The Glade 4.0

You would have to talk to one of the people who helped commit it, and even then - because good fraud leaves no evidence - citation would be impossible.

Falsifying voter roles - you find people to vote as people you say live places they don't (or you have one person at the polling place vote as these people). The books match the records, and the polling employees say nothing bad has happened. How do you confirm? You want to start an investigation but its blocked because the people who would be investigating are ones benefited by the fraud so its either not investigated or it is by with 0 man hours and a few months later they report a "thorough investigation found no fraud". You get the listings yourself for who voted there and then and then try to contact them but phone numbers don't need to be listed and if you do go door to door you find people unwilling to give much of any investigation about them or anyone else.

Even voting as the dead only leaves record that someone committed fraud - not who. The fact that it leaves a record is why it isn't done nearly as much anymore - fraud had to evolve to the systems used to catch it.

I mean do you actually believe people haven't figured out how to game a system where the referee of that system benefits to game it? A system where you just say a name and then sign a scribble and that is all the error-checking that is done? You really think its hard to commit undetectable fraud?

_________________
"...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

I don't see that this is much more plausible. Sure, you only need a few people to implement it, but an audit of the count or the code can find it more easily than a decentralized attempt.

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

http://pjmedia.com/jchristianadams/2012 ... epage=true


http://pjmedia.com/tatler/2012/10/10/se ... r-firings/


Two different places.

_________________
"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

Okeefe has been discredited for editing the video to create false impressions in the past. He's another conservative willing to fake data to support this conspiracy to scare minorities away from the polls because he doesn't like the way they vote. This voter fraud concoction of the GOP is blatantly criminal and immoral.

O'Keefe is an absolute scumbag who got a completely legitimate organization (ACORN) dismantled via a heavily edited video that suggested criminal activity when there was none. He should be in prison, or failing that have all his **** taken away in a libel case. He has no credibility.

You're missing the point. The point is not that there's no fraud, it's that there's no fraud that the voter ID crap being pushed would help prevent. If you can get the polling place employees to be complicit in the fraud, then it doesn't matter what ID the voters have or don't have.

Ok an example- http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/mar ... _blog.html

A Maryland Democratic candidate quit her congressional race Monday after her own party told state officials that she had committed fraud by voting in both Maryland and Florida in recent elections.

http://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/po ... a-new-york
that the group analyzed Florida’s entire voter registration roll and evaluated it against 10 percent of New York’s voter roll. In its study, the organization pinpointed 1,700 people with voter registrations in both states. Of those people, 31 purportedly cast ballots in both states during the same election cycle.

Back in 2008, WHIO News in Ohio identified 3,000 deceased people registered to vote, and “approximately 22 of them voted from beyond the grave.”

Pew Research found more than 2.75 million people nationwide are registered to vote in more than one state.


So again, it happens. And with all the lip service being paid to not disenfranchsing voters, the fact remains we have the ability, but not the political will, to at the very least clean up the voter registrations.

_________________
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

Money says that Mus is "registered" to vote in 2 states. I'm sure a lot of that is because of people moving and remaining "on the rolls" in the state they moved from.

I wonder how many people die in a year in Ohio as well.

That fact is, even if we give full credibility to all of those numbers, you're talking about TINY TINY percentages when compared to the overall body of registered voters.

I don't doubt that. What I'm saying is that (a) there is no evidence of it happening on a large enough scale to matter, (b) it's completely irrational (and irrelevant) for individuals to bother casting a a couple of fraudulent votes on their own, (c) conspiracies to rig an election on the front-end by having ineligible voters cast ballots would require the involvement of literally thousands of people to have an effect, making it virtually impossible to keep the conspiracy a secret, and (d) conspiracies to rig an election on the back-end by corrupting the counting process are not affected by or the focus of the Voter ID movement.

Are there people out there who are motivated enough to go to the trouble of registering and voting when they know they're ineligible, immoral enough to do so, and stupid enough to think their individual vote will make a difference? Sure, but not enough to have any impact. So really, the problem to guard against is conspiracies to commit voter fraud on a large scale. But again, those would involve too many people to be kept a secret, so would-be conspirators would be morons to try and rig an election that way. Anyway, the upshot is that anyone who wants to rig an election and has half a brain is going to go after the count, because that only involves a handful of people. And even there, as Diamondeye pointed out, there's a huge risk of getting nailed if an audit is done. Regardless, Voter ID laws will do nothing to prevent fraud of that nature.

*Edited to delete some unnecessary snark.

Sure, but you'd have to be cracked to think it would have any impact on the election outcome, so even if you had no moral objection, it just wouldn't be worth your time.

Organizing thousands of people to commit frausd would be very hard, but if people think fraud is undetectable and the rules are saet up to prevent attempting to detect it they may hope minor fraud on their part will combine with fraud on the part of others to have an effect.

As for it being irrational and unlikely to have an effect, so what? Its ok to commit fraud because it probably won't affect the outcome? People do irrational things all the time; that isn't a reason not to try to counter it.

All of these arguments seem centered on avoiding a voter ID program. The reason so many have been struck down up till now has nothing to do with a lack of fraud and everything to do with "poll taxes".

It seems the idea is that since detected fraud has so far been small, that therefor any attempt to determine if more exists, or deter people from trying, must have some ulterior motive.

As for voter suppression, how about white republicans in a mostly democratic and hispanic area not being registerted through the BMV when getting licenses? It goes on here in south Texas.

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

1. So, according to that, 31 people cast ballots in both states. Since they only analyzed 10% of the NY roles, lets say 310 did. So, 300 people out of a total population of about 40 million voted twice. This is a major problem?

2. The voter ID stuff being pushed doesn't do anything to prevent this. The idea behind these laws is to make sure the voter is a citizen and eligible to vote. It does absolutely nothing to catch people voting in two different places.

So in other words, the arguments against voter I'd are based on the fact that it doesn't prevent an entirely different kind of fraud?

Even if voter ID didn't help with these kinds of fraud (which it should, since each voter must present an ID and dead people or fake people can't) it hardly makes sense to complain that voter fraud by citizens is small that therefore voter fraud by using illegals must be as well.

Furthermore, the "its minor!" Argument is stupid. We just had a thread where we discussed that a few votes can matter in certain states. They also can matter a lot more in house, state or local elections.

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

Fair point. I suppose it's not that much more irrational to cast a fraudulent vote than it is to cast a legitimate one. Neither has any meaningful impact, but both can be perceived as "doing your part" to help while hoping that others do the same. Still, there's a lot of cultural pressure to vote as part of your civic duty, whereas there's the opposite pressure (backed by criminal sanctions) with respect to fraudulent voting. Most people can barely be roused to go vote legitimately, let alone take it upon themselves to do so fraudulently. Amoral, highly-motivated, politically active, and yet content to just be a drop in the bucket (as opposed to rigging a count or organizing a larger fraud) seems like a pretty uncommon personality type.


To be clear, I actually think Voter ID laws are fine as long as they aren't too onerous and get implemented in a gradual manner so people have time to adjust. I just don't think there's any reasonable justification for the current "OMG! Voter fraud!!" freak-out being pushed by Republicans and their media allies. So, given the lack of any genuine urgency to the issue, the push to implement new requirements prior to the upcoming election, the fact that the otherwise legitimate voters most likely to be prevented from voting generally vote Democrat (not to mention tend to be minorities), and the occasional gaffes by Voter ID supporters like that Republican legislator in PA talking about how it will enable Romney to win the state...yeah, I doubt the good faith of the current Voter ID movement.

Now, if the Republicans were saying, "Let's implement a Voter ID law that gets phased in after the current election is over and we've spent a couple of years educating the public about the new requirements," I'd be all for it.


Yeah, that's the kind of fraud that I think actually is more of a problem. Low-level bureaucrats messing with voters and/or tampering with results definitely makes more sense as the kind of thing that could be both difficult to detect/prove and effective at influencing the outcome of elections. Anecdotally, my brother ran into a lot of it when he was poll watching in Arkansas for a local mayoral campaign. People who he knew lived in the town and were on the voter rolls but were voting for the challenger (a black woman) got hassled and turned away (often with a warning about "voter fraud" being illegal, by the way), while people who weren't on the rolls but were obviously voting for the incumbent (a white guy who'd been in office forever) were allowed to vote because "Oh, everyone knows so-and-so. Must be a mistake in the paperwork." There were some other shenanigans too that I can't recall right now - something about town vehicles being used for the incumbent's GOTV efforts and some of the challenger's absentee ballots being lost or wrongly disqualified or something. Anyway, in the end, the incumbent won by a small enough margin that the result likely would have flipped if not for the manipulation.

RD it doesn't take thousands of people. It takes perhaps dozens.

You get the polling officials who go into the back room in precincts you know you control. You then add as many votes or take away as many votes (most easily done through write in votes) in order to give a lead greater than the polling indicates in that precinct. You know in advance how many poll watcher certificates were issues and you know to whom. Day of the election is too late to get them so there are no surprises where the votes are counted and confirmed. If the votes are way out of your favor for some reason -oops the machine ate the printouts.

_________________
"...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

Right, but that's not voter fraud, Elm, which is what Voter ID laws are aimed at. That's fraud by election officials.

You're fooling yourself if you think that voter fraud is what these laws are about.

Quite a few people, especially younger people who have convinced themselves the other side is "evil" would see vote fraud as "a necessary evil". As for being willing to be a drop in the bucket, look at the complaining about the electoral college. People whine that their vote in a particular state "doesn't matter" and yet they think that it somehow would "matter" more in a pool of hundreds of millions. The increase in the amount it matters is so miniscule as to be unworthy of notice, but many people are hung up on the idea that their personal ideas really should matter to everyone else.



I find the opposite. I think that the lack of urgency has been created by the fact that every attempt to implement such a law has been stymied.

I am also not at all convinced that the voters that would be most likely to be prevented from voting would be democrat. Sure, more minority and poor people vote democrat, but those people are more likely to be in urban centers where liberal and nonpartisan vote drives can access them. Rural poor are more dispersed, making vote drives more physically difficult to accomplish. Therefore, I think it would be even in the long run, and in any case, I do not buy that it is hard to get a photo ID. I have arrested many, many people who did not have a driver's license, and many were poor, but every single one has had a government photo ID of some sort. I think the difficulty of getting one has been wildly exaggerated by the left.



I wouldn't be against this, but again, I do not think there's much actual need for education. People that actually lack ID are extremely rare. People that refuse to get an ID I have no sympathy for.



Small towns have that sort of problem. Note the Massachusetts thread.

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

You're fooling yourself if you think they're about anything but voter fraud.

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

Please. You don't see republicans going after deibold. And why target black neighborhoods?

Just yell racism already and stop dancing around the issue.

_________________
A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. ~ John Stuart Mill

You also don't see cases of voter fraud with republicans gaining the benefits. Always seems to be the dems doing it.

_________________
"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

It's the only crutch the left has.

_________________
"It is true that democracy undermines freedom when voters believe they can live off of others' productivity, when they modify the commandment: 'Thou shalt not steal, except by majority vote.' The politics of plunder is no doubt destructive of both morality and the division of labor."

It's not about racism, it's about winning elections for Republicans. These neighborhoods tend to vote Democrat. Race really has nothing to do with it.

That's because there is absolutely zero evidence of any impropriety built into Dieold's machines, despite the efforts of the left to find it.



Why not? That's where ACORN was having fake registrations created. And in any case, if we're asking "why", why the incredible opposition to voter ID to prevent illegals from voting, on such a flimsy excuse as "poor people can't get ID". Oh right, because the left would rather look the other way and let the imported voters count, while simultaneously advocating for these people with endless appeals to a poem about "huddled masses".

RD's point about educating the public and having a lead-in period was vastly more convincing than the majority of the left and it's total freakout that its fake voters, however many or few there are, might be exposed.

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