Did Ramon Cue vote?
How about Neville Waters? Did he vote?
If he did, can he be convicted of it?
Au contraire. I think a sizable number feel that’s exactly what the issue is. Which, as has been pointed out, negatively impacts voter confidence.
I’ll cheerfully stipulate that Ramon Cue #1 cast a vote and Ramon Cue #2 was not eligible to vote, but it’s unclear, even in your cite, that #1 and #2 are the same person.
As for Waters, I forget what the deal was with him, assuming there was a deal in the first place.
The problem may be a lack of shared understanding of what voter confidence is. To Bricker, it seems to be confidence of a Republican win, that being in the true best interests of the voters, who will eventually become confident it was the right result after they experience the effects.
Those of us saddled with a less-sophisticated understanding of democracy, and with intellects significantly inferior to his, have trouble agreeing because we simply cannot grasp the correctness of the concept.
What? You don’t know about the Neville Waters case!? Man, that was totally huge. I don’t ever mention it, because it totally destroys our case and is famous across the land for that reason alone! I could tell you about it, sure, but that would spoil Bricker’s fun…
But its really big and important, and pretty much everybody knows about it, except you, dummy dumb dumb.
Done with all the class and clarity I would expect from you, weasel-fuck.
I acknowledge that your post-hoc face-saving flail is apparent.
[
](http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/06/01/v-fullstory/2827629/gov-rick-scott-florida-is-absolutely.html)
But even if they did vote, showing ID at the polling place would *not *have stopped them. The issue, if there is one, is their being allowed to *register *despite not being citizens.
You’ve had that explained to you already, multiple times, but are *still *trying to lie about it. Maybe you advanced life forms are beyond such primitive concepts as mere morality.
Had the case of razor thin elections and lax voter laws, right here in Minnesota.
See, by law and custom here, voter laws are what Bricker describes as “lax”. Basically, if you go to the poll with a registered voter in your district, and that registered voter will attest that he knows you personally, you live where you say you live and that you are qualified to register and vote, then…(drum roll and cowbell!)…you can vote. That very day, no “provisional” bullshit, you just vote.
Then came Franken/Coleman. Norm Coleman, some of you remember him as the only person that Garrison Keillor actually hates. Anyway, it went right down to the wire, voting margin the size of a butterfly’s eyelash. Recounted, in public, totally transparent, every single move recorded, witnessed, publicized, video’d. Result: Franken won by half a butterfly’s eyelash!
Naturally, Republicans were outraged at this destruction of their voter confidence, they pushed for a referendum on a stricter voter id law. It was defeated.
(Side note of minor import: that was when the whole thing about felon voting here came up. Turns out, the law was not very clear on the precise determination of a felon’s restored right to vote. So reformed felons who thought they were entitled but maybe weren’t, voted. And if you don’t think the Pubbies tried to make that into a Big Hairy Ass Deal, you don’t know Republicans. Epic fail in a teapot…)
Because in the exchange between you and elucidator, when he responded to you in post 5819, HE ignored it, and addressed your questioning of the numbers come up with by the guy who wrote the article. You then responded to him with your claim about Adaher’s article’s 100.
So as far as the back and forth that produced the context in which you made the immediate claim under discussion, which was very clearly about whether we could trust the numbers produced by the study author, (numbers of CASES OF VOTER IMPERSONATION), your further statements about your larger position in the thread were tangential at best. Any reasonable person reads that exchange as Elucidator saying “His ideology is irrelevant… are you questioning his numbers (of cases of voter impersonation)?” and you responding with “there are over 100 cases (of voter impersonation) in Adaher’s cite”, as opposed to you saying “well, I don’t know anything about his numbers, or how good they are, despite the fact that I’m responding directly to a question about how good his numbers are. But, here’s an interesting and related data point… Adaher’s cite lists over 100 cases of a RELATED thing which I personally view as being clearly part of the same overall issue”.
OK, I agree. My context was clear to me: a steady refusal to be drawn into debating numbers of voter impersonation when my claims have never been limited to voter impersonation.
But I trust your honest appraisal. And if you say that fair-minded reader takes away a different impression, I accept that.
Therefore: I apologize for failing to express myself clearly. For anyone who believed I was endorsing a claim that there were over 100 voter impersonation cases, I apologize. That was not my intention, and my lack of clarity is regretted.
To be crystal clear: I contend that there are over 100 cases of unqualified voters voting.
Anyhow, back to discussing the issue as a whole… far and away the most prominent super-close election in recent memory was Bush-Gore 2000 in Florida.
And at some point before that election, there was an infamous purging of names of felons from Florida voter roles.
That was in many ways comparable to this issue…
-it has a seemingly legitimate pretense (after all, if felons are in fact not legally allowed to vote, they should not vote)
-liberals suspect that it was done purely for nefarious reasons
-it likely didn’t actually PREVENT anyone from voting. Anyone who was really on top of civic laws would no doubt have gone in ahead of election day just to double check that his or her name was still properly at the polling place, and even if it wasn’t, they all they had to do was file some kind of protest or lawsuit or something, and eventually I’m sure they would have gotten their vote counted. As long as they had plenty of time and energy and knowledge of the legal system and so forth. So I mean it wasn’t like voting was IMPOSSIBLE for them.
So, was voter confidence increased by this measure? Well, 14 years later many of us STILL remember that law, and not in the context of “well, that election was close, but at least we are sure that no felons voted illegally, so thank god for that law making is confident that the results of that election were accurately tabulated”.
And of course, while we’re on the topic, that whole election was and is a GLARING example of massive LACK of voter confidence, and as far as I can tell none of the many things that led to voter misconfidence would be remotely addressed by voter ID laws, and many of the things that led to a lack of voter confidence were immediately and directly the result of GOP actions. (Sure, we’ll STOP RECOUNTING VOTES just because a gang of angry assholes are pounding on our door and DEMANDING THAT WE DO A LESS GOOD JOB COUNTING VOTES THAN WE SHOULD. What respect for the future confidence of the voters you door-pounding-thugs have!)
Apology accepted.
I suggest that ships should carry sufficient lifeboats. You respond that the Titanic had a few, and yet it was still a major seafaring disaster.
I suggest that voter confidence is improved by identifying voters, so that if non-qualified people vote, they may be reliably prosecuted. You respond that a halfway measure removed some felons’ names from an ultra-close election and it was still questionable.
Yes, it was still questionable. And yes, the Titanic still lost lots of lives.
Your suggestion is short-sighted, for reasons that have been clearly explained.
Well, closer to reasonable. He has made major use of the rhetorical tool of distraction for years now. Any time anyone gets close to rebutting him, he changes one small term in the discourse, and starts arguing this new point as if it were directly relevant to the old one.
This time, however, moving from “impersonating someone else” to “not having been removed from the voting list,” is a hellish nadir for the man. He has transcended his earlier art of sleight-of-hand and has gone directly to the “Liar” guy from SNL. “Yeah, that’s what I mean, right, that’s the ticket.”
It’s pathetic. I almost miss the old manipulative son of a bitch.
That’s our point. Voter IDs would not have caught the convicted felons whose names had not been removed from the voting rolls.
You made a bad argument, one that does not advance your actual point (which has been that Voter IDs would reduce ineligible voting.)
You hared off down a side-track that doesn’t go anywhere you would like.
Now, by consistently denying this, you are acting dishonestly, and causing many of us to hold you in low esteem. (Lower esteem, as I’ve always felt you were arguing fallaciously. This time, it’s fallacious and stupid.)
If you want to go down that rabbit hole about felon voting and Franken/Coleman, you do so at your own peril. I offer you three synopsis: Fox News, AlterNet and Wiki (natch).
And may the Goddess have mercy on your soul…
Wait, its not sudden onset glaucoma, my eyes just glazed over! Huzzah!
My point is that you yourself have admitted that your proposed solution has traces of scuzzery associated with it, since you agree that it’s likely that the motives of some or all of the legislators who proposed it were scuzzy. And that if there is another super-close Bush-Gore style election, the fact that there was a controversial and scuzzy recent modification to voting laws could, nay WILL, cause damage to voter confidence all by itself. “Voter confidence” is based in a large part on perception, and your claim of how much importance you place in it is, to me, belied by how casually you ally yourself with a law that you admit has basically-openly-partisan motivation.
If there’s another super-close election some time soon (as you are oh so terribly worried that there will be), what’s more likely to cause actual lack of confidence in the results… a fairly new law that many reasonable people believe for very good reasons was intended to disenfranchise lots of voters (even if a really precise mathematical analysis of those claims proves them to be unfounded or overreaching), or a lack of voter ID laws, which is vaguely alarming only because of problems that we don’t even know exist but which might exist.
I quoted my posts from two years ago that are consistent with the point I am making now.
No. “Some,” yes. Never “all.”
Except that someone who focuses on the motivation is unreasonable. (“The voodoo analogy.”)
Those unreasonable fears exist in a minority of voters. The majority of voters favor Voter ID laws. I prefer to cater to the majority.