Voter fraud: a rarity only in the fantasies of the far left

[Al B. Sure!]

How the hell is there no fraud? The 1993 Stinson scandal in Philadelphia had rampant fraud. Poll workers today are known to go through the rolls, sign for people who haven't voted, and vote for them.

This law doesn't address such things but this idea that voter fraud doesn't exist in America and that the Democrats aren't benefiting immensely from it is a ****ing joke.

[gribbler]

How the hell is there no fraud? The 1993 Stinson scandal in Philadelphia had rampant fraud. Poll workers today are known to go through the rolls, sign for people who haven't voted, and vote for them.

This law doesn't address such things but this idea that voter fraud doesn't exist in America and that the Democrats aren't benefiting immensely from it is a ****ing joke.

Explain how the Republican ID laws are supposed to stop poll workers from engaging in fraud.

[Al B. Sure!]

Explain how the Republican ID laws are supposed to stop poll workers from engaging in fraud.

Like I said "This law doesn't address such things"

But I'm sick and tired of Oerdin and Kentonio and whoever else going LALALALA no fraud except Republicans!

[Al B. Sure!]

dp

[gribbler]

Like I said "This law doesn't address such things"

But I'm sick and tired of Oerdin and Kentonio and whoever else going LALALALA no fraud except Republicans!

Sorry, I should have read your post more closely. I think it is clear Republicans are trying to suppress turnout. Is it possible that a corrupt poll worker could claim that they think someone's ID is fake?

[DaShi]

Too late to suppress my turnout. I've already sent all my votes for Obama.

[Dinner]

Not really, no. The Southerners started voting for Republicans but the Republican party did not subsequently adopt Jim Crow as a policy position. Instead it merely opposes stuff like affirmative action.

No, he's completely correct. You're problem is you're thinking party name when you should be thinking which party is liberal and which party is mostly conservative. Southern conservatives, both the politicians and the voters, all switched to the Republican Party in mass following LBJ's signing the civil rights act. That means all those southern conservatives who previously refused to vote Republican because they still blamed Republicans for the civil war suddenly became Republicans. The bad guys in this story, the evil racist shitbags, they were ALWAYS conservatives especially southern conservatives.

[Dinner]

Like I said "This law doesn't address such things"

But I'm sick and tired of Oerdin and Kentonio and whoever else going LALALALA no fraud except Republicans!

Fraud practically doesn't exist. The very few times someone does try it they are almost instantly caught. BTW the GOP's tactics have never been voter fraud as instead their primary means of trying to swing close elections is to attempt voter suppression. Their who "claim there is lotes of voter fraud so we can justify STILL MORE voter suppression" game is the same thing they've been doing for at least the last 60 years.

[Al B. Sure!]

Fraud practically doesn't exist.

You're back to screaming LALALALALA I see.

[Dinner]

Show me meaningful numbers of convictions. She mean where fraud has happened in a systematic fashion where it wasn't instantly caught. This is not Russia where the officials stuff ballot boxes (that would get caught right away due to all the poll watchers and registration watchers) so we're left with Republicans alleging that some how thousands of Democratic agents are running around from polling station to polling station supposedly casting multiple votes. That's the only type of fraud these proposals would stop yet even they can't point to any wide spread example of this happen. It's ludicrous just on its face.

Like I said after years and spending hundreds of millions trying to find examples of voter fraud even they couldn't come up with more than a half dozen examples usually of someone double voting but not more so it sure as hell isn't swinging election results. We're talking about going over voting in this country for the last 20 years and only being able to come up with a few small scale examples so, yeah, I'm very comfortable saying the problem is virtually nonexistent and their motivations for doing this simply must be something else. Something which Republicans have long tradition of doing and which is obvious to any honest person.

[Al B. Sure!]

You clearly don't know how Democratic machines work. It's not in the forefront because the ruling elite benefits from it. The Philly Republican party, meanwhile, controls the Parking Authority as one giant bribe to shut the GOP up so they're not rocking the boat.

[Al B. Sure!]

Here, Oerdin, a report from last month:

http://philadelphia.cbslocal.com/201...op-complaints/

Gov. Tom Corbett and his administration haven’t produced an example of what he meant when he said some Pennsylvania precincts have voted at “over 100 percent,” but complaints by the state Republican Party about voting in Philadelphia suggest he may be right.

It’s not clear, however, whether that was fraud.

The Philadelphia city commissioners, who oversee the administration of elections in Philadelphia, are investigating the state GOP’s complaints that a number of city divisions in last year’s primary election somehow reported more ballots cast on electronic voting machines than voters who signed in.

Corbett, a Republican, used the 100 percent-plus argument several times in the days leading up to his March 14 signing of one of the nation’s toughest voter identification laws, but neither he nor his administration have backed up his statement with a specific example.

“That, to me, demonstrates that something happened, where there was fraud that took place,” he told a Pennsylvania Cable Network interviewer on March 12. Two days later, in a public ceremony to sign the law, he repeated the claim, saying, “how does that happen?”

The state Republican Party brought the complaints to the Philadelphia city commissioners in March after similar complaints in recent years that a prior slate of commissioners had dismissed because of questions about the accuracy of the data, said Joseph DeFelice, the Philadelphia director for the state Republican Party.

The newly elected chairwoman of the Philadelphia city commissioners, Stephanie Singer, said Thursday that she’s concerned about the phenomenon, but is not ready to say whether fraud actually occurred.

“It needs to be investigated,” she said, “and the same analysis should be run … in other counties.”

It’s also not clear whether the state’s new voter identification law would address such a fraud. The Republican-controlled state Legislature passed it over the objections of Democrats and advocates for the elderly, good government, civil liberties, the poor and minorities.

Philadelphia, where one in five of Pennsylvania’s 4 million registered Democrats live, has long been a boogeyman for the Republican Party.


Singer said one of the three divisions she has so far personally looked into had a straightforward explanation. In north Philadelphia’s 20th ward, the confusion was caused by a machine assigned to the 11th division that recorded dozens more ballots than voters who signed in there after it was switched to a polling place for a different division, Singer said.

But in the other two divisions, she couldn’t find an immediate explanation. Singer said she also plans to investigate a handful of other divisions scattered around the city where, according to the data, there were “substantial over-votes” in the 2011 primary.

There may be innocent explanations: for instance, machine error or poll workers failing to make a log entry for everyone who walks in to vote. But it is also possible that polling place workers colluded to run up vote tallies for favored candidates.

DeFelice said if such small-scale fraud occurred in Philadelphia City Council primary elections, then it could happen — and maybe did happen — on a much broader scale in the general election for statewide offices such as governor or U.S. senator.

One problem is that it’s much harder to detect such fraud in a general election, where voter turnout is much higher, DeFelice said.

DeFelice’s analysis found that roughly 5 percent of approximately 1,700 divisions in Philadelphia recorded a higher vote total by registered voters of one party in a particular race for mayor or a City Council seat than the number of that party’s voters who signed in. Some of that might be explained by registered Republicans voting mistakenly on a machine’s Democratic primary voting template, or vice versa.

Aside from that, there are hundreds of divisions where the tally of votes for one office — particularly by Democrats — is curiously high, although not over 100 percent of the Democrats who signed in, DeFelice said.

But the divisions being investigated by Singer are harder to explain, DeFelice said. For instance, in the 1st Ward’s 3rd Division in south Philadelphia, 192 Democrats voted for a City Council candidate and seven Republicans voted for a mayoral candidate for a total of 199 votes cast, but only 191 names were signed in, according to DeFelice’s analysis.

“Eight votes came from somewhere and they’re completely unaccounted for, because you don’t have those eight voters to attribute the votes to,” DeFelice said.

[Dinner]

So we have one local GOP official claiming more than 100% of the population voted in some precincts, which would be worrying if true, but when asked for details the dumb ass can't actually name a single precinct where such an event happened. This is sounding like sour grapes to me; "I'm positive fraud happened because I lost". He's made some wild claims which have been proven to be completely false and yet you, like a complete dumb ****, still believe his claims without any evidence what so ever? What is wrong with you?

Sure, investigate it and see if there is any merit to the wild conspiracy theories but require hard evidence before believing said conspiracy theories.

[Al B. Sure!]

They won't be investigated. That's the point. That's how corrupt one-party political machines work. Normal operating procedure in Democrat-controlled cities.

You're from San Diego. You have no idea how one-party cities like Philly, DC, and Baltimore are. I don't even think there's Republican candidates for mayor in DC and Baltimore and in Philly, our Democratic mayor was re-elected with 75% of the vote. And that was with a mayor with 50% approval rating.

I guess his lowish approval ratings did lower his turnout. He was elected with 83.4% of the vote the first time out so 75% is a big downturn.

I wonder how Russian elections compare to Philly, DC, and Baltimore.

[MrFun]

The Republicans' strategy to fight voter fraud is akin to taking a wrecking ball to smash a house down, in order to kill a fly.

[regexcellent]

That's not really true, no. Requiring you to prove who you are is a pretty basic security measure.

[DaShi]

That's what voter registration is for.

[regexcellent]

When you show up at the poll booth, the fact that the name you're voting under is registered proves nothing about your identity.

[kentonio]

James O'Keefe uncovers devastating new evidence that US citizens are voting!

FACT CHECK: ‘Non-Citizen’ Voter In James O’Keefe’s Voter Fraud Video Is Actually A Citizen

Conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe released a new video today supposedly exposing voter fraud in North Carolina by highlighting non-citizens like Zbigniew Gorzkowski who have voted in recent elections.

The problem: Gorzkowski is an American citizen.

In fact, if O’Keefe had done a simple Nexis search for “Zbigniew Gorzkowski”, he would have found a single article from the News & Observer in 2008 noting that Gorzkowski and his wife are naturalized citizens:

Customers flock through the red door of Zbigniew “Ziggy” and wife Halina Gorzkowski’s European grocery and flower shop to buy one of the 12 varieties they sell. The pierogis and 400 eastern European food items and flowers are also punching the naturalized citizen couple’s ticket for their version of the American Dream.

ThinkProgress spoke with Gorzkowski this morning. He verified that this information was indeed correct and he had been an American citizen since the late 1980s. Therefore, his votes in the 2008 and 2010 elections were not only perfectly legal, but encouraged as a civic duty.

In other words, the one instance in the video where O’Keefe purports to show that a non-citizen had actually voted, in fact shows that a citizen voted.

The episode does speak to a larger underlying problem with most accusations of voter fraud. It’s what I call the “Scooby Doo routine”. People like O’Keefe make wild voter fraud accusations like non-citizens voting, only to discover a much simpler explanation for the situation.

In this case, O’Keefe is using “evidence” of foreigners voting in American elections to supposedly demonstrate the need for draconian security measures like voter ID, which could disenfranchise 20 million citizens across the country. However, his evidence actually shows nothing more than an American citizen exercising his civic duty. Earlier this year, South Carolina went through the same Scooby Doo routine after Attorney General Alan Wilson claimed to have unearthed evidence of 953 dead voters, only for his state investigation to ultimately find no dead voters — and zero voter fraud — but rather a handful of clerical errors.

O’Keefe has a responsibility as a journalist to ensure the veracity of his facts before he makes wild charges like these. A simple phone call or Nexis search would have sufficed, yet doing so would have undercut his spurious argument that voter fraud is a widespread problem in the United States.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/201...orth-carolina/

[Dinner]

Well, at least the fraudster & charlatan O'Keefe didn't end up in jail this time. How anyone, even the most brain damaged right wing extremist, can trust any thing he says is beyond me. The guy got caught lying and editing videos so that they appeared to say the exact opposite of what people actually said. Up is down, left is right, and anyone who trusts O'Keefe's deceptive editing is a fool.

[kentonio]

Oh it turns out that in Pennsylvania the GOP have decided to admit that it's not actually about fraud..

Pennsylvania Voter ID Law Trial Set To Begin As State Concedes It Has No Proof Of In-Person Voter Fraud

Defendants in a case against one of the nation's strictest voter ID laws in Pennsylvania made a major concession to plaintiffs this week, just days ahead of the start of the trial over the measure.

In a stipulation agreement signed earlier this month, state officials conceded that they had no evidence of prior in-person voter fraud, or even any reason to believe that such crimes would occur with more frequency if a voter ID law wasn't in effect.

"There have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states,” the statement reads.

According to the agreement, the state “will not offer any evidence in this action that in-person voter fraud has in fact occurred in Pennsylvania and elsewhere,” nor will it "offer argument or evidence that in-person voter fraud is likely to occur in November 2012 in the absense of the Photo ID law.”

The possibility of voter fraud has frequently served as the ideological underpinning for voter ID measures, whose supporters claim that the integrity of elections can't be preserved without requiring would-be voters to verify their identity at polling places. Reports on actual incidents appear to counter this contention, however, as figures suggest voter fraud is a highly infrequent occurrence.

Opponents of voter ID laws argue that such legislation is an effort to establish obstacles for potential voters, particularly college students, minorities and the elderly, who tend to vote Democratic. A recent report from the Brennan Center for Justice found that a variety of factors could seriously hamper the ability of a half-million Americans in 10 states that have passed voter ID laws to obtain the required documents they would need to cast votes in November.

Pennsylvania GOP House Majority Leader Mike Turzai fueled the concerns of anti-voter ID activists earlier this year when he claimed that the recently enacted measure would "allow Gov. [Mitt] Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania."

Just weeks after those comments, Pennsylvania officials released a study finding that more than 758,000 registered voters in the state -- many of them in its urban center of Philadelphia -- lacked driver's licenses. While the law allows for a variety of other forms of identification to be used at polling places, the figure suggested that a large number of Pennsylvanians still didn't meet the criteria needed to cast ballots in the fall.

A lawsuit filed against the state's voter ID law by the ACLU and NAACP on behalf of lead plantiff Viviette Applewhite, a 93-year-old woman who claims she will be disenfranchised by the legislation because she won't be able to get valid documentation before the election, is set to go to trial on Wednesday. On Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice also announced that it was investigating whether the law discriminates against minorities.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/0...p_ref=politics

[Al B. Sure!]

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Justice also announced that it was investigating whether the law discriminates against minorities.

**** like that I just don't understand.

Minorities are being turned away from DMV's when they ask for ID's?

[rah]

Driving is a privilege and not a right.

[Jon Miller]

Maybe the registering to vote should be done at the same time as acquiring a firearm?

JM

[H Tower]

I still haven't seen proof of mass voter fraud. Only allegations. Where's the proof?

[DinoDoc]

I still haven't seen proof of mass voter fraud. Only allegations. Where's the proof?

I'm still hung up on what the hoopla is about requiring the voter to have an ID when the Supreme Court already held that requirement to be permissible.

[Ogie Oglethorpe]

It obviously suppresses minority voter turnout as evidenced in Georgia...

I still haven't seen proof of mass voter suppression. Only allegations. Where's the proof?

[Dr Strangelove]

To say nothing of the thousands of votes that vanish from voting machines...

jesus ****ing christ...

...or the police road blocks that appear near polling places on election day.

[kentonio]

It obviously suppresses minority voter turnout as evidenced in Georgia...

I still haven't seen proof of mass voter suppression. Only allegations. Where's the proof?

So we can assume that theres no fraud, no voter suppression, no lowering of turnout and in fact no effects full stop? So the GOP want to spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money to achieve... nothing?

[Zevico]

So we can assume that theres no fraud, no voter suppression, no lowering of turnout and in fact no effects full stop? So the GOP want to spend millions of dollars of taxpayer money to achieve... nothing?

You're right. You know, murder's pretty rare, robbery's rare, all these crimes are rare. So there's no point in enforcing the law, right? Because it's broken so rarely? We all know it's just a waste of money, because nothing will happen if the law isn't enforced. Like Tammany Hall, which never happened. Or Jim Crow, which never happened.