Distinguish between bogus voter registrations and bogus actual votes cast.
Certainly in a system this big you are going to have some bogus ballots. That said there has been no evidence that it is a real problem these days (historically there have been some doozies).
The OP cites three bogus ballots and wants to change the whole voter registrations system in the whole US?
Going back to my howitzer to kill a gnat analogy on this one.
There were 131,257,328 ballots cast in the 2008 election. If just 1% were bogus then 1,312,573 should be popping up.
The result? Despite that these signatures were gained by voter fraud, the amendment was still allowed to be put on the ballot. And, ever since, Affirmative Action is illegal in Michigan.
Whites have been unraveling the gains of the Civil Rights Movement ever since MLK was shot. Though woe to anyone for admitting it. Voter fraud in combination with state ballot boxes has been used to erode the spirit of federal laws that allow colleges and private companies to take affirmative action in the employment and education of minorities . This is tyranny of the majority at its finest. I don’t blame Michigan or California; I blame the U.S for not protecting the most vulnerable its citizens and failing to live up to its end of the bargain at the end of the Civil Rights Movement. Just reason 1,000,002 why I believe the U.S should cut a reparation check and be done with it. I promise to move to Holland and never, ever come back.
Bricker, if I had posted a horseshit strawman argument like this, I hope you’d jump down my throat very quickly. I however will take the high road, and suggest you go back to the drawing board.
And why do I suspect you’d been collecting those cute cites for some time, waiting for your chance to jump?
Anyway most of them DO NOT SAY WHAT YOU THINK THEY SAY.
We acknowledge voter fraud exists. And it should be eliminated when found. But it does not exist in any amount that justifies the voter suppresion tactics used by certain parties.
I wish I had. But frankly it didn’t occur to me that anyone would claim “No one’s said that voter fraud doesn’t exist,” when people have said that repeatedly in many different threads. Thankfully the site is indexed by Google now, so the search only took about ten minutes.
But it’s amazing. If I made this claim and then DIDN’T have the cites, the claim would be dismissed as untrue. If I had one or two cites, undoubtedly they would be waved away as aberrations. And if I take the time to gather a whole mess o’ cites, why then it’s a “cute” list that I’ve obviously been assembling for some time to serve as a gotchya, and should for some unaccountable reason ALSO be dismissed.
Is that about the size of it?
Look, it’s clear to me that the example here is a small one. And it’s also clear that we cannot generalize from this to conclude that some nefarious scheme is afoot to steal elections, because this method doesn’t scale well for large numbers of votes. But…
…It’s like the death penalty. Proponents of the death penalty on this board (and elsewhere!) piously claim that not a single innocent person has ever been executed. When the hundred-plus prisoners exonerated and released from Death Row by the Innocence Project and DNA testing are pointed out, they merely claim that this is proof the system works: after all, those prisoners were not executed!
They seem willfully blind to the inference that if the court system wrongly convicted someone and imposed the death penalty, only to be proved wrong by DNA, it’s highly likely that other convictions exist that were equally wrong but didn’t have DNA available for testing. Because I can’t point to a specific wrongly-executed person, they smugly claim this proves there are NO wrongly-executed people.
So, too, with this argument. I contend that simple measures, like voter ID cards, would prevent fraud. No, I hear, don’t be ridiculous – there is no fraud; you’re describing a problem that doesn’t exist.
So I start this thread not to hold up this specific instance of fraud as proof of anything more wide-spread, but to say that there are instance of voter fraud, and it’s reasonable to take reasonable steps to limit that fraud.
Please look back over the quotes you assembled. I appreciate your taking the time to do so. However, they almost entirely describe this as a “problem that does not really exist.” You’ve done nothing to contest those claims with the OP. It’s almost like you’re actually reading neither your own OP or the Doper quotes you’ve assembled.
Again, I ask how an ID card has any bearing on the present example, since one can simply complete and mail in an application to recieve an absentee ballot in Troy, NY? I really am curious how your solution addresses the problem within your OP.
Bricker. you and your talking point sources already lost the Battle of ACORN. There is no value in attempting to pretend you were really concerned instead about some broader problem of any significant size faced by our democracy. It would be better for you to just accept that and try to be a little less transparent in the future, okay?
Not a very good analogy. Apples and oranges really.
1,176 people have been executed in the US since 1976. Getting it wrong once is 0.09% of the total. In the 2008 election that would represent 11,813 votes. That is just on a 1:1 comparison.
Further, the chances of finding vote fraud occurred is much better than finding after the fact that someone was innocent who was executed. As has been noted there just is not a lot of money or effort put into exonerating people who were executed. It is incredibly difficult, perhaps even impossible with the passage of time, and expensive.
Voting fraud is easier to spot. There is a record of the vote, numerous organizations analyze them and match them against known markers and there are numerous statistical tools to unearth irregularities. Hell, people make a business out of this stuff. If something looks remotely fishy they can take ever closer looks at the ballots to find irregularities (indeed I am amazed at the colossal work put into things like a serious review of the 2000 Florida vote count after the fact). Add in exit polling to match against and poll watchers.
Not to mention executing an innocent person seems a much more egregious thing than fixing a vote (not to say vote fraud is unimportant).
Vote fraud is a amazingly stupid crime to engage in. If you just do it yourself to aid a candidate and cast one bogus ballot you are a felon and have done nothing to sway the election at all. Helluva thing to risk jail for. If you organize some massive vote fraud, sufficient to dangerously skew the results, the chances of it being spotted are excellent for reasons I just listed. Further you need a lot of people in the loop to do it thus exponentially increasing your chances of getting caught. Lots of people willing to risk a hefty prison stay to get their candidate in? Lots and lots of downside, not much upside for the people doing it.
Now, mess with the voting machines and you are on to something (see Diebold controversy).
At the end of it all however you have not spelled out how a national voter card would aid things. How much less fraud might we expect? Is it worth the cost to implement for the result it will deliver? How many people might be disenfranchised from such a scheme?
Till you can show a cost/benefit analysis on this I see no reason to push it. You’ve been around here long enough to know that an idea that just “seems” great to you (general “you”) often isn’t when scrutinized.
Agreed. Furthermore, a case here and a case there are not sufficient to make it reasonable to mandate new and expensive voter ID bureaucracy in every state in the union.
Put it this way: Suppose I said that there is no problem with arsenic contamination in the drinking water in my city. Am I lying? After all, there are surely a few atoms of arsenic floating around in the reservoir. But a few atoms of arsenic doesn’t constitute a problem, so the statement “there is no problem with arsenic contamination here” is still true.
Similarly, you have demonstrated here that there is at least some voting fraud in the US. But is there a problem with voting fraud? Can you, for instance, find any election which would have had a different result were it not for vote fraud?
Actually, what Diebold has been suspected of is election fraud. Different animal entirely. “Voter fraud” means people voting who are legally ineligible to vote, or voting under false names, etc.; as distinct from ballot-box stuffing or its virtual equivalent, which might be done at a different stage of the process, by whoever is actually running the process or counting the votes.
“As of November 1, 2005, the Working Families Party had 30,391 enrolled members, who are eligible to vote in party primaries, 0.26% of registered voters statewide.”
~50 votes in a primary, ya know those things that don’t choose who gets elected just who’s running, for a party that’s gotten all of two candidates elected to the city council of Hartford, Connecticut and zero, count 'em ZERO elected in the state of their founding!
CMC fnord!
BTW, if we really want to concern ourselves with voter fraud in party primary elections maybe we could discuss Operation Chaos?
Hmmm, 50 votes in (WATB) a city council party primary vs 16,000 in a Presidential party primary, can’t quite decide which is worse. :rolleyes:
From 2000 to 2005 ,20 people voted while ineligible, 5 voted more than once. Only in Brickerland is voting fraud a problem. In the real world ,claiming voting fraud is rampant ,allows them to question and suppress voters they do not like. It is a ruse and an obvious one. Voter fraud is simply not a problem. Those who get noisy about it are just looking for an excuse to get poor people off the rolls.
There is no information who the perpetrators voted for.
As though my reaction would be, “Oh, no, THAT kind of fraud is just dandy!”
To the contrary: I agree with you, and am interested in hearing what method you propose to reduce or eliminate it. I’ll certainly sign on to your proposal, if it does the job.
By the same token, I expect you will support my voter ID card proposal, since it reduces fraud.
Okay, how about this: once you choose a political party, you are never, ever allowed to change it, for so long as you live. You cool with that? No? What’s that you say? It’s an overly restrictive solution that creates a larger problem then the one it seeks to solve?
Agree. When ever and where ever fraud is suspected, it should be investigated, according to the law. If it is proven, it should be dealt with according to the law. If this is done, then there is no need for some new system, some new bureaucracy.
Voter fraud is extremely rare and pretty easy to catch. The idea that it is a huge problem, is an excuse to purge and question voters of lower class. Why don’t we have investigations of voter fraud for the wealthy? They are most likely to be able to vote out of district . Ann Colter was able to pull it off.
