Wolfgang asked about the predictions of fraud in the election. While for the most part elections do seem to be run about as well as anywhere, fraud, corruption, influence, and down-right dirty tricks are such a part of some that perhaps we're just sort of conditioned to expect the worst.
The comment about Senator Allen of Virginia is behind & looking to beat Webb but is down 7000 or so votes & claims to have picked up 1000 on side of the road somewhere, brings to mind a fairly well known and probably credible story that might be illustrative:
Only the first page is publicly accessible at the link, but that's sufficient to get the drift; and many libraries can get the full article for you.
"Six days after the 1948 Texas senatorial runoff election, enigmatically amended returns produced what the winning candidate, Lyndon Baines Johnson, humorously referred to as his "87-vote landslide." … Accounts by historians of LBJ's razor-thin victory have invariably converged on the Thirteenth Precinct in the South Texas town of Alice in Jim Wells County, where 202 Mexican—American voters, some of whom were deceased or had been absent from the county on election day, reportedly lined up in alphabetical order at the very last minute to cast their ballots overwhelmingly for Johnson."