As best as I can remember, there's a story they tell about the Sufi Muslim saint, Mullah Nasrudin, that goes something like this. One night he was coming home after dark, and when he came around the corner, he saw what looked to him like a group of suspicious-looking people lurking by the door to his house. Not knowing they were his students wanting to ask him something, he assumed they were robbers, so he turned around and tried to sneak away. His students saw the master head back out into the night, and followed him. Seeing the "robbers" following him, Nasrudin took off running. His students, used to the master delivering odd parables to them by putting them through physical challenges, took off running after him. Desperate to escape the "robbers," the mullah lead his students on a night-time chase through the city, down alleys and over fences and across back yards. But they were younger than him, and gaining on him steadily, so eventually he resorted to jumping into a trash heap and hiding in the corner, hoping they wouldn't notice him and would run on by. It didn't work. And so Nasrudin looked up and recognized, to his chagrin, the puzzled faces of his own students, just as one of them asked him, "Master, why have you brought us to this trash heap in the middle of the night?" And the Mullah Nasrudin answered, "Well, it's quite complicated. You see, you are here because of me, and I am here because of you."

It's the best parable I know for the subject of election fraud in the United States, especially this year. The Democrats, in the interest of preventing Republican election fraud, are doing their flat level best to convince the Republicans that they themselves are engaged in massive election fraud. The Republicans, in their equally fierce determination to stop that fraud, are doing their flat level best imitation of massive election fraud themselves. This prompts the Democrats, in increasing desperation, to step up the activities that look like voter fraud to the Republicans, and that prompts the Republicans, desperate not to have an election stolen from them, to step up the activities that look like voter fraud to the Democrats. Tempers are high, and fears are even higher, and they've bled out beyond the usual confines of political insider debates into the general public. The net result is a national hysteria, umpteen-hour lines at the early voting sites by people who are terrified of being cheated if they wait until the actual election day, the Obama campaign threatening to spend the money to put a lawyer on duty not just in every election board office but also in every single precinct in at least some swing states, serious sober calls by journalists for international election monitoring committees, and a level of confidence in the American electoral process rivaling the cynicism over Zimbabwean or Turkmenistani elections, both here among Americans and abroad in the foreign press.

How did we get here? It's a long, and to me deeply fascinating, story, but let me summarize as briefly as I can. Possibly the second most fascinating story to be left out of Americans' history textbooks is the process by which organized crime families and mafiosi took over almost all of America's major cities during Prohibition, and the roughly forty year grueling and inspiringly heroic struggle by crusading prosecutors and journalists and politicians to get our country back from the racketeers. But even without it being in the textbooks, even with it being an under-studied part of our history, Americans know from folklore that the hardest part of the process was the campaign from the late 1940s to the mid 1970s to clean up our local Election Boards. Once they got control of the police and could run extortion rackets without fear of prosecution, mafiosi in almost every major city terrified election board officials into looking the other way as they padded the election rolls with fraudulently registered dead or completely non-existent voters. That way, if an anti-mafia mayor, prosecutor, or judge ever actually won an election, mobsters working in total impunity (and only the thinest veneer of secrecy) in the election board's back room offices would make up out of whole cloth a giant stack of ballots for their guy and stuff them in. Once Kennedy appointed a whole host of anti-mafia federal prosecutors and muck-raking journalists turned their files over to them, some minor headway got made in federal prosecutions. But real progress only happened, quite literally, over the dead body of the mafia-allied extortionist FBI director Hoover; once the FBI stopped covering up for the mafia and started helping the career prosecutors at the Justice Department investigate and make cases, the mafia control over our election boards collapsed like a cardboard shack in a hurricane.

But once you prove that a shadowy conspiracy has been stealing elections and getting away with it, how do you prove that you caught the last of them? I mentioned this to a friend of mine in the grocery store the other day, and he snarked that he couldn't prove that there wasn't an invisible elephant out in the parking lot, either, but that didn't make it likely. "Sure," I said to him, "but suppose I proved to you that just the other night somebody's car was stomped flat by an invisible elephant, in front of witnesses -- would you still feel safe parking out there?" Still, that leaves those of who believe that freeing both party's election judges from the fear of mafiosi assassination of themselves or their families left them free to stop ballot-box stuffing in the awkward position of trying to prove a negative, to prove that something doesn't exist. In fact, we can't do it; I know from first-hand account that it does still exist, or did at least as late as 2000 when a friend of mine saw a union member from a union I'm still a bit nervous about mentioning in public make the mistake of trying to vote with one particular fraudulently obtained voter registration card. How did my friend know this? The election judge said to the guy in front of him in the line, "hey, that's my address you're registered at." And when the Democrats say that there's no proof that anything like this ever gets tried any more, or at most once or twice per year, let me tell you that what happened next was that the guy who was trying to double-vote ran out the door, and got away clean. Thanks to entirely legitimate fear by Democrats that if poor voters saw police officers at the polls they would assume that people were at risk of being arrested on outstanding bench warrants if they tried to vote, something the law doesn't allow, there were no police there to chase him. Can you prove that he didn't try again at a different polling place the same day? Not knowing for sure how he got that fraudulent voter registration card, can you prove that there weren't a dozen more like him? A hundred? A thousand? Just in north St. Louis county?

The Republicans, not entirely illegitimately terrified of ballot box stuffing, have devised what seems to them like the only way to make sure that everybody only votes once. Ironically, it's not the simple solution that the Iraqis used, and that many other countries have used: you must dip your finger in indelible ink at the polling place to vote. That'd be cheap, and to the extent ballot boxes are being stuffed by in-person double-voters, it would catch them. Granted, that's the most unlikely, most expensive, most labor-intensive, and most likely to get caught form of election fraud anybody's ever invented. Outside of party primaries where the number of voters is so small, the number of people it would take to even semi-safely stuff a ballot box one vote at a time by hand could almost certainly, with those numbers, make more a difference if they used those same people for perfectly legal campaign activities, and most political insiders I know consider there to be a lot safer and more borderline legal ways to manipulate a primary than to cheat at it. (If that formerly entirely mobbed-up union of leg-breakers, extortioners, and assassins is still trying to stuff ballot boxes in north county, it almost has to just be out of habit.) Neither the third world solution, nor the Republican solution, addresses the far scarier possibility of corrupted vote tallying inside the election board offices, but never mind that. This particular form of fraud is the one that terrifies the Republicans, and they have what seems to them like an entirely fair solution to it: create a nationally regulated form of identification that clearly and unambiguously ties one person to one ID, using photos and biometrics and computerized matching to catch anybody who tries to obtain two of those IDs and requiring formal legal documents that put the burden of proof on the person asking for the ID to prove that they're entitled to vote in American elections, and then require people to show that ID (and, ultimately, have their biometrics checked at the polling place) in order to vote.

Your average Republican voter doesn't know anybody who doesn't own a car, and assumes that all American voters have driver's licenses. (Here in Missouri, the last study on the subject I saw estimated that one in three rural Missouri drivers has no valid driver's license. We created a physical economy that requires driving, and then disqualified hundreds of thousands of people from getting licenses, and then expected those people to do what? Just lie down and die, instead of trying to get away with it?) Your average Republican voter doesn't know (or doesn't realize that they know) anyone who would have a hard time obtaining a certified original copy of their birth certificate. (A friend of mine was born on an overseas military base, and the only records of her birth were lost in a fire at the Army Records Center decades ago. A lawyer estimated that it would cost her $800 to $3000, depending on whether or not the lawyer had to travel to that country to search hospital records, to actually prove her citizenship.)

Democrats, especially black Democrats, see costs ranging from dozens to thousands of dollars to obtain a voting-qualified form of ID as morally and legally equivalent to the hated "poll tax" that racist white election officials used to keep poor blacks from voting in the Jim Crow era. So to make sure that even if Republicans find ways to cheat tens of thousands of black voters out of their ability to vote, they've gone to phenomenal effort and expense to register so many poor voters, and especially poor black voters, that even if the poll tax cheats tens of thousands of them out of their votes, enough will get through to undo the Republicans' voter suppression efforts. The Republicans, seeing these thousands of almost impossible to verify voter registrations coming in from homeless people, from people whose poverty forces them to move around a lot, and so on, "recognize" this as the traditional first step in mafia-style ballot box stuffing: invent thousands of fake voters, so if you have to invent fake ballots inside the election board office you have names to use.

They've responded with lawsuits and private investigators and database searches attempting to use, well, more or less the same software techniques that the major credit-reporting firms use to identify individuals and assemble their credit histories. They'd like to use better techniques, but the Democrats keep suing to stop them and winning, so they use what they have. The result is as famously inaccurate as credit reports are. If your credit report confuses you with someone else, if two or more people's loans and repayments ever showed up on your credit report (which happens to an estimated one in three people, if I recall correctly from my years working in the credit card industry), then according to the Republicans' software models, the two of you probably are one person and if you both try to vote, that's probably ballot-box stuffing. So, to prevent it, they pushed through legislation during the years they controlled both the Congress and the White House and the Supreme Court, requiring all records that flag as "possible fraud" in a Republican's computerized analysis as requiring that voter registration be discarded, to force those people to re-register so we can more carefully check if they really exist, really are entitled to vote, and really are voting once. Democrats then obtain a list of literally tens of thousands of entirely legal voters who've been flatly denied their legal right to vote, and scream bloody murder. Which only "proves" to the Republicans that the Democrats will try to stop any effort, however well intentioned, to prevent ballot box stuffing, so they "must" be covering up ballot box stuffing.

Enough already. This has already gone way, way too far. For the love of all holy gods, once this election is over? Let's not wait to find out what new ways of convincing each other that they're engaged in election fraud the two parties come up with after this year.

Look, here's my suggestion. The other night on the Rachel Maddow show, she got a chance to ask Senator Obama if he would agree with her recent (and surprisingly vicious and strident for her, a serious change from her usually sunny demeanor) insistence that if local election boards don't provide enough judges and voting booths to get people in and out in at most a couple of hours no matter what the turnout, that's a form of poll tax, a way to keep people from voting unless they're able to afford to go a day without pay and sure that they can do so without losing their job. He stopped short of going along with her; he's more famously conciliatory to both sides than that. But he did say this: one of the things he'd like to do if elected (no promise made, just "like to do" or at most "we have to do") is do a second iteration of the Help America Vote Act that will, in part, addresses obstacles to voting. He's not the only one calling for more federal funding for a second round of HAVA; the first round of HAVA lead a lot of counties to buy totally unreliable electronic voting machines that are now filling up landfills because nobody in his right mind would use one, and they need more money to buy new and more reliable voting technologies. There is a very good chance that some small number of billions of dollars will be borrowed in the next year or two, yet another (and in this case, an entirely legitimate) federal intervention to protect federal elections.

When that bill comes up, here's what I'm going to write to the sponsors, and to my own congressman and senators, to suggest. Let's give both parties one billion dollars each specifically for criminal investigations of possible election fraud. If the Republicans want to subpoena everybody under the sun looking for ballot box stuffing, want to hire a ton of computer analysts and private investigators to go over the election records to catch duplicate voters, I say "go to it." If the Democrats use their billion dollars to subpoena every Republican campaign operative and elected official for possible evidence of intent to knowingly disenfranchise legal voters and hire the private investigators to search those emails and records, I say "go to it." Let's spend the money, take the time, create the media circus of investigations that it would take this one last time to find out just how serious a problem election fraud is, by either or both parties, and put as many people as we can in jail. And then? Once everybody from ACORN to Karl Rove has been investigated all to hell and gone and then either convicted or acquitted? Let's all shut the hell up about it, before we turn this country into even more of a laughable third-world banana republic than it's already becoming.

Because we can not go on with both parties taking measures to fight the other side's actual or hypothetical voting fraud that look exactly like what the other side is looking for as evidence of actual or hypothetical vote fraud. We're making each other crazy.

Update: And scant hours after I posted that, one of Wired.com's "Threat Level" columnists, Kim Zetter, posted this: "Republican Politico Admits No Proof of Voter Fraud from Fraudulent Registrations." Of course, as I'm sure some Republican paranoid will point out, "absence of proof is not proof of absence."