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0.008%!!!!! massive voter fraud!
Okay. :::smh:::
0.008%!!!!! massive voter fraud!
So the ID laws wouldn't have stopped any of the fraud you mentioned.
Nice!
I'm glad you agree with me that current safeguards need to be implemented in a more timely manner.
That race was an outlier too... how many state races have been within 500 votes?
http://www.tnr.com/article/magazine/...ennsylvania-idArt of War
How Republicans mastered voter suppression.
Timothy Noah
August 2, 2012 | 12:00 am
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THE GOP IS supposed to pretend that its 2012 strategy doesn’t include the systematic disenfranchisement of lower-income blacks and Latinos. But in June, Mike Turzai, Republican majority leader of the Pennsylvania House, blew his party’s cover by blurting out: “Voter ID, which is going to allow Governor [Mitt] Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania? Done.” The press was jubilant. It was as if Koch Enterprises had acknowledged global warming.
Since at least 2008, when minority voters gave Barack Obama his victory margin––Obama won only 43 percent of the white vote––Republicans have increasingly relied on voter suppression to counterbalance the steady shrinkage of America’s white majority. Former Florida GOP Chairman Jim Greer (currently under indictment for stealing party funds) stated in a deposition released in July that a 2009 party meeting included discussion of “voter suppression and keeping blacks from voting.” In December, Paul Schurick, a top aide to former Maryland Governor Bob Ehrlich, was convicted of election fraud for using automated phone calls to suppress the African American vote during Ehrlich’s unsuccessful 2010 bid. “The first and most desired outcome is voter suppression,” stated one consultant’s memo entered into evidence. It described a “Schurick Doctrine” to “promote confusion, emotionalism and frustration among African American Democrats.”
Most of the disenfranchisement is less obviously crude and presented to the public as hygienic electoral reform. But the pathogens it seeks to remove are African Americans, Latinos, and other lower-income folks who resist voting Republican. You’ve probably heard something about it, but Turzai’s gaffe invites us to review, with open eyes, how this racket actually works. It’s an obscenity no longer hiding in plain sight.
Voter ID. The preeminent tool. Attorney General Eric Holder has correctly likened voter ID laws, which have passed in 33 states, to poll taxes. Their popularity derives from their reasonableness. Why shouldn’t we prevent imposters from committing electoral iden y theft? Because it solves a nonexistent problem. New York University Law School’s Brennan Center for Justice calculates the incidence of individual voter fraud to be literally equivalent to the incidence of individual Americans getting struck by lightning.
What voter ID laws are useful for is reducing voter participation by you know who. Requiring an unexpired government-issued ID, a bank statement, or a utility bill is good. Requiring an unexpired government-issued photo ID, such as a driver’s license or a passport, is better, because about 25 percent of African Americans and 16 percent of Latinos don’t have any––as against 11 percent of the general population. The nine states with the strictest photo ID requirements are mostly rural, which means the government offices where such ID can be obtained are likelier to be far away and to keep irregular hours. The Woodville, Mississippi office is open only on the second Thursday of every month. Wisconsin’s Sauk City office is open only on the fifth Wednesday of every month, and since eight months in 2012 don’t even have a fifth Wednesday, the office will open its doors only four days this year.
Voter registration. Before you vote, you have to register. Five states now require proof of citizenship with an unexpired passport (something fewer than one-third of Americans possess) or a birth certificate or a naturalization certificate (to which about 7 percent lack easy access). Since acquiring these do ents can easily cost as much as $100, this requirement has the virtue of weeding out both legal immigrants and the native-born poor. The ostensible target is undo ented immigrants, but they have even less incentive to commit voter fraud than American citizens do: In addition to steep fines and imprisonment, they’d risk deportation.
Another tactic, favored in Texas and Florida, is to target nonprofit groups that conduct voter-registration drives (the League of Women Voters, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People). This is achieved by imposing onerous new training, registration, and/or liability burdens on the groups’ volunteers. The proportion of African American and Latino voters who register through third-party drives is about twice what it is for whites.
Closing the polls. Since lower-income voters more often work early in the morning or late at night, Republicans tend to favor shorter polling hours. They justify this with feigned concern about the stamina of (often elderly) volunteers. A similarly motivated opposition has mobilized against early voting arrangements that let people vote on weekends. Sunday voting is a particular target. The stated reason is that it’s impious. (Glenn Beck: “This is an affront to God.”) The actual reason is that Sunday voting allows black churches to provide “souls to polls” transport after services. Ohio and Florida have eliminated it.
Purging. States have to update their voter lists, right? Federal law requires certain safeguards, such as notifying those found ineligible so they can dispute erroneous removals. But many such formalities go unobserved, especially if you purge close enough to Election Day. (In this, as in many other subcategories, the gold medal goes to Republican Florida Governor Rick Scott, who has been doing battle with the Justice Department over the legality of his planned purge of noncitizens.) A variation on purging is caging, wherein nonforwardable letters are sent to voters in African American neighborhoods. Whichever letters get returned unopened occasion instant purges. The Republican National Committee got caught doing this in the 1980s, and now the party is not allowed to under a consent decree. But considerable evidence suggests the GOP has quietly resumed the practice anyway.
Robocalls. Automated phone calls aimed at discouraging people from going to the polls. Before the failed June vote to recall Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, a robocall said anyone who signed a recall pe ion didn’t have to vote (which wasn’t true). Maryland’s Schurick put out a robocall in 2010 assuring voters in African American neighborhoods that his candidate’s Democratic opponent, Governor Martin O’Malley, was well ahead (and thus unlikely to need more votes).
The GOP has other, similarly repulsive schemes afoot, but these are the most egregious. As for the Republican nominee: Don’t hold your breath waiting for Mitt Romney to condemn something his party sees as essential to victory.
double post is double
Last edited by FuzzyLumpkins; 08-07-2012 at 08:21 PM.
GOP Voter Fraud Hucksters Latest Lie: Felons Made Franken U.S. Senator
The problem with this assertion—from a new book [6] by The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund and George W. Bush Justice Department attorney Hans von Spakovsky—is that it is not just factually wrong, according to Minnesota Supreme Court records, the Minnesota prosecutor who investigated most of the cases, and some of the country’s top election scholars, but it is intended to rile a segment of the Right that thinks it is patriotic [7] to demonize voting by non-whites and disrupt voting for everyone else.
“They are talking in code to their base,” said Rutgers University’s Lori Minnite, co-author of Keeping Down The Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters. “Von Spakovsky and Fund know exactly what they are doing.”
“There is no basis in fact, whatsoever, in these inaccuracies propagated by the Minnesota Majority here, none,” Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said Wednesday. “After the most closely scrutinized election in Minnesota history in 2008, there were zero cases of fraud. Even the Republicans lawyers acknowledged that there was no systematic effort to defraud the election, none.”
“In Hennepin County, 650,000 people voted,” he continued. “The Minnesota Majority presented us with 1,500 cases that they felt there were problems with voting. Our own election bureau gave us 100. At the end of the day, we charged 38 cases. And all but one of them are felons voting who were still under the penalty [of not legally applying to regain individual voting rights]. There was no fraud.”
In many cases, former felons are not aware that they have to go through a legal process to regain their voting rights, unlike getting a driver’s license.
“How many of the former felons were registered to vote but never voted,” said Kathy Bonnifield, executive director of Citizens for Election Integrity Minnesota, which issued its report [8] on scapegoating felons in November 2010—five months after the rightwingers first raised [9] the spectre of illegal felon voting. “There is a lot of devil in those details.”
http://www.alternet.org/print/gop-vo...ken-us-senator
Florida in 2000 decided the outcome of the Presidential election with 157 votes.
Why isn't the honor system good enough?
So 2 races in 12+ years?
What honor system?
Pretty ing important ones, if you ask me.
Perhaps there aren't more notable incidents of voter fraud because the races weren't close enough for it to matter.
It has been suggested the 1960 Presidential election was affected by voter fraud.
Again, where is it being said that voter fraud need be either pervasive or widespread for it to have enormous impacts on our system of government?
I'm asking you if it's 2 races in 12+ years?... I really don't care what you think it's important.
Or perhaps it's simply because 0.008% is negligible.
Who cares what you're asking. The consequences of voter fraud, in those two cases alone, are sufficient for me to support current measures to prevent it.
I wouldn't call giving the Senate a filibuster-proof majority or potentially handing the presidency to the wrong person negligible but, that's just me.
Is that a yes or a no?
It's a no. Voter fraud is rampant in this country. From vote buying in Kentucky to absentee ballot fraud in Florida. Who know how many elections have been affected?
I find it revealing you're not concerned voter fraud could have thrown the election to George W. Bush in 2000 or that, it's quite apparent (if not yet definitive) that voter fraud put Al Franken in a Senate Seat that had a huge impact on the first two years of the Obama administration.
So what other state races were that close in the past 12+ years?
I have no idea, it's not important to me. I've already stated voter fraud need neither be pervasive nor widespread to be a significant problem and I've give two huge examples where that's been the case.
You disagree, I get it. Thank God you aren't the Attorney General; I only wish Eric Holder wasn't.
It's important in establishing if there's rampant fraud. Apparently, there isn't.
I get it, you don't care. Why do you continue to argue? I'm perfectly satisfied letting my position stand against yours on this matter.
We've exhausted the topic.
Oh I care. I would love to see ways to reduce that 0.008% even closer to zero that doesn't involve disenfranchising legitimate voters.
Nobody has such a proposal though.
Again, I'm all for taking care of the fraud you mentioned in a more expedient manner using the methods that found them in the first place.
No new laws are needed -- unless you really want to disenfranchise a group of voters who are more likely to vote Democrat. I sincerely believe that's what you want to do.
It seems to me that he has made a point about the margins in elections relative to the alleged fraud and you are raising the white flag.
The GOP policy is bald 1930s style electioneering.
Again yoni, I'm all for taking care of the fraud you mentioned in a more expedient manner using the methods that found them in the first place.
No new laws are needed -- unless you really want to disenfranchise a group of voters who are more likely to vote Democrat. I sincerely believe that's what you want to do.
So, instead, you settle for the .0008% disenfranchisement caused by the those fraudulent votes even though there's no evidence to suggest there would be any disenfranchisement caused by fraud prevention measures.
And, I guess you're fine with the administration's attempt to disenfranchise military voters in Ohio?
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