You appear to have assumed I considered the response unreasonable. I don’t.
Here’s a clue:
They don’t have to find anything. They don’t even have to look. Any hesitation to cooperate fully will be presented, by Trump and his media stooges, as evidence of fraud.
The less the commission is able to do, the more successful it will be.
bolding is mine
The idea that publicly available data held by any office of government should not be released unless the requesting party knows the magic handshake or whatever the process is to make a formal request in the right way is bullshit.
If I, in my personal capacity, were to request the publicly available voter information from a particular state I would expect that my initial inquiry be met with an explanation of the requirements for them to fulfill my request.
Hypothetically the exchange might go something like this:
Me: I’d like to get a full copy of the publicly available Connecticut voter date. How do I do that?
Connecticut: The available data includes name, party registration, … etc… We are unable to release the following personal information… The public data is available in the following formats. We need to to make your request on form ABC123 and submit payment. The cost is $X for format #1 or $Y for format #2. Payment can be made by check made out to the Connecticut Office of Voter Registration.
Instead the official in Connecticut replied that “her office hasn’t been told exactly what fraud the commission is investigating” and that "As for the commission’s July 14 deadline, Merrill said, “I don’t consider that to have the force of law… I don’t know if I’ll be able to figure all this out by then.”
That is simply wrong. It does not matter why someone wants publicly available data. The state has no business prying into its use.
And the official overseeing this office in Connecticut cannot figure out how to send a boilerplate reply within two weeks? WTF? As others have noted state political parties routinely make such requests. This is nothing new.
I don’t think Trump’s Commission is likely to find more than a handful of actual voter fraud cases, consistent with what has been found historically when other parties have looked into the matter. But they have just as much right to this data on the same footing as any other individual or group. No better, no worse.
All of which would fit into one of the available scenarios, the one where its nothing more than a distraction, with no actual goal in mind, nefarious, rotten or merely stinky. Maybe Knoblick and Hans are cheerfully on board because they think Trump actually gives a rat’s.
And if unacceptable demands are refused, kinda proves his point, doesn’t it?
Does Il Douche actually believe any of this? Did he actually write any checks for investigators digging up all that incredible stuff in Hawaii? Does he actually believe that he won the majority of the popular vote, if it hadn’t been for a massive voter fraud conspiracy? Shit, who knows?
So far, this is mostly swamp gas. Has General Services made a budget for this project? is there an appropriation bill being advanced? With guys like Trump, nothing is true until the check clears.
Trump and his commission are engaged in a massive snipe hunt, and many of the Secretaries of States are saying they’d rather not play. Good for them.
The political problem is that by not playing *and *making a forceful show of resisting these state official feed the conspiracy monster. There are people, apparently quite a lot of them, who bought into the Trump li[del]n[/del]es. If you refuse to release the data then *they *believe you have something to hide. And there are enough of *them *to elect Trump president.
Better an attitude of, “Sure, here’s the publicly accessible data. We already looked at it. Anybody can look at it. There’s nothing there.” <Bored indifference.>
Any rigorous and thorough review probably will find something to raise a question, if we are honest. And that question will, in most instances, have an entirely innocent explanation.
A poll worker marks that John Smith Sr DOB 01/01/1928 was given a ballot. But Social Security Death Records indicate John Smith Sr is dead since 1978. Somebody (Trumpions cough cough) screams that dead people are voting! :eek:
In reality the poll worker actually gave a ballot to John Smith Jr DOB 06/07/1960 and marked the wrong name off the list. No big deal. No fraud. And no way the outcome of an election would be changed by something like that. This kind of stuff probably happens a thousand times or more for every actual incidence of someone trying to intentionally fraudulently vote.
But, once sorted out, we should mark the voter registration record for John Smith Sr DOB 01/01/1928 as no longer valid since the voter is deceased. Next time the same mistake doesn’t happen with the same people. It gets to happen all over again with entirely different people! :smack:
Are states somehow required to make some of this stuff publicly available? I’m a bit perturbed that my state might tell folks whether I voted or not, but that bothers me less than the idea of giving my partial SS# out. Is there any state that will actually make public the partial SS#s of voters from their voter rolls?
I can go to my county’s board of elections, and see who voted in any election. I do not believe that I can get ssn’s, partial or otherwise.
I’m gathering a growing suspicion, that perhaps the demands for information might be deliberately provocative. How much time would it have taken to look up the various applicable laws and find out what info was publicly available, and what was not. A phone call, a polite letter. Or just look up the laws for what info is explicitly off limits, and don’t ask for it. How hard is that?
So, then, if they go ahead and demand more info than the law allows, they either know or sure should have. They are deliberately provoking resistance with the intention of exploiting it. Not exactly the oldest trick in the book, but one of them.
Are you familiar with the term “security theatre”? This is Trump and his cronies’ latest incarnation of the genre of “X theatre”. During the campaign, Trump purt-near had sex with the American flag on stage. That was “patriotism theatre”. Muslim ban? “Good Christian theatre”. This latest stunt is “integrity theater”. If you think that’s going to be limited to voting, you’re as delusional as Trump.
Do you know what all theatre needs? The basic concept is suspension of disbelief. And you need quite a lot of that to accept a story-line in which Trump or his братва have any integrity whatsoever.
If it were a secret, I might agree. But it’s not. The information on how to get the information is publicly available. If you can’t be bothered to follow it, the states have no legal obligation.
So since the law does not compel them, all that’s left is their own moral code. If these states believe that releasing the information does more harm than good, then, as far as I’m concerned, they have every obligation to resist as far as they legally can.
And, yes, I fully believe that, to determine whether it will do more harm than good, they must consider the intentions of the requester. That’s a huge determiner of whether it will be harmful.
That’s not to say that it might not be less harmful to be seen to help them out. Maybe you are right, and this is just a propaganda stunt for Trump’s base. And maybe they are miscalculating in assuming that the majority of their voters care more about their voting privacy than they support Trump.
But that’s a different argument than whether they are required to go above and beyond the law to help out someone they think has nefarious purposes. Sure, maybe there is a way you can pay the back property taxes and legally acquire my Grandpa’s land, but I’m sure as hell not going to tell you how to do it.
I don’t believe for one second that Trump’s purpose in gathering this data is to investigate voter fraud. It’s to COLLECT THE DATA all in one place. To create a data bank that his troops can use in the 2020 election and/or sell to the highest bidder (including, but not limited to, the Russians). **Names AND addresses AND voting history? **This is a direct mailer’s dream come true!
Nah. His purpose in requesting tbe information–info that at least one of his top cronies knows cannot be provided–is to establish more people as his antagonists, making him, of course, the protagonist in this drama. His gullible supporters will lap it up.
My idea and yours are not mutually exclusive. Your hasty dismissal is a bit naive IMHO.
Would Trump or his people have any authority to purge the rolls of people who are registered but haven’t voted recently? Republicans love that trick.
I missed the direct mail bit. Sorry. I don’t think even Trump believes he’ll be running again in 2020. But, yeah, he’ll be creaming forever with such a mailing list.
Any major party presidential campaign already has names AND addresses AND voting history of every single voter, at least in the states they’re targeting. It’s expensive in some states, but the costs pale in comparison to a national campaign’s budget.
I’m worried that he’s going to cry “FRAUD” when the more accurate word is “ERROR”.
150,000 names erroneously on Rhode Island voting lists
I have voted in four states over the past 20 years. I would not be surprised if my name were to show up on all four voting registries, because it’s not like I have ever filed any paperwork to have my name taken off of any of them.
If the number of erroneously listed voters the commission discovers is anywhere close to 3 million, expect Trump to fart up a storm about how the election was rigged against him all along. It won’t matter if the majority of the errors show up in red states or that there’s no evidence that anyone actually voted under those erroneously listed names.
These people are going to do to the election system what TSA has done to air travel. The only reason people still fly is because the alternative is worse, even with all the headaches involved. But if voting becomes a major headache, people will simply stop showing up.
It is blowing my mind how many conservatives are so nonchalant about this. If states were reliquinshing their gun registries to the Feds, they’d be shitting bricks. Obama had the audacity to cry over 30 dead children, and the conservatives took this as a sign that their 2nd Amendment rights were under threat. But for some reason this doesn’t send up in any alarms. I guess the federal government is only too big when it’s being run by libruhls.
Post-modern performance art is not for every *nekulturnyi *pleb to appreciate.
[QUOTE=wolfpup]
Which is kind of interesting since every democracy on the planet advanced enough to have mastered indoor plumbing long ago instituted the secret ballot to protect its democracy from abuse. I guess none of that matters in Trumpland.
[/QUOTE]
<pedantic nitpick>Actually, the Romans had indoor plumbing but public voting - deliberately so the elite families could manipulate, bully or straight up pay off the voters.</pn>