The Star Tribune has a piece up about Trump's plan to root out and stop the imaginary voter fraud that he and his supporters believe is running rampant around the United States. It can't possibly be that people don't like them. It has to be those gol durned illegals!
So, he has sent Mike Pence out to get everyone's Social Security numbers to make sure that we are all legit. Yeah...riiiiiight...I'm giving my SS number to a well known con man! How well has that worked out in the past? And talk about BIG government. I guess it's when they do it, it's OK.
Further,
Trump and his allies have said the commission’s work is necessary to prevent what they contend are widespread instances of voter fraud. Evidence for that claim is exceedingly thin. Kobach has made it a central issue of his tenure and has achieved a total of nine voter fraud convictions. Most of the people convicted were older Republican voters, and at least one claims he was targeted for an “honest mistake.”
Who called that from a mile away?
Moi.
Again, for those who have trouble accepting reality.
Academics who have studied the issue for decades say voter fraud — particularly of the type that strict ID laws championed by Kobach and others are intended to combat — is vanishingly rare, and that voter ID requirements are a burdensome solution. A federal judge ruled that some of Kobach’s proposed ID requirements constituted a “mass denial of a fundamental constitutional right.”
1 comment:
There are only two kinds of voter fraud that have any significant impact: fraud committed by officials trying to advantage their party and absentee voting.
The former can be countered by conducting spot checks of election judges on election day and detailed audits of the results after the election.
In the latter ballots are sent through the mail and can be filled out by anyone who intercepts them -- the most common form of fraud is people filling out absentee ballots for the elderly who are too infirm to know what's going on anymore. (Signature checks are made by amateurs and next to useless.)
In-person voter fraud, where someone pretends to be someone else, is exceedingly rare. The Republican rush for voter ID laws to prevent this nearly non-existent form of fraud are intentionally crafted to disadvantage minorities and the poor.
But the best thing we can do to eliminate fraud in the future is to get rid of all touch screen voting machines, and use only paper ballots that can be counted by mark sense readers and -- most importantly -- human beings.
The Russians are intent on screwing us over using the Internet, and touch screen voting machines are just computers. Most of them are now 10-15 years old and are running Windows XP, an ancient operating system that is no longer supported by Microsoft has a zillion security vulnerabilities.
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