The standard needed for the House to refuse to seat Sanchez was clear evidence that the invalid votes went to her. They couldn’t prove which way the invalid votes went, so they had no grounds to disturb the certification of her as the winner. I did not ask you anything about who the winner should be.
What I asked you was: In light of the evidence in that report of 748 invalid votes being cast in that election, do you now concede that at least 748 invalid votes were cast in that election?
Don’t be coy, Counselor. You have the facts right at your fingertips. Tell us about those votes, who cast them, and for whom. Those 748 votes, they were all illegal aliens? No?
Not quite as cut and dried as you make it out to be, wouldn’t you say, Counselor?
I check links, Counselor. I check facts. You should know that by now.
You read this, right, Counselor? In your headlong and non-partisan pursuit of truth, yes? So how come you didn’t say “124”? What’s wrong with registering to vote before you become a citizen, is there some law against that? And those 124 “improperly cast” ballots? In what manner were they “improperly cast”? And that proves what, exactly?
Now, I won’t say this is dishonest, Counselor. Just that your typical relentless diligence in pursuit of the impartial truth slipped a bit. Lucky for you I was here, huh?
There is probably a government outreach program to encourage you to continue your free speech.
Barring that, perhaps you and Bricker can start a support group for those who have been outwitted by hippies.
All kidding aside, I’d like to know how a score against you even of 125 to 12 helps your case; especially in light of you argument that it is a non-existent phenomenon.
I intended to post this last night, but lost my internet connection; apologies if it’s no longer considered relevant:
It’s up to the Secretary of State and the local clerks to validate whether the registration of a voter is correct and legal. Really, this thread is arguing about two entirely different problems - one, the initial registration of people who are not eligible to vote, and two, people illegally voting because of lack of identification at the polls on election day. My answer was in response to the second one. If you’re on the list as a registered voter, it’s not up to me to determine whether you’re supposed to be there.
Again, exit polls aren’t going to be anywhere near the accuracy that you would need to know whether you need 100 votes to swing an election or 1000. And you won’t get that info anyway at lunchtime. It’d still be later in the evening, which cuts into the time alloted to put into place your dastardly plan.
First you would need dozens of friends willing to commit voter fraud. And not talk. How much are you going to pay them?
No one person could vote more than once. (We remember faces.) You would have to count on the idea that none of the other volunteers knows any of the voters you’re impersonating, even though poll workers often live in the precinct they’re working. You would have to count on the idea that none of your impersonators will come across a poll worker who recognizes THEM. You would have to count on the idea that nobody who got impersonated shows up later. AND, you are going to have to give them the names and addresses of people to impersonate, because they will be filling out the application to vote before they do anything else. This is all assuming you don’t have the cooperation of your co-workers which I’ll get into further down.
The clerk assigns you to your precincts less than a week before the election, and you get no say in who you’re working with. Each precinct has a chair and a co-chair of opposing parties (by state law) who have worked several elections (meaning volunteering for years) and have shown themselves to be competent. Most people are there out of a labor of love, because you have to take a Tuesday off if you’re not retired, the day is long and the pay’s not much. If you fuck up, you don’t get called back to work again. So if you want to be a part of a conspiracy to throw a particular election, you have to plan to play it straight for a few years ahead.
So collusion around here to throw the vote in a single precinct would require 4 or 5 people, at least two who have worked several elections honestly before, at least one of which has lied about their political leanings all those years, all spontaneously and unanimously deciding, with no random worker thrown in who might have a change of heart and spill the beans, to say “fuck democracy, we might go to jail for it, but let’s try to swing a bare handful of votes this guy’s way.” Lucky indeed for the corrupt poll worker.
Hell, we had one crap election where 14 people came in all day. It still would have taken all the poll workers’ collusion, and again, if we had a sudden jump from 14 votes at 5 pm to
50 at 8 when we closed the polls, we would have gotten questions.
“Questions” in this case of a full-blown conspiracy could end up meaning felony charges of election fraud. Jail time and shit. I think most people care about that.
I’d say there should be inquiry into such a discrepancy. It could be voter fraud, or there could be other legitimate reasons.
This is pretty much it. Large scale voter fraud is going to leave a mark that can be calculated. There are perfectly legitimate reasons for one precinct to vary in turnout and outcome; simple differences in demographics from precinct to precinct, a local ordinance on the ballot that affects one precinct but not others, school redistricting proposals, a candidate who happens to live in that neighborhood, etc. If there were suspicions of voter fraud, there’s a literal paper trail to follow, starting at the applications to vote; if they’re all in the same handwriting as in the example of a poll worker personally stuffing the ballot box, there’s a big red flag right there. And the poll workers could be brought up on felony charges.
The list of who voted in a given election is requestable information; if you have a precinct where 50% of those who voted did so in the last 2 hours of the polls, investigators could contact those people and ask them if they actually showed up to vote. And if they didn’t, the poll workers could end up being brought in on felony charges.
And so on.
As much redundancy and safeguards are built in to prevent large-scale voter fraud, people can and will make mistakes and allow things to slip through. There was one in our district not long ago that sounds similar -in that case, it was a husband and wife. The husband had come in and voted in the morning; when the wife came in later, she was already marked as having voted. It was a simple error by the poll worker who had marked off the wrong name. Since they knew the husband had already voted - they had his application - and he was not marked off, a call to the SOS gave the go-ahead for her to vote.
I don’t know what happened in your case, I wasn’t there. I’m not saying it didn’t happen or couldn’t happen, just that it’s unlikely to be a sign of massive voter fraud in an election, which is the concern here. One incident like this in an election is most likely to be a regrettable error and would warrant later phone calls to the chairs and workers to figure out what happened. Two or more in the same precinct during the same day, as is plausible in the example of getting a hundred people to come in and impersonate voters, is a different story. It sucks that the workers couldn’t or wouldn’t try to work things out for you. Did you complain to the local clerk’s office or the SOS? Given how rare actual voter impersonation appears to be, you bet they’d want to know about it, and that their volunteers wouldn’t help you. And did you alert the news? That’s the kind of story the Republicans would be drooling all over themselves to find.
Michigan now requires ID - OR the signing of an affidavit - in order to vote at the polls, and I can’t say we’ve had any problems with having to turn voters away, nor have there reports of problems in Detroit, for example. We get one or two people signing affadavits per election, usually because they forgot their wallet. I assume the numbers are higher in less affluent areas, where you get more owners who don’t drive. How those people should get registered to vote in the first place is a question I don’t have an answer to.
Well, yes, I’m compelled to agree, you were indeed wrong about those votes. A pity you found out that you were wrong after rubbing my nose in it. And now, having lost that point so spectacularly, you want to use it to support your argument? By any chance, do you know how to say chutzpah in Spanish?
As I’m sure you know, I am the very soul of magnanimity and generosity, and would never stoop to gloating. Neener neener. OK, once! But that’s all!
Well, sure the Republicans have a compelling interest in restricting Democratic voters, but I’m not sure it’s an interest we should be concerned about, legally speaking.
Really, if the only thing that Bricker and Terr have is that this is an overwhelmingly Republican thing instead of an exclusively Republican thing… Then so what?
The fact is that there will be disenfranchised voters.
The fact is that most disenfranchised voters are more likely to vote Democratic.
The fact is that Republicans are extremely more likely to support these measures than Democrats.
Speaking as a radical with a long-standing disdain for my liberal allies, I would like to point out that simply having a “D” after one’s name does not a progressive make.
It was truly a lucky break, since it got you to acknowledge the core point of my argument. As you may recall, I have not been pushing the point that illegal voting is a current problem. I have said that voter confidence is the issue.
And through your own research, you have uncovered a perfect example. In an effort to determine if a given voter was qualified, we are stymied – as you yourself point out – by the lack of information that having a voter ID program would provide.