You’re citing Hans von Spakovsky on voter fraud??
Didn’t you have a more solid cite, like the Weekly World News?
Me, I’m going with the famous author Fear Itself.
Have you a point, or just a bit of fun? Is it sufficient that Fear dumped this scofflaw, or should the proper authorities have been alerted?
This post just cracked me up. An elegant coup de grace. A thing of beauty it was.
I think his point is that there’s such a thing as voter fraud, and we know that because Fear Itself’s ex committed it.
My point is: there is such a thing as voter fraud. Or, to rephrase: voter fraud actually happens. For realsies.
So as I asked in the OP:
So, if the question is phrased as “significant”, your answer might well be different? Or that *any *event, however trivial, vindicates your position?
That’s an interesting choice of words… “any event, however trivial.”
It suggests that there’s degrees of voter fraud, with some more trivial than others. In fact, it’s simply an issue of numbers. That is, one non-citizen voting is one instance of voter fraud; there are no circumstances that make the offense more or less trivial. Right?
I’m sure you were just talking about the number of offenses, though.
So I began this thread to rebut the claim that there were NO instances of voter fraud.
And now I ask if the argument has changed to, “OK, there’s been only one case of voting fraud ever, and this was it!”
Has it?
The argument has ALWAYS been that the problem is negligible in extent, and certainly in comparison to your party’s hyperventilation about it. “Does not exist” is, in the non-legal contexts of English most of us and most of the anglophone world uses, effectively synonymous with “negligible”.
And I think you’re aware of that, and were when you first raised the strawman you keep waving around here.
You lost. It happens.
No, no, merely a misunderstanding. I think most of the rest of us were thinking along the lines of significance, as in, was there any real threat from “voter fraud”. Which, as I’m sure you know, was relied upon to further a Republican conspiracy to use the Justice Dept to its own partisan ends. Many of us think thats pretty important. YMMV.
So far as I know, there is no annual SDMB Nitpicker of the Year Award. However, if there is such, I will happily advance your nomination.
Point of Clarification?
There may be a lot of arguing past one another if the essence of the OP isn’t fairly clear. Given your penchant for Socratic-esque questioning and delayed nuance, a bit of clarity may be in order. Even if you think you were extraordinarily clear in the OP, now that it’s several months and tens of posts later it may help people be more responsive to you and to one another.
Is the quoted bit above the whole debate? That someone claimed there were zero instances of voter fraud, and you started a great debate over whether or not there was at least one such instance?
Perhaps my reading/re-skimming the thread is off, or perhaps I’m taking stated facts as hyperbole, but I don’t think anyone here has claimed that in the 2008 elections there were absolutely no instances of voter fraud for either major candidate.
If so, I would agree that that is an absurd statement to make, and one easily dismissed in a GQ-like fashion (i.e., where is the debate?).
As for the GD, it doesn’t sound like you were asking what is voter fraud? But I daresay that elements of that question arose – e.g., is setting up a system that incentivizes falsifying registration records voter fraud?
I think many people in the thread took it as accepted that in any large-scale election there would be isolated pockets of fraud. Therein lies the talking past each other. Many people here were expecting or arguing about the existence and implications of wide-spread fraud.
Are you furthering your OP to state that ONE example of fraud is tantamount to a thousand cases? That ANY fraud is as untenable as massive amounts of fraud? That any occurrence justifies, say, voter identification statutes regardless of their overall outcome on participation in general? Though it’s an extension, it seems a stretch from your most recent insistence (which I could be misreading) that the soul of the OP was about finding at least one example of voter fraud to demonstrate how wrong others had been.
It also insists that others are wrong, though it is making that claim based on a minor and non-dispositive aspect of their claim–most would willingly stipulate that there is some fraud occurring, but that it does not rise to levels (ACORN or otherwise) sufficient to warrant knicker-knotting or significant law changing.
One step at a time.
As I suspected, we’ve gone from saying “there is no problem,” to “there is no BIG problem.”
Now, does anyone believe that Fear Itself’s example represents the only case?
How many cases similar to Fear’s ex exist?
As I’ve observed before, the attitude here is remarkably similar to death penalty advocates. They claim, “There’s never been an innocent person executed!”
“But wait,” say the opposition. “Look at all the people on Death Row that were exonerated!”
“Yes,” say the deathers. “That proves the system works!”
They absolutely refuse to adopt the obvious inference that if a hundred people were wrongfully convicted and later exonerated by new technology like DNA, then it’s virtually certain that others, convicted by the same types of evidence but now lacking DNA were also innocent.
Here we have the same thing. There is no real way to uncover instances of voter fraud like Fear Itself describes. Yet the opponents here adopt the same sort of hard line reasoning: if you can’t prove it, it didn’t happen. They will not acknowledge that if one did this, it’s virtually certain there are others, and because our voting registration procedures have been so lax, we simply don’t know how bad the the problem is.
Well, we have some pretty good ways of estimating how bad the problem is. An outstanding political scientist, Mike Alvarez, wrote a book about this recently. It’s not entirely hopeless; there are some things we do know.
I take no position since I have not yet read the book. I am aware of Alvarez’s other works (and know some of his students, fwiw). He is not a crank.
Nice spin there, Bricker! As a connoisseur of spin, I appreciate the value of a bit of semantic chicanery! Because our procedures have been “so lax” as to permit trivial and insignificant incidents to occur, then that means that trivial and insignificant incidents may continue to occur. And that’s all that it means. Period. Full stop.
We don’t know how big the problem is? Given an excruciatingly tortured rendering of “know”, well, yes, you have a point. What we do “know” is that the hounds have been sent haring after voter fraud again and again, and returned hareless. We do know that the alleged “problem” has engendered solutions wildly out of proportion to any known “problem”, up to an including the prostitution of our Justice Dept for partisan ends.
Turned around, we could just as easily say that our procedures are so precise and puissant, that only rare and insignificant instances of fraud can occur. This is in part due to our expertise in polling and statistics, if Orangutan County in CA should suddenly vote overwhelmingly Democrat, due to a massive shift in voter registration, we might well have grounds for suspicion. Got any thing like that, counselor? No?
Can you offer us an incident that would arouse such suspicion? No? Well, then, if you need a victory boogie so desperately, I will not begrudge, that would be churlish.
YOU’VE gone there. The rest of us were *always *there. Capisce?
Yet you and your party keep insisting it’s a serious problem anyway. If that is taken at face value (inadvisedly), it’s based on what, please? :dubious: You just admitted it can’t be on fact.
In fact, it’s even enjoyable to watch, in a twisted sort of way.
Just ordered the book – I’ll let you know what he thinks.
The hounds have been sent out on short leashes, returned hareless, and you claim that means there are no rabbits in the surrounding six counties.
Specifically: how would the “hounds” have found Fear Itself’s ex?
And you claim, on the same lack of evidence, that there are! Amazing.
Having failed to prove there is a shadowy, namless conspiracy to thwart conservative justice by stealing votes as he implied in his OP, Bricker has been reduced to transparent strawmen by taking my quote out of the context of the OP and presenting as if I claimed it was an absolute. It is unbecoming of you Bricker, but understandable in these days of conservative retrenching in the face of Democratic success. If a meaningless little “gotcha ya” comforts you, I will not deny it to you.
Bricker, quick question.
I think we all agree that if it were no cost, taking steps to reduce voter fraud of all sources would be desirable. But it appears that efforts to eliminate fraudulent voting would disenfranchise a certain number of legitimate voters, and/or cause enough extra burden to tip voters into not bothering to vote.
My question to you Bricker, is for each fraudulent vote that is eliminated how many otherwise legitimate votes are you willing to also eliminate?
I think this really gets to the root of the discussion. For my part as a statistician I would try to arrive a result that would most be most likely to mirror what would happen if there was no fraud and no disenfranchisement this leads to a 1/1 ratio. Although party bias on either the voter fraud or disenfranchisement side would shift me to some extent in the direction of reducing the bias.
Even if a enforcing election reforms disenfranchised/turned-off 0.1% of voters this would account for 131,000 voters in the last presidential election. Under no scenario do I think anyone believes that voter fraud is that rampant. Further I haven’t seen evidence that the primary perpetrators of voter fraud are from a particular party, while disenfranchisement seems to primarily affect minority who vote democrat.