The Glade 4.0

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2012/1 ... ?mobile=nc

Spoilered for the sensitive:

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So do you agree or disagree with the commentary?

The commentary is asinine. A person isn't "more likely to be hit by lightning" than to choose to commit a crime. That's a completely inapt comparison. If someone isn't sure if they'll be committing a crime by voting, perhaps they should be willing to make the effort to find out. If they're not willing to find out and just don't vote because it's too hard to learn about their own rights...

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Also good voter fraud is
1. Not detectable and
2. Occurs in areas with party control so there
A. Won't be an investigation
B. If there is no wrong doing will be found.

It's like trying to report on the number of unreported crimes. It is unknown.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

If this is voter intimidation then the don't drink and drive billboards are police brutality.

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Reading comprehension fail.

More likely to be hit by lightning than commit voter fraud, not "a crime". And based off of the numbers I've found, that is an accurate statement.

Are people more likely to be struck by lightning than drive drunk? Or steal copper? Yet you don't seem to have any objections to billboards condemning these crimes.

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I prefer to think of them as "Fighting evil in another dimension"

Here's a thought: if there's virtually no evidence of voter fraud, and any fraud that you think might be occurring is admittedly almost undetectable...on what basis are the sponsors of these billboards deciding to target minority neighborhoods? After all, there's no more evidence of fraud (i.e. there's no evidence at all) in those neighborhoods than there is in, say, Orange County, CA, rural South Dakota or central Pennsylvania.

*shrug* Guess it's just a coincidence that they targeted minority voters who are likely to support Democrats. Couldn't possibly be a mixture of racial prejudice and political manipulation because, of course, we all know the anti-voter fraud movement is motivated by only the purest of concerns for the integrity of the process.

Dude why the snark? I try to have civil, even friendly discussions with you, but you have to repeatedly throw **** like that out. Knock it off.

Voter fraud is "a crime", there is no failure of reading comprehension on my end.
You don't randomly choose to commit a crime. Getting hit by lightning is a random occurrence.

Comparing choosing to commit a crime with getting hit by lightning is asinine.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Your contributions are rapidly approaching the Monte condemnations about supposedly conspicuous blood soaked rifle avatars, less the pure comedic effect of Monte's pure absurdity factor but plus a great deal of douche quotient.

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"It's real, grew up in trife life, the times of white lines
The hype vice, murderous nighttimes and knife fights invite crimes" - Nasir Jones

So I read your statement as expanding the situation to any crime, not a specific crime thus changing the goal posts. If that wasn't your intent, then I apologize.

That said, the comparison is completely valid. Certainly one doesn't randomly decide to commit voter fraud, although there is intentional and unintentional fraud. However, if you take a macro view of voter fraud, there is a certain rate at which is occurs. Lightning similarly isn't a random event. It's caused by very specific things that happen at a predictable rate, again when you back out to a broad enough perspective.

The fact of the matter is that lightning strikes people more often than people commit voter fraud. It's a completely valid comparison.

What's ironic to me is how many here get all up in arms at how advocating gun control laws are a waste of time/money to control a "non-issue" when voter fraud has even less of a rate of occurrence.

Neither lightning strikes nor "personal choice" are random. They are both ultimately dictated precisely by physical, natural law.

Other than that, I don't care about this thread.

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

How about you save yourself the trouble of repeatedly apologizing and just stop that ****?

I knew I shouldn't have said random, it just invited an argument about semantics.



If you're at the voting precinct, you can consciously choose to commit voter fraud, while consciously choosing to get struck by lightning, which has a higher chance of occurring?
If I choose to commit voter fraud, I can guarantee I'll commit voter fraud. If I choose to get hit by lightning, I can give no such guarantee, and neither can anyone else.

The "fact of the matter" isn't that "lightning strikes people more often than people commit voter fraud", folks making the claim of how rare voter fraud is are conflating committing voter fraud with being caught for voter fraud. The statement reeks of disingenuousness.

Billboards are common in high density, high traffic areas. Minorities are common in high density, high traffic areas. Correlation != causation.

I don't see that "many here get all up in arms at how advocating gun control laws are a waste of time/money to control a 'non-issue'". Advocating gun control laws may very well be a waste of time/money but it's the advocate's time/money. Creating new gun control laws, like the proposed Cook County "Violence Tax", are a waste of time and money.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Was this really necessary?

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

What constitutes "necessary" ?

It's an expression.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

There's no evidence of fraud of any significance. Studies and investigations have been done and found virtually nothing. It would be wildly irrational for individual voters to try to influence the outcome of an election by casting a fraudulent vote. It would be impractical and risky to the point of stupidity for conspirators to try to commit fraud in modern elections by having large numbers of ineligible voters cast ballots instead of just rigging the count. So sure, we can't prove a negative and say with 100% certainty that no voter fraud is occurring, but seriously, there's just no reason to suspect it's a problem.


Come on, Vind. You're reaching here.

This supposed impracticality of committing widespread voter fraud did not seem to stop wild accusations against Diebold in the last 2 elections.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

Maybe this is off the topic somewhat....but I think anyone caught of voter intimidation, or voter fraud, should face stiff penalties in the form of hard time behind bars, busting rocks with a small hammer.

Basically this.

I'm honestly sorry that my comment made you upset Vindi, but seriously dude you're over reacting. The phrase reading comprehension fail is pretty mild on the whole snark-o-meter. Especially in context of how completely and totally retarded this "issue" is.

The facts of the matter is there have been several studies done looking into voter fraud, and non that I've found (please show me otherwise) have shown any hints at significant amounts of voter fraud. If you look at one of the ones I linked in this thread you'll see the following data.

2068 alleged cases of voter fraud since 2000 (12 years)
During that time there were 10 cases of voter impersonation (something that voter ID laws would address)
During that time there were 146 million registered voters

So that gives you a rate of 1 incident of voter impersonation in 14.6 million people over 12 years.

Since you seem all wrapped around the axle on comparing that rate of occurrence to lightning strikes let's look at the rates of other crimes so that we avoid the whole random semantic argument.

http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/cr ... 0tbl01.xls

Rates of Crime for 2010 (I've multiplied the source data by 146 so that the rates are per 14.6M inhabitants and we're looking at apples to apples)

Violent Crime: 58,925.6
- Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter: 700.8
- Forcible rape: 4,015.0
- Robbery: 17,388.6
Property Crime: 429,517.4
- Burglary: 102,141.6
- Larceny-theft: 292,511.0
- Motor vehicle theft: 34,864.8

It should be highlighted that these are just the rates for 1 year worth of crime (2010) and that these rates have fairly steadily been trending down. Further we're comparing ALLEGED cases of voter fraud to ACTUAL cases of other crimes here, so I'm being about as conservative with my comparison as you can get. So in just one year (the lowest rate year I might add) you are 700.8 times more likely to be murdered than be exposed to voter identification fraud. So over the 12 years of the voter fraud samples you would be 8,409.6 times more likely to be murdered or killed.

The facts of the matter are that the Republican political machine has concocted this liberal fraud boogeyman and somehow managed to get otherwise intelligent people to be scared of the dark.

I completely and wholeheartedly agree, and it appears that those laws are already on the books.

That's not "voter fraud" in the sense of ineligible voters casting ballots, though, which is what the current Voter ID movement is all about. The Diebold allegations were of fraud in the counting, which, as I noted, is much more plausible because you don't need thousands of random people involved. You just need a handful of corrupt counters (or programmers).

You guys seem to have this idea that voter fraud when done correctly is detectable or reportable.

I know people who have committed voter fraud, organized it in fact on a city-wide scale. It happens every single election, it happens in the primaries.

How you could think that organizing political power is not worth committing something that cannot be detected (and won't be investigated if the target of the fraud wins) is worth it - is beyond me to understand. Political power at its core is the ability to kill people who disagree with you because ---no reason needed.

If you don't think that kind of power is attractive and that people and organizations will do ANYTHING to keep that power then I have to call you wholly naive to how politics works in cities and counties in this country and the nature of politics itself.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

Cite Elmo?

I've already asked a couple times in threads here to see examples of fraud.

I have no doubt that I could fly back to Kansas on election day and cast a vote in my brother's name and there would be essentially a zero chance of it ever being discovered. I wouldn't do it, because I'm not a criminal, but I definitely could.

I am certain that the numbers cited on the amount of voter fraud are wildly inaccurate, as you have to be fairly inept to get caught at it.