Democrats take the House and have a shot at the Senate. Election Fraud my ass.

The BBQ Pit
1

In one of the other threads I alluded to this, but now that this election has turned out to be a rousing success for the Democrats I’d like to address the topic of election fraud. But first, a few preliminaries.

For my part, I am quite happy that the elections have turned out the way they have. I can’t say that I’m overjoyed with the idea of Speaker Pelosi, but everything has a price, and I think I can choke that down for the benefit of all. I’d be happier if the Senate had gone decisively to the Senate, but as it stands now it’s still a blow to the Republicans so it’s worth celebrating. I say all of this so that I can forestall the inevitable “You’re Bush’s boy” comments that ordinarily would be hurled my way given the topic.

OK, now that that’s out of the way, I ask all of you Chicken Little Democrats who have been beating the “Diebold’s going to throw the election” drum for the past few months: where’s the cheating? Where is the widespread corruption that we were led to believe would be running rampant? To hear it from you guys, a Republican victory was assured. Rove and Diebold were going to cheat. Mass disenfranchisement was going to occur.

Does anybody want to assert that such things have come to pass? Are the Democrats going to mount massive challenges to the results? The only reason that I ask is because this election was quite clearly dirty. I mean, it must have been, because you’ve been telling us that it was so for a long time.

Go and celebrate tonight. I’m celebrating the demise of Santorum, and I certainly won’t begrudge you your celebrations given the magnitude of the results. This thread will still be around in a few days, plenty of time for you to address the stunning silence and shameless hypocrisy of this obviously tainted victory. Or, perhaps, one of you would be willing to step up to the plate and explain to me why the hue and cry about the obviously fraudulent results is so muted.

Oh, that’s right, the Democrats won. The party of goodness was ordained victory long ago as long as things were legitimate, so it stands to reason that this election must have been legitimate. It’s only fraud if the Democrats LOSE. Silly me, how could I forget that part?

Or maybe, just maybe, you guys were wrong all along. Enjoy your crow. I hope it tastes good. I’ll let you get your wits about you so that you can give me a cogent answer. In the meantime, I’ll be celebrating the triumph of an honest democracy tonight.

2

Its far, far too early to say what problems this election has had. You’re way off base, on the very night of the election, to sweepingly call every contest well run or not. Anyone would be.

Give it a rest, and wait for the returns.

3

Would I have had to wait for the hue and cry from the conspiracy whackjobs if the Republicans had won tonight? Hell, during the 2004 Presidential elections I didn’t even have to wait for the polls to be closed!

4

Corrupt lying bastards can lose elections even when they cheat.
This is expecially true if they are also incompetent.

5

Expecially?

6

A cheat that succeeds for the side you’re rooting for is still a victory assured by cheating. Legally, it’s wrong. Pragmatically, it just stings somewhat less. Ethically, its indefensible.

Squeegee has the right idea.

7

It’s a Bushism, meaning “extra-specially” :wink:

8

Hee. Point.

9

A couple of further points:

  • Just because one side won, doesn’t mean there wasn’t fraud of some sort. On either side. Someone may have won, either in spite of, or because of, election fraud. We don’t yet know and can’t have enough information yet.

  • There’s been plenty of screaming about electioneering, voter intimidation, and other problems, in other threads, and on red and blue blogs. All day today. There has been a hew and cry from both sides of the isle about election problems. At least one senatorial campaign is mumbling about court challenges. Where have you been?

  • If there was election fraud, voter intimidation — I think it should be investigated and prosecuted. I also think the emachines should be removed and replaced with machines that produce paper audits. What’s the problem?

  • If someone screamed on this board in 2004 about election fraud, or screamed about Diebold, or whatever… well, gosh, folks yell about things all the time.

In sum – I have no idea what you’re on about.

10

Just wait, Doors, the whining will start tomorrow. I dislike pubs and dems equally, and think the two party system is completely fucked, but don’t worry, there will be dem (and pubbie) lawsuits, demands for recounts, allegations of fraud, all kinds of bullshit over the next few weeks.

For the dems sake, I hope they don’t let their zeal to hang every pubbie officeholder from the nearest tree get in the way of trying to actually accomplish something.

The Democratic party is divided enough amongst itself. I have some doubts that they will take this opportunity to finally unite.

11

Let me just add that the outcome of the elction does not necessarily assuage my concerns about present, past or future election problems. I don’t care who benefits from any type of voter intimidation, fraud or tampering. It disgusts me and concerns me greatly that our elections can be called into question… ever. Sadly, it only ever matters when the races are so damn close to call that every vote counts.

Partisanship aside, getting it right is all that matters. I welcome all discussion and litigation pertaining to the proper monitoring and execution of elections in this nation.

12

If for nothing else, this seeming landslide victory across the board for the Dems ought to shut them the fuck up about these vast, shadowy election conspiricies…at least until '08 anyway. The Dems have been crying wolf about this bullshit since 2000…and its going to take quite a bit of that evidence stuff before I start taking the charge seriously.

Incompetence? Yeah, I can believe that. General government fuckup-ery, inability to write a decent RFP, inability to check up on the contractors, graft and general lazyness with a pince of corruption?? Oh yeah…I more than believe that. Localized election shananigans? Yup, thats certainly more than possible…even probable. But a vast nation wide conspiricy composed of hundreds or thousands, a complex election stealing machine funded and run by the same Republicans who brought us such gems as the invasion of Iraq and the flurry of scandals and fuckups in a crucial election year? Get real. Or at the least…get some frigging hard evidence before continuing to play this tune.

All that said, I think you should back off on this Airman (for now)…its raining on their parade. And after the last few decades of Dems getting beat up by the Pubs like a bunch of crazed Russians and a pack of baby seals, the right thing to do is let the Dems feel good, feel smug, and let the various Pubs feel like things are crumbling under them. :stuck_out_tongue:

For my part, I’m happy that the Dems have won big…now the government will be totally dead-locked and NEITHER of these frigging worthless parties will be able to accomplish much. A pox on BOTH of their houses, I say…and long live split governments!

:wink:

-XT

13

You can’t steal an election unless it’s a very close race. Otherwise discrepancy between exit polls and actual results would be obvious.

And it’s possible that Republicans tried to steal the election and failed. We just don’t know.

Whatever the results are, there are serious flaws with voting machines, e.g. lack of a paper trail and inability to do a recount. I hope now both parties can get together and work on renovating the voting system; perhaps Republicans can now support it without being seen as caving in to Democrats?

Personally I hope they go back to paper ballots - what the heck was wrong with them anyway?? Unfair to blind people? Make computers that assist filling-out the paper ballots. Is it just not modern enough? Even Japan still uses paper ballots. Voting is not something we should be testing our bleeding-edge technology on.

14

Yep. It’s also possible that Democrats tried to steal the election and suceeded. It’s also possible that both sides tried and this time it tipped things towards the Dems.

I don’t actually get the OP (nor xtisme’s post either). Most of us just want fair elections, and have repeatedly said so over and over again. If a person wants to vote, I want them to be able to do so without intimidation, harrassment, deception, etc., and I want that vote to count. If the Dems cheat, throw their asses in jail for as long as the law allows. By the same token, if the Republicans cheat, toss them in the slammer. ANYONE who cheats needs to be punished severely.

I don’t actually believe that Karl Rove paid Diebold “one million dollars” to throw the election their way, but it wouldn’t surprise me to find out that a programmer here, or a tech there did something to skew results. It also wouldn’t surprise me to find out that organizations disseminate methods to sister or child organizations that have a proven method of obstructing or at least discouraging voters. I saw plenty of it with my own eyes in past elections. So no, no vast conspiracy, but evidence of many small violations that add up to the same result. I want it gone.

15

Well, shit, Airman, of course it was stolen. If it hadn’t been for Diebold, the Dems would have taken over 400 House seats, and every Senate seat except maybe Orrin Hatch’s.

:wink:

Abso-fucking-lutely. I, for one, am sick and tired of the schoolyard whining from both sides. Let’s make the necessary improvements so that voting is as safe as it can be in an imperfect world, and when we find someone making it more imperfect, throw 'em in jail. That seems to me to be a plan on which we should all be able to agree.

16

Put me in the “don’t care if there was fraud at this particular election or not, that system is flaky and needs to be fixed” camp. Well, not that I don’t care, but I think that the issue of the fallibility and general untrustworthiness of the voting machines is important regardless of who wins. People should not be delayed or impeded in voting because of technical failures.

17

The last step in the process of the Diebold machine that I voted on was the printing of a paper copy of my ballot. In big letters on the screen it said in plain English that a paper copy of my ballot was now being printed. And I heard some mechanical things going on down in the machine.

The problem was, I didn’t see a copy of the paper ballot so that I could confirm that it was the same as what was being presented to me on the screen while this was going on.

18

As someone who voted a split ticket but tends to be liberal on most social issues, I’m aghast at the reports of other forms of fraud - the repetitious robocalling leading off with something like “I’d like to tell you about [name of the opposing candidate]” (leaving the hangers-up to believe that it’s that person who’s harassing them with repeated calls), the phone calls telling people that they will be arrested if they try to vote because they’re supposedly not registered in the district, the people passing out “informational” brochures on how to vote with the sample ballot showing the featured candidates marked under the wrong party, and so on.

The voting machine data transmission screwed up enough around here that Cook County (which contains the City of Chicago and other towns) had a number of vote cartridges delivered by vehicle to the downtown vote-counting HQ so that the data could be uploaded directly. One candidate announced to his supporters that there were reports of unguarded boxes, and marched down the street with them to insist on “guarding” them. At one point, fights broke out and there were struggles in which at least a couple people were trying to open one of the boxes while another person was trying to fend them off.

Plus without outright fear of vote fraud, from everything I’ve read on the subject I still have concerns about the security and reliability of the systems being used.

19

What a dumbass argument, as has already been pointed out by several people here. It’s good to see that the partisan rancor will continue, with this kind of pre-emptive whining even from semi-reformed Republicans.

Start thinking, man. If it did or did not happen last night, it has no bearing on whether it happened or not in the past. All this bullshit fraud and cheating needs to be stabbed in the heart post-haste. I would include among that the misleading and harrassing robo-calling, the false and deceptive mailings, and even the bullshit like putting candidates home telephone numbers in ads (what the fuck is up with that punk-ass petty bullshit anyways).

The fact is that one party engages in this kind of bullshit far more than the other. Perhaps they’ll die off and a new party will grow in their place. So, listen up: it all must stop, and those who perpetrate it must be held accountable. That means that they should stop receiving the cover of false equivalence and actually be held accountable.

Finally, I call for Vote By Mail for all in every state!

20

I agree with most of what you said, Hentor. This is targeted at a specific subset of members of the SDMB that see Republican conspiracies at every turn, people who were claiming that the Republicans were going to steal the election one way or the other. You know who I’m talking about.

The part that I don’t agree with is that dirty tricks are the sole purview of the Republicans. The Democrats have a long and distinguished history of their own in that regard. Of course, all the dirty tricks in the world won’t matter if people aren’t interested in what you’re selling. Now that people are interested again I’m curious as to whether the Democrats will remain the party of virtue or if they will return to business as usual.