Not sure of your meaning there. I simply meant that the Democratic political machines in big cities have no incentive to disprove these claims, and one of those reasons is that it discourages the opposition. I don’t think they started these claims at all.
There is the noted case in the 1960 election where Joseph Kennedy made a joke about not paying for a landslide. However in that case I believe he was trying to exagerrate his own influence.
Nothing so crude-the Ward Boss has the ballots premarked before the election-he just feeds them into the machine. Since no voter ID is required, nobody says anything.
Do we even have *ward *bosses anymore?
Aside from the fact that Ralph has no cites and is just offering pure fantasy, how would voter ID keep ward bosses from pre-marking ballots?
That would not be voter fraud, that would be ballot-box stuffing; different thing entirely, and not preventable, obviously, by requiring the voter to show ID.
Again, unless his first name is Ward, Mr. Boss isn’t a cite, it’s a fantasy villain. Name ONE ward boss who has done this. Name the parties involved, the date, the location.
This is the second request for an actual instance of this crime occurring. Ignore this, and I’ll assume you’re just making it up.
Exactly. This is the point I don’t get about people who have a hard-on about enacting voter ID laws. If you really think people are conspiring to sway elections by committing large scale voter registration fraud, then rounding up actual people to go vote in multiple districts, why would an ID law stop them? All they need to do is have a poll worker they know or paid “check” the IDs. Why would that small stumbling block deter someone conducting large scale fraud involving multiple people?
Yes. Of course, you have to realize, I was arguing not against an actual case, but against your feverish imagined hypothetical, for which you have yet to offer evidence of actually happening. And even then, you know what’s interesting? Voter ID laws wouldn’t stop this. In fact, nothing short of a complete crackdown on the system would. I’m kind of confused why you think that voter ID would stop him from feeding them into the machine.
I think we’re talking past each other tbh, I’m just confused.
I assume you were responding to my assertion that the State of Illinois Republicans didn’t want a state wide review of the 1960 election, or my speculation that Democratic politicians in big cities didn’t mind their reputation for rigging elections.
You’re in Massachusetts. From what I understand of the laws here, you have to either return the census forms your city elections department sends out every year or have voted in the last election to keep from showing ID. It’s been years since I’ve had that happen.
I’m really not sure how the scam you’re proposing is supposed to work. The ward boss (whatever you mean by that) has to get the ballots one at a time by giving the poll worker a name and address of a registered voter who hasn’t been marked as having to show ID by the criteria mentioned above. Then he has to fill out the ballot, and give his name and address to a different poll worker when he puts it in the machine. It’s far from a foolproof system, but there’s no point of cheating unless you do it on a large scale. And any effort to do it at that scale is going to drastically increase the chance of getting caught, or require a lot of co-conspirators.
Voter registration fraud will be more frequently associated with leftish organizations. They may or may not be perpetrating the fraud, but they’re largely the ones handing in the fraudulent forms.
That’s because conservative and right-leaning groups do registration drives less often (presumably because Republicans are philosophically inclined to say that people who want to register to vote should shlep down to the board of elections rather than doing it at a table in the mall).
Arguably true; it’s the rare election nowadays in which the Republican candidate is better for those demographics than the Democrat is.
The heyday of machine politics is long past, though at the time it was mostly Democrats.
That could be it, I suppose, presuming that we think it likely that Republicans, or any politician of any stripe, will forego political power on some principle.
There is also the issue that it is felt that a majority of unregistered voters in cities (where registration drives are more practical) would vote Democratic.
Why did you underline the word ‘coerced’ when you quoted my post?
The trouble with ballot-box stuffing is that (a) you have to get your hands on ballots ahead of time, (b) you have to put them in the box, and © you have to get the polling staff to fudge the details somehow so that the vote total from the box agrees with the total counted votes cast.
If your elections are like Canada’s, voters are checked off the list as they vote; a scrutineer from each party watches the vote process, the checking off, and the ballot counting. It’s tricky to do much wholesale damage in that situation.
(as I mentioned, a fellow student, somewhat of an idealist from Chicago in the 1970’s, mentioned that he was given a hard time by scrutineers from the Republicans as well as fellow Democrats when he questioned something fishy. If you’ve corrupted the entire process, well, you can do what you want.)
I recall also a discussion about this (some talk show recently) where the (right wing) side mentioned that there were severe penalties for challenging legitimate voters. It was in the context of a Republican volunteer claiming “Democratic voters claiming to be students at the university are voting fraudulently”. he said when he asked Republican higher ups about it, they told him to drop his objections because he could face a serious lawsuit even if he was right, if he tried to deny a legitimate voter the right to vote. That sounded like the usual Urban legend BS to me, but what is the case in that situation?
That is quite likely true. The remedy I would suggest would not to be avoid the registration of new voters, but to alter the agenda to fit the changing demographics. That this might require Republicans to offer views and agendas more aligned with mine own does not alarm me.
My solution is so much simpler. Let everyone who shows up vote. Their credentials can be checked after the fact. The only possible violation of law should be in voting more than once or misrepresenting your identity in a substantial manner.
And this just in, from The Nation by way of Daily Kos…
**Ohio sets up one early-voting system for Republican counties, another for Democratic counties
**
Comment seems superfluous.
Cite?
Gangs of New York, I think.