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Showing posts with label Voter Fraud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Voter Fraud. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 17, 2021

End The Voting Rights Battle

I don't do this often but both sides are completely wrong in the voting rights debate. And Ross Douthat has explained why in his latest piece. 

The first study, from the Democracy and Polarization Lab at Stanford University, looks at the effects of no-excuse absentee voting on the 2020 elections — the kind of balloting that a lot of states expanded and that many Republican state legislators now want to roll back. Contrary to liberal expectations, easing the voting rules this way seemed to have no effect on turnout: “States newly implementing no-excuse absentee voting for 2020 did not see larger increases in turnout than states that did not.” Then contrary to Republican fears, the easement didn’t help Democrats at the G.O.P.’s expense: “No-excuse absentee did not substantially increase Democratic turnout relative to Republican turnout.” Overall the authors argue that what drove higher turnout in 2020 was simply “voter interest” in the elections, not the major voting rule change, which “mobilized relatively few voters and had at most a muted partisan effect.” 

The second study comes from a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Oregon, and it looks further back in time to assess the effects of Shelby County v. Holder, the Supreme Court revision of the Voting Rights Act that made it easier for states to impose voter ID laws and other restrictions. Using data from six federal elections, the author finds no post-Shelby divergence between white and African-American turnout in states affected by the ruling. Indeed, if anything, the jurisdictions saw African-American turnout rise relative to white turnout in the 2016 elections, suggesting that new obstacles to voting prompt swift mobilization in response.

That should all clear it up, right? 

Bwahahaahaha!!!

Friday, June 30, 2017

Trump Wants Your Social Security Number!

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.”


Thursday, January 26, 2017

Our French Revolution

Last night I was at a baseball association meeting. My son plays high level baseball and I serve as the fundraising coordinator. The mother of one of my son's teammates from last year came up to me and wondered if she could help out with fundraising. We talked briefly about how she could support the organization and then I remembered a conversation we had last spring about the election.

She told me back in June that she had this feeling that Trump was going to win. She seemed gleeful about it. After talking with her for a bit, I realized that she was one of the folks not very connected to politics who went on pure emotion. She's wealthy, white and pissed off about the direction of our country. This is actually a more accurate demographic than the stereotype that's out there about the Trump voter (dumb, toothless, racist etc). At the time, I thought she was nuts but she ended up being right.

The question I'm pondering today is why was she right? How can such a large group of people be so irrational as to vote for Donald Trump? By any indication, he's a despicable person and a horrible image for our country. Yet he is going to keep behaving the way he does until he loses because up until this point, it's worked. People who support Trump are convinced that everything he does is great and the criticism against him is all lies.

When I brought up the Access Hollywood tape, she said that she didn't believe it was him and that it was all taken out of context. She called it a witch hunt! Even his own voice saying his own words didn't fucking matter. I realized in the that moment that we weren't fighting the last battle of the Civil War, as I previously thought.

We are experiencing our own French Revolution complete with massively high levels of irrational thought and behavior.

Consider Trump's assertions over voter fraud and his recent call for an investigation. Even proceeding down this path is crazy. He won. Hillary Clinton lost. The popular vote does not matter. Why seek to undermine your own election? Further, it was Donald Trump himself and his own lawyers who called Jill Stein's recount efforts crazy and worthless and sought to stop them. So, when she says it's rigged it's not true but when he does it is true? Republicans and Democrats alike have called his claims entirely baseless. All 50 secretaries of each state have stated unequivocally that there was no voter fraud in this election and for millions of illegals to vote around the country would be completely impossible. Trump has also misrepresented the studies he says that show there is voter fraud but that doesn't really matter. He believes it's true. His followers believe it's true. So, it's true.

This same kind of thinking was in full gear during the French Revolution. People were so angry at their leaders that they would believe anything. The only saving grace we have now is that Trump takes office with the lowest approval rating of any president. My thought is that patience is required right now. It does indeed seem that Trump is invincible. He can do whatever he wants. But let's remember that's what Al Capone thought as well. They tried many conventional ways to bring him down and in the end it was something small like tax evasion. This is what I think is going to happen with Trump. Interestingly, Vegas has Trump's odds of being impeached in the first six months at 4 to 1. I think that might be a little too good but who knows?

In the meantime, I'm still really bummed that so many people out there are that irrational. How can we bring them down to more grounded reason? The fate of our nation rests on our ability to be critical thinkers and accept reality for what it is. We can ill afford to behave so erratically when it comes to these serious issues. Leaders like Trump and his followers are why civilizations decline and fall apart. Oddly, I think some of Trump's followers want this. They want to tear down the whole playhouse merely because they don't like stuff.

Can we stop them? How?


Saturday, October 01, 2016

It HAS to be Fraud

A recent poll from AP shows that half of Trump's supporters think that if their candidate loses, there will be fraud. It can't possibly be that their ideas are backward and hateful. There has to be cheating somehow. More than ever before, we are seeing a large block of US voters burying their heads in the sand and completely denying reality.

Gail Collins, a columnist for the New York Times, recently asked the question, "How can anyone vote for Trump?" I posted this piece on my Facebook feed and a friend responded with this comment.

I keep hearing about white male alienation, and how all the alienated white males are going to vote for Trump. But I wonder if the reason all these white males are alienated is because they’re stupid. If you’re so deluded that you think Trump is presidential material, maybe you should be alienated. 

It’s possible that people alienate you because you’ve made bad decisions all your life, you didn’t get a decent education, you’re intellectually incurious and you can’t tell the difference between a slightly flawed, politically astute and highly prepared candidate and a man with a raccoon on his head whose campaign slogan is “No fat chicks."

Right, The real problem is THEM. It's not liberals, the media, the elite or voter fraud. They completely fail to look at how the choices they made in their lives are directly tied to their lot in life. Essentially, they aren't taking responsibility for their mistakes. Odd, considering they in the part of people who foam at the mouth of the lack of individual responsibility.

Here are a few pieces on the voter fraud myth for your reference.

Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth

The Success of the Voter Fraud Myth

THE MISLEADING MYTH OF VOTER FRAUD IN AMERICAN ELECTIONS


Friday, August 08, 2014

And That's The End of the Voter Fraud Myth

31 out of 1,000,000,000 ballots cast. That's how many credible incidents of voter fraud were found in this recent investigation that covers the years 2000 to 2014. Mr. Levitt welcomes anyone to check his work.

So, that's the end of the quaint (lie) notion that there is rampant voter fraud in this country and we must have photo ID YESTERDAY!!! (unless we are talking about absentee voter fraud in which case Sgt. Schultz from Hogan's Heroes suddenly makes a cameo appearance). Levitt notes the following.

ID laws are not aimed at the fraud you’ll actually hear about. Most current ID laws (Wisconsin is a rare exception) aren’t designed to stop fraud with absentee ballots (indeed, laws requiring ID at the polls push more people into the absentee system, where there are plenty of real dangers). Or vote buying. Or coercion. Or fake registration forms. Or voting from the wrong address. Or ballot box stuffing by officials in on the scam. In the 243-page document that Mississippi State Sen. Chris McDaniel filed on Monday with evidence of allegedly illegal votes in the Mississippi Republican primary, there were no allegations of the kind of fraud that ID can stop.

Uh Huh:)

Friday, June 06, 2014

What is Bad, What is Good

Let me see if I understand this correctly.

The New Black Panther Party (bubble translation: a couple of black guys in Philly) with batons at a polling station...




















BAD!!

Yet bringing a gun to a polling place in Chambers County, Alabama, in Shelby County, Alabama, or in Alabaster, Alabama  (if you are white)...

GOOD!!

Makes perfect sense to me:)

Wednesday, September 04, 2013

Saturday, September 29, 2012

The Bittersweet Irony

Remember all that bitching about voter fraud and ACORN?

From the Wall Street Journal...

GOP Firm Accused of Voter Fraud

Suspicions of voter-registration fraud by a firm working for the Republican Party of Florida spread to at least eight counties Friday after apparent irregularities in registration forms emerged earlier this week in a single county.

Two words come to mind initially.

"Fuck" and "Off."

And now we're done talking about voter fraud.

Tuesday, August 28, 2012

Shovel To The Head Stunned



I didn't it was possible to cram so much truth into six minutes before!

Wednesday, August 15, 2012

Yeah, Not So Much

Remember all that business about how voter fraud was rampant and every state needed to pass laws to stop this awful law breaking.

Yeah, not so much. 

The analysis of 2,068 reported fraud cases by News21, a Carnegie-Knight investigative reporting project, found 10 cases of alleged in-person voter impersonation since 2000.

10? Good grief, someone call the CDC. This epidemic is out of control!!!

With 146 million registered voters in the United States, those represent about one for every 15 million prospective voters.

Well, now I can see why this was such a concern and why we now need photo ID's.

Oh, wait. Here's why.