda, the votes were not secret, and even the ballot to vote for the emperor was designed to be less appealing). Not only did he take home 99% of the vote, but he also managed to gather considerably more votes than there were registered voters in many regions—including regions that were under North Vietnamese control.
• The 3rd Gospel Music Association Dove Awards, held in October 1971, had most of its awards nullified after Southern Gospel artists J.D. Sumner of the Stamps Quartet and Paul Downing of the Downings family group alleged that two members of the Blackwood Brothers, Cecil and James Blackwood, signed friends as members of GMA and then "suggest" they vote for the Blackwood Brothers or — in categories they weren't eligible for — candidates that the two Blackwoods recommended; opening up suspicion of a fix that led to the GMA's nullifying most of the awards.^note Among the awards voided included The Blackwood Singers, a spinoff group with both male and female members, winning what would have been their lone win in the "Mixed Group" (with both male and female members) category; James Blackwood winning Male Vocalist of the Year — which would have been his 8th and would have left Blackwood in sole possession of most Male Vocalist of the Year Dove Awards; with his 7 awards in this category being a tie with future contemporary Christian artist Steven Curtis Chapman and Sue Chenault (later Dodge) winning Female Vocalist of the Year — an award Chenault refused to return (one of the Blackwood Singers; Donna Blackwood, was also nominated). Sue would go on to a three-peat with no controversy in that category between 1972–74. James Blackwood, while apologizing, noted that such actions weren't overtly prohibited; resulting in GMA changing the rules to prevent a similar scandal from happening in the future.
• Pocket, or Rotten, Boroughs were Parliamentary constituencies in the UK where, due to irregular redistricting and strict franchising requirements, there were only a handful of registered voters in the area. This made it easy to buy or rig elections in those districts. The Blackadder example listed in Live-Action TV is an exaggeration, but this problem was real until efforts were made to correct it in the mid-19th century.

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