I still don’t get it. It’s seeming intentionally abstruse.
Could everyone here who made the extreme claim that in 2008 (or other large-scale election of your choice) there was absolutely no voter fraud please stand up and be counted. Thanks. You are the only people that Bricker seems to take umbrage with.
To get on the same page, could everyone who acknowledges that in the 2008 elections (etc.) there were isolated, uncoordinated, and statistically insignificant pockets of voter fraud please place a yellow carnation on your head? Thanks.
Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.
Could everone who thinks that in the 2008 election there was coordinated, widespread, and statistically significant voter fraud please put a blue carnation in your right ear? Thanks.
Oh, and can you put a cite on that too?
Could everyone who thinks that ANY EXAMPLE of voter fraud, regardless of it’s coordination, breadth, or statistical significance warrants the same reaction (shock, outrage, legislation, etc.) as coordinated, widespread, and statistically significant voter fraud please place a green carnation in the “green carnation box”? Thanks.
Oh, while you’re at it, could you explain why there is no distinction between the two?
Lastly, could everyone who thinks that evidence or admission of small-scale, isolated, uncoordinated, and statistically insignificant voter fraud warrants admission that large-scale fraud must (or is likely to) exist, please place a plaid carnation in the time-space continuum? Thanks.
Bricker, other than cheer on your rightness in claiming that there was SOME voter fraud, if everyone else is nonchalantly and easily accepting that the claim in the OP was silly and trivial–if everyone is admitting that there were some instances of voter fraud, what then? Does that justify Draconian voter ID laws? Mild voter ID laws? Draconian investigations by the Justice Department? Minor investigation? Defunding of ACORN? What?
Voter suppression- by finding mismatches in government data bases. They match data base info and if anything is mismatched, no matter how innocent or irrelevant, voter registration is purged. Of course it is done selectively in poor or dem areas. Done in Ohio, Fla, Wisc., Louisiana, S. Dak.
Voter purges as done by Kathlene Harris in Florida. It is prone to selective manipulation. Other states on the bandwagon Colorado, georgia, Indiana, Mich., Nevada
Voter challenges Challenging the right to vote on election day or soon before. This is the use of caging lists . Used in Montana, Mich., Ohio, Ill., Ind.
Looking for unchecked boxes on votes. or something irrelevant to toss out vote. Ex. Tossing ballot for signing in wrong line on envelope of Absentee Ballot.
Voter intimidation and misinformation Calling voters before the election and telling them their voter location has changed ,when it did not. Some of this was done through robo-calls last election. Of course it was used against poor are voters and minorities. done in Pa., Ohio, Calif., Texas, N. Car. Maryland, Wisc., Minn.
Confusing ballots… In some the pres. race came after the smaller elections and ballot initiatives. Some places the Pres. election went across the 2 pages of ballot resulting in Dbl votes and a DQ
Ohio, Fla., Miss etc.
This is the real voter fraud.
You might also find this interesting. This is his written testimony to the Commission on Federal Election Reform in 2005. It’s brief and non-technical but pretty informative.
Nope. Those who have insufficient ID or not easily able to get it, are poor or living in the country. Putting up roadblocks to voting is wrong. It should be encouraged.
Bricker’s statement offers a possubkle motive for engaging in fraudulent registration drives:
There are some who want to us all to have to have a national identification card very badly.
Rigging up inept voter registration schemes, then revealing them along with claims that they constitute actual voter fraud provides an example of a problem that a national id might fix, without appealing to overtly racist or classist arguments.
Logistics. How many fraudulent votes would you need to rig even a mid-sized, local election? Thousands, to be sure. Thousands of ringers must be entered unto the rolls, data kept on which ghost lives where. Then thousands of ringers must be recruited, depending on how many times you want them to vote.
So, you need ten thousand votes, you got one thousand people lined up. Paying them, presumably? Arranging transport to get them all to the correct precinct (where they are allegedly registered), each in sequence, ten times within the time allowed for polling, typically twelve hours.
And all the participants must keep their mouths shut, and not reveal anything to anybody who might tell somebody you’d rather didn’t know.
Forget the organization. Suppose you have ten thousand illegal voters in a state, unorganized. They’re all going to vote their non-citizen consciences.
“Oh, well, I suppose if ten thousand Canadian Nazis flood over the border and sneak into Minnesota to vote Socialist, I guess thats all right with you, huh?”
Mr. Bricker, if you could institute change which would (accidently) prevent five legal votes for every illegal vote it prevented, would you support that?
The question isn’t rhetorical. No system is perfect. I’ll give you the benefit of the doubt and call you “naive” but any political type calling for reforms to make it more difficult to vote isn’t worried about fraud. (As others pointed out, voter fraud is insignificant in America.) Instead they’re interested in preventing legal votes likely to go to the opposite party.
For example, here’s a story about a Florida purge of convicted felons from voting lists which, due to a software design flaw, purged some non-felons of typically pro-Democrat race, which not purging felons of typically pro-GOP race. Coincidence that the software was biased this way? Maybe; want to buy the Brooklyn Bridge?
Rationally arguable position. It seems as if many here are arguing that the level and nature of known and reasonably suspected fraud is not sufficient to warrant such actions. A major premise of that position seems to be that in addition to blocking unlawful votes, such requirements would cause a statistically significant decrease in the number of eligible voters of one particular political party. This imbalance in the requirement’s impact leads to accusations of disingenuousness (not on your personal part per se), in that the imputed motives of vote suppression and political gain are the underlying motive for the imposition of requirements.
One response would be a callous-sounding so what? If someone finds producing a license (or ID) so burdensome as to choose not to vote, then that is an individual choice, not a society denial of voting rights. So long as the requirements are not overly burdensome, the state should have the right (and in this particular case, the duty), to impose reasonable restrictions and requirements to combat an arguably greater harm. That it is affecting one party more than the other is incidental and irrelevant—on its face the law is neutral and reasonable.
Where I can’t take that further is the point at which the courts have taken statistical evidence of harm and used that as the primary reason for overturning a decision, despite a contrary stated state interest. I’m all out of Lawyer Crack at the moment (i.e., no WestLaw access), so I can’t cite, but I’m pretty sure there is a body of cases out there (mostly in discrimination?) in which courts look to overall outcomes and weighs that more heavily than the purported state interest. It isn’t an absolute balance, of course, but strongly suggestive of a penchant to look unfavourably on otherwise-seeming neutral laws. Staying with just legal theory for the moment, can you articulate why, in the name of more accurate poll results, this disparity is acceptable?
Another response would be to call the above two paragraphs poppycock and argue that the additional burden of presenting an ID is so negligible that it will have little to no impact on voter turnout. Do you find that a reasonable contention?
Alternatively, you could take issue with one of the fundamental premises—argue that voter fraud is statistically significant and widespread, and has changed (or likely will change) the outcome of an election. As I’ve seen it, the claims of fraud in the thread have either been complete conjecture, hypotheticals, unproven insinuations, relatively small in scale, or extraordinarily limited in time and scope.** If this is a mistake, could you point to where I missed something? **
Lastly, and similar to an earlier possibility, there is the notion that everyone sees the same relatively isolated pockets of fraud but arrives at different conclusions as to its impact—there is the argument that any fraud is an abomination to democratic processes, and it is incumbent on policy-makers to act to squelch such fraud. That is, the aggregate numbers create enough of a problem of ineligible voting so as to warrant action. Though some may disagree at the moment, by digging deeper and adding on more and more examples, more and more people would arrive at a similar conclusion—eventually everyone has some tipping point at which they would acknowledge a problem exists; yours is just (apparently) somewhat sooner. Given that the line is fairly arbitrary, there is little to no defence over why their or your line is more ‘correct’.
**
If this is the case, can I ask you to return to Buck Godot’s question? **
Oh, and though I tried to understand both sides, the likelihood that I missed a line of argumentation or misrepresented one is fairly high — if one or more of these are inapplicable or missing, please don’t think I’m trying to set up straw men or mischaracterize anything. Rather, I’m attempting to achieve a modicum of shared comprehension before asking questions.
It depends on whether the cause for the legal votes being lost is objectively reasonable.
As an extreme example, let’s imagine that every Democrat is opposed to voter ID, and every Republican in favor of such a measure. Let’s further imagine that in a given state, it passes, and the Democrats decide to prove it’s a disaster by boycotting the next election.
Now, the day after the election you could easily show that the voter ID requirement prevented millions of legal votes. But because those votes were lost for reasons much more fairly attributable to the voter himself and not the intrinsic effect of the voter ID law, I have no heartburn whatsoever with those lost votes.
So the answer is: it’s not sufficient to merely assert that five legitimate votes are lost for every illegitimate vote prevented. We must examine WHY those votes were lost, and whether it’s a reason we as a society are prepared to recognize as something we wish to accommodate.
So the answer is to (a) fix the software so that it purges only felon names, or (b) never again try to prevent felons from voting.
Correct, and essentially what I argued in my previous post.
I have no doubt that statistical evidence of harm would show that, despite the prophylactic effect of the Miranda decision, poor black street criminals are more often convinced to speak without an attorney and thus incriminate themselves than are rich white stockbrokers. Nonetheless, the Miranda decision’s facially neutrality is considered sufficient.
In other words, I believe that whatever cases you might cite for your proposition will be distinguishable from voter ID requirements in some meaningful way, and I would further point out that voter ID requirements have already survived court challenges and found to be constitutional. So your speculation is both on theoretically shaky ground and practically untenable to boot.
If I had to guess, I’d imagine that there will be a small, but measurable impact on voter turnout.
Quite frankly, I believe there will also be a small but measurable impact from removing non-citizen and other illegal voters. I agree, however, that this is mostly speculation on my part. The problem is that there is no meaningful way to measure how many people are voting that shouldn’t be. I agree with elucidator’s point with respect to a conspiracy – although I think that municipal elections are vulnerable to and have been the victims of coordinated assault, anything larger is untenable. But I suspect there are statistically measure numbers of ineligible voters that routinely vote, uncoordinated by any master campaign. And while my evidence for that is slim, the denial of that possibility is based on the lack of any evidence… a reasonable position, as long as it’s also acknowledged we have no real way to know, given the paucity of controls that have historically been applied.
And … just as an aside … these couple of previous posts reminds me of GD as it was in 2000-2001. No snide attacks, no imputation of bad faith, just a DEBATE.
Thanks for your response. As I suspected there seems to be an underlying difference in our philosophies and how you and I view the goals of the election, which is why I prefaced my remarks by indicating that I come from a statistical background.
Here as with many other of your views, as near as I can tell, you seem to be more focused on process than on results. Perhaps this is related to your profession. Provided the process is right and firm as it should be, you believe that the results should hopefully take care of themselves. So you view the election as a process that goes on and whatever happens as long as it is strictly legal is fine, whether or not it leads to the most popular candidate being elected. In other words, the means justify the ends.
I on the other hand view the election as a method of polling public opinion and so whenever possible the laws should be arranged so that the most accurate polling is possible. For thise reason I am particularly concerned with the biased nature of those that appear to be eliminated by voting reform.
This difference came most clearly into focus in the controversy over the use of sampling in the census. I come down strongly in favor of whatever method was most likely to give an accurate count. You on the other hand I would expect would reject sampling because its process is non-standard, whether or not its results are more accurate.
The way I view the prevention of election fraud is rather like a store attempting to prevent shoplifting. One way the store might prevent shoplifting is to require that all bags be checked at the front desk prior to entering the store. Some who have particular problems with shoplifting do this, but most do not. The reason they do not is that even though this is not particularly onerous, it may turn away some costumers, and so in the long run be bad for business. I view our current electoral system as a store that in the past year has had 2 candy bars and a pair of nylons stolen.
And your supposition with respect to my views on the census is precisely correct. I wouldn’t be opposed to doing it by sampling, but as long as the Constitution says, “Actual enumeration,” then we have to actually count.
I view our electoral system as a store that in the past year knows about two candy bars and a pair of nylons being stolen, but only because we caught the shoplifters. We have no inventory tracking system and just reorder items when we see empty spaces on the shelves, so we really have no idea how much is actually being stolen.
I did a little more digging for useful empirical work. Here is a piece published in the Harvard Law Review. The abstract is below:
It is a law review article so it’s not short, but at least go to page 23 for the conclusions and check out the following tables if you can. Perception of voter fraud and election theft are highly partisan and appear to be completely unrelated to actual voter stringency policies throughout the United States.
