Bloody peasant!
To start with, the “Real ID” card would have to be issued free to the voter. Otherwise, you’ve got a de facto poll tax.
The Democrats need to suppress the same amount of Republican votes as the Pubs do for Dem votes. Then all will be fair and balanced!
Not quite – gotta do it in the same areas. If Republicans suppress votes in Florida, Democrats doing the same in Texas won’t accomplish hardly anything.
Oh, go back and look at the picture. Then re-read the caption (since you clearly didn’t understand it). Then take a look at one of those ballots from directly above. There was absolutely no ambiguity unless you put it there intentionally.
I hope you are aware that on the SDMB it is forbidden to edit your quote boxes to make it appear that people said something they didn’t. Sage Rat said that, not me. Don’t change attributions in the edit box!
Oh, and by the way, cite?
Ack! Oops! I responded to both of you and forgot that there were multiple people involved. My mistake!
Certainly! From CBS:
‘The rumors began with this letter from Diebold’s CEO, Wally Odell, who was moonlighting as a Republican fundraiser. In his invitation to a benefit for Bush last August, he wrote, “I am committed to helping Ohio deliver its electoral votes to the president.”’
Again, my mistake. Looked at other pictures, and it is pretty clear.
This doesn’t make sense. Diebold supports the Republican party, so therefore the Republican party doesn’t want voting to work right?
Look, you (I assume) are strongly in favor of the Democrats winning across the board in 2008. And I further assume you would absolutely reject being a part of any plan or scheme to overcount or undercount votes to make that happen. Right? That is, you are capable of simultaneously being a strong advocate for a political party’s success and and a strong advocate of an honest election. And to the extent that the two come in conflict, you wouldn’t pause an instant before choosing the honest election over the political party.
So – why can you be credited with this appraoch, but not the CEO of Diebold?
No. Diebold supports the Republican Party, therefore Diebold doesn’t want voting to work right. Neither does the party, but we have plenty of other evidence of that.
Nor does that follow. I support the Republican Party and I assure you I want voting to work right.
By the reasoning of some in this thread, I could point to the antics of ACORN, the vote fraud cases in East St. Louis, the activists with ties to elected Democratic officials in Milwaukee who sabotaged Republican GOTV efforts - and conclude that the entire Democratic Party has an interest in sabotaged elections.
That wouldn’t be at all logical, so I don’t see where you folks can get off the hook making statements like you do, especially with so little evidence that it is a systematic operation.
Because BobLibDem is not in a position that gives him an inside track for manipulating the system, and therefore does not receive the special scrutiny that naturally falls upon someone who is. I’m sure that you can see why (to take a corresponding situation) it would have been inappropriate to entrust the blood-sample tests in the OJ Simpson case to someone who had declared that Simpson was a victim of The Man, or that he was proof that football players just can’t be trusted to behave themselves.
There is a world of difference between “special scrutiny” and the absolute declaration that wrongdoing has occurred and is being contemplated for the future. Anyone with an “inside track” deserves special scrutiny, even if they have announced they will be scrupulously neutral. My objection is the distance we travelled from “special scrutiny” to “hang the bastard.”
The question as asked demonstrates knee-jerk partisanship, and can be dismissed out of hand.
If one were to care about “vote suppression” and how to prevent it, than I think that might be a legitimate topic of discussion among reasonable people.
Since the OP only cares specifically about the suppression of Dem votes by Pubs, I suppose the converse is somehow ok. I guess Dem votes need to be protected but it’s ok to suppress Pub ones. Dem votes must be worth more.
Clearly the question ignores the legitimate concern of protecting the process, and is simply a gambit for gaining advantage in a context outside of ethical or moral concerns.
Such attitudes are a part of the very problem that leads to such egregious acts as voter suppression.
The conflict of interest statements I sign for my job, and when I do work for the government, go beyond “special scrutiny,” and say that I cannot participate in certain activities while remaining employed. I don’t think it is too much to ask those with significant involvement in the mechanisms of voting from taking part in partisan political activities, and it is not too much to ask for state officials involved in regulating elections from taking part in partisan activities - like leading an election committee - for that election.I’m sure both Democrats and Republicans have done this. This may be accomplished by the person recusing him or herself from any participation in regulating the election, which might be necessary if they are running for office.
Does this sound reasonable?
That’s not necessarily true, Scylla. I’d argue that the most effective way of preventing problems with the electoral system is for each side to scrutinize the other like hell. It’s up to Democrats to make sure Republicans don’t suppress votes, and Republicans to make sure Democrats don’t do it. It’s always worked pretty well in counts/elections in which I have played a role.
Sure.
But since those strictures do not currently exist for CEOs of companies that make vote-counting machines, it is not reasonable to say, “Because Wally Odell failed to act thusly, we can safely assume that he illegally tinkered with election vote counts.”
We have evidence of the Pubs acting, systematically, to suppress potential Dem votes.
If you have any evidence of Dems acting to suppress Pub votes – bring it!
:dubious: Not at all. Quite the contrary.
No. No, they’re not.
I think it’s hard to deny that the greatest risk of vote fraud is from electronic voting itself, where it is apparently possible to alter huge amounts of votes without anyone every knowing about it. Most of the other examples of claimed fraud have simply failed to pan out on closer inspection, even in the big cited cases. The voting dead people turn up alive, the huge scandals turn up a single case of double voting, and that by mistake, and so on.
Having personally worked on campaigns in which I WAS the Democratic party (and hence have a pretty good idea whether or not I tried to commit fraud), and in which the Republican party very actively sought to suppress and make as difficult as possible for people to vote (only in high DPI districts, of course, though now they “microtarget”), it’s going to take a lot to convince me that this is really a bipartisan issue.
I spent several days tracking down people who had their right to vote challenged in court hearings they couldn’t even afford to attend (because they were generally held on workdays) and most never even had heard or read the notices that they had been challenged. The end result of my efforts was a boatload of angry citizens showing up for their hearing dates in court and the local Republican lawyer that the party had roped into signing off on the challenges nearly bursting into tears when the judge tore into her for filing what amounted to baseless challenges (I think she was genuinely innocent: she was just a lousy lawyer who was assured by her party that what she was doing was fighting fraud).
What happened in counties where no one was putting in this sort of effort, of which there were many, or the people who just said “to hell with this, who cares, I won’t vote anyway if its such a big deal?” I don’t know.
Bricker’s fun little Virginian Republican party that he wines and dines with planned to bus in people from out of state to stand around polling places in quasi-policey uniforms and harass people about whether they had all the legal affairs of voting straight, (coincidentally this was planned to happen only in AA districts, where you wouldn’t think the Republican party would want to be so considerate as to help that bloc of voters to vote). This, of course, was the downgraded version from simply sending police officers to patrol polling locations in AA districts, which they are no longer allowed to do thanks to a court order.
It wasn’t MY party that almost pathetically handed out ballot slates to AA voters claiming that local Republican candidates were the endorsed Democrats (a trick they apparently tried again to no avail in Maryland). And so on.
So again, its going to take some convincing.
It IS, however, completely reasonable to suspect the possibility, based not only on that statement, but on government voting officials’ being necessarily less knowledgeable about what it would take to rig an election, and on demonstrated count errors being very far from evenly distributed from random.
Didn’t you just finish saying that you want voting to work right?
Or, when it would work against the party you said you support (in the very same sentence), is it necessary to prove a case beyond reasonable doubt before even doing a good-faith investigation? :dubious:
This was your party, wasn’t it?
The other people sentenced in this scandal were all elected Democratic precinct committeemen and a precinct volunteer.