And people who don't go to vote are not being forced to not go to vote, you know.
Very naive. Voter supression is extremely common.
Just in America's Southern States this has included putting fake election reminders in black people's letter boxes with a false date for the election, Republican squads pretending to be election monitors and turning black people away from polling booths, telling them they'll be arrested for voting if they have parking tickets (which is false). Pretty much every conceivable attempt to block blacks from voting just because they tend to vote for the Democrat party. Plus, there's infamous stuff like the Florida voting ban on "criminals" who turned out not to be "criminals". 1000's of regular people were wrongly banned from voting, because they "sort of" had similar names to known criminals. They got all the details wrong. Except race. Every person banned "just happened" to be black.
And the strict voter ID laws which are presented as a way to prevent voter fraud (which there are very few cases on record, less than 1 per 1 million votes cast in the USA) overwhelmingly hits marginal groups, many of whom vote Democrat - poor people, women, blacks and the elderly. The line is "everyone has valid ID". But that only turns out to be true of middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods. Tens of millions of poorer native-born Americans, who
should have the right to vote don't have a set of current ID, so they're turned away at the polls. Here's the breakdown on how many people are affected, we're talking maybe 10-20% of ALL adult Americans can theoretically be blocked from voting by these "ID" laws. Certainly enough to swing an election.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/11/05/five-reasons-voter-identification-bills-disproportionately-impact-women/Here are a list of incidents from a few countries:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppressionExample:
Shortly before the Canadian 2011 Federal Election, vote suppression tactics were exercised by issuing robocalls and live calls to notify voters that their polling station had changed. The locations offered by these messages were intentionally false, often to lead voters several hours from the correct stations, and often identified themselves illegally as coming from Elections Canada.
So it happens all the time in "advanced" countries. In poorer countries with more corruption and less judicial oversight it probably happens as well and is more overtly violent.
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