Admit­tedly, even though I think the US has been slowly falling apart since [the 60s]

Yeah, there’s nothing like a half century of peace, liberty, prosperity and technological advances on a scale unprecedented in human history to really destroy a country.

“Kennedy won by the thinnest of margins and with our help in the crucial state of Illinois. It is no secret now that Kennedy’s nine-thousand-vote win the state was accomplished with more than the usual ‘graveyard vote’, regularly employed by big-city machines. Sam Giancana strutted around for a while, bragging that in wards controlled by his Family, Kennedy’s margin of victory was more than 80 percent — considerably more than the totals piled up in other wards of the city. Republican party officials in the state, after an unofficial canvas of votes, came up with enough phony votes to show that Nixon had actually taken the state by about five thousand votes. According to Sam, and others, Nixon, who had his own friends in our world, was ‘persuaded’ not to challenge the outcome. Nixon conceded defeat the morning after the election, forgoing the opportunity of having an official recount in Illinois.”

The book is also pretty interesting in how it examines the Mob’s antipathy to Castro, and Kennedy’s considerations of their casino interests with regards to the Bay of Pigs invasion. Just an incredibly tangled web. Admittedly, even though I think the US has been slowly falling apart since then, the ’60s sound like a crazy good time to have been living.

I suppose this is literally true, in the trivial sense that not many people know much of anything, but I knew it and lots of people I know knew it. I’d be surprised if this were unusually esoteric knowledge.

Please, please tell me that principle is not a concept owned solely by people who vote Republican.

Breath easy, Laura. I’m opposed to voter fraud, unequivocally.

As the many thoughtful comments on this thread have demonstrated, however, the proper context for this question is much larger than you have allowed.

How do you know for whom a particular fraudulent vote is cast? If a fraudulent vote is cast for your candidate then your right to vote has been amplified by fraud.

In the vote fraud case I linked to, the precinct chosen for audit went 100% for the Democratic candidate.

Furthermore, I am no more pleased by the concept of fraud amplifying my vote than I am of fraud diluting it. Please, please tell me that principle is not a concept owned solely by people who vote Republican.

OIC. So because Johnson was crooked, he must have done crooked things. Petitio principii.

But I’d note your original claim was (and I quote):

[DDD]: “Few people remember how close the 1960 Election was – without Illinois, JFK would have lost the Election, and Richard Nixon would have had little reason to become the bitter, paranoid man he was in later life.”

To be honest, I truly do not remember that. But it’s nice to know I’m in good company. ;-)

Cheers,

BUT, you ignore the fact that Kennedy also carried Texas by just 46,000 votes, helped a great deal by “Landslide Lyndon” Johnson. Based on his own history of vote fraud (i.e., the way he had beaten Stevenson, a very popular former Texas Governor, for his Senate Seat), LBJ’s crooked machine was capable of producing many times the 46,000 votes needed to put Kennedy over the top; there were several precincts in LBJ’s South Texas political stronghold that delivered many more Kennedy Votes than the total number of voters that cast votes (INCLUDING all absentee ballots) – NONE of those votes were stricken from Kennedy’s Texas tally.

Where things really need to work, as at an ATM, often there
is an alternative way of hitting things, as for instance buttons, or the touch screens may actuially work right.

I think none of the systems that are under consideration in New York involve touch screens now. The systems I think are actually extremely cumbersome ways to mark a paper ballot. Thanks to sucessful footdragging though we are still using voting machines in New York.

In New York, it’s still 1935 (well, these machines are actually from 1962)

We alwaqys used to have a problem with people losing their votees – maybe one person in 50 or more – because people pulled the lever the other way before they actually voted. Apparently the Board of Elections was somewhere pretending taht this
was on purpose. There actually was a fix for it – which had
been disabled within a few years of the purchase of these machines. Maybe it was really some kind of inside political deal (for instance maybe more Democratic votes were lost this way than Republicans and it benefitted Governor Rockefeller running statewide, while it didn’t hurt local Democrats much) The fix was put back in after the Help America Vote Act. The fix consisted of creating a dummy vote at the bottom right of the machine – a lever olored silver – which someone could cast in the event they went into vote and discovered that there was nobody they wanted to vote for. The claim earlier for disabling that was that without that people could breask the machine by pulling the lever back right away.

There is only case of in person voter fraud (not done by one person or two ating alone) that I heard of. I read about this in the last year or so. There was a case in Brooklyn in the 1980s where a lot of fictional were registered and then voted.

The key facts that made this both logical and possible were:

1) A very small amount of legitimate absentee voting – otherwise anyone wanting to do this would have used absentee ballots. Not
only is it easier logistically, there is no risk that the phony voter will not vote the way someine wants – or not remember
what to do and how to do it.

2) The people committing the fraud did not control the voting machinery – or else there would be much easier ways to commit fraud. There is no need to have actual voters cast votes if you control the election machinery, and this is true even in Afghanistan. (In Afghanistan this year the sites of some polling places were insecure and so independent monitors couldn’t get there. Some of these sites never actually opened but votes – in some case 100% for Karzai – were reported.)

3) An almost complete lack of organized political opposition in the area. It maybe wasn’t secret,, but it was relatively safe for a few years.

On any large scale – large enough to affect an election – it can’t be done in secret.

By the way, the case in Troy New York this year – which was discovered even though only a few people voted (by absentee)
in the name of real living registered voters, was done in a Working Families Party primary. It sounds like the goal (which apparently failed – therefore the mention of what could have happened in November) was to give the Democratic candidate their line (only party leaders can allow non-members to run in the primary or be on the ballot) – but in this case some members of the Working Families Party had instigated a primary. Because the membership was very small only a few dozen votes were needed. In New York but in very few other states, candidates can be cross-endorsed, and often are. Bloomberg for instance this year I think
has 3 ballot lines.

The biggest preventative of in person voter fraud is: registration of voters.

That very simple thing, without any ID necessary, went a great deal of the way toward eliminating that 100 or so years ago. People also used to need to present ID to register. The IDs were either

1) A birth certificate – which in those days were not re-issued by states years later (Now they are not considered ID at all, but only proof that a certain person was born in a certain place on a certain date.)

2) Naturalization papers.

Both of these were difficult to forge and usually unnecesary to forge – not needed for very much so there was no industry set up to do that. (There would no point in forging naturalization papers for a passport, since there was a record in Washington I believe)

I think people got issued voter cards. This is no longer being done but a few old people may still think they are necessarty in order to vote.

A final precaution was a signature – which people used to pay more attention to than they do today.

By the way state issued picture ID would not necessarily prevent organized in person fraudulant voting by people who did not control the election machinery.

There was a case I read about.. it happened in Israel – in 1999.

There was a minor religious party (Israel has proportional representation) which collected ID cards (used in Israel for voting) and then assembled men hired to be the fraudulant voters.

They assembled say 50 or 100 men and then matched them up with the pictures that looked most like them (more than one per person) They had to memorize the number, because being able to recite the number from memory is a kind of test used at polling places. Now what made this make sense was:

1) the people who sold or gave away their votes trusted the people to whom they gave their ID cards to get them back to them.

2) Because only one form of ID could be used, the people who took them knew that the voter would not stupidly go ahead and vote anyway.

3) There was more certainty as to who wsas going to be voted for – and for that matter that a vote would be cast at all.

This system would of coursde not have worked in New York State because the voter could not deprive himself of the ability to vote anyway by handinbg over a picture OID and because while someone can use someone else’s picture ID it is much harder to copy someone’s signature especially when you have never seen it before..

The only other way to be sure a real voter does not show up is for the registered voter to be dead or nonexistent.

As for provisional ballots being “second class ballots for second class citizens,” I’ll define a second class citizen as one so unengaged from the political process that he didn’t register in time, doesn’t know to which precinct he belongs or doesn’t know where he ought to vote — those being the three main reasons a person must cast a provisional ballot.

… or wrongly purged from the voter rolls by Republican campaign co-chair Katherine Harris along with her buddies Choicepoint/DBT….

And I’d note the observation that Ann Coulter is “so unengaged from the political process” should afford a chuckle.

Cheers,

Few people remember how close the 1960 Election was – without Illinois, JFK would have lost the Election, and Richard Nixon would have had little reason to become the bitter, paranoid man he was in later life.

Nope. See here, amongst other places.

Cheers,

In some alternate universe or on BizarroWorld, perhaps.

Meanwhile, here on planet Earth….:

In the aftermath of Palm Beach County v. Harris, there were claims of changing standards. But in Dubya v. Bush, there was no such issue … in part because the counts at issue hadn’t even taken place yet!!! But the Dubya v. Gore decision stopped the statewide recounts, the only thing that could have imposed more uniform and more detailed and specific standards across the board, but left the previous recounts from the four counties resulting from PBC v. Harris in place!!! If indeed there had been sufficiently non-uniform standards in those initial and limited recounts (which is arguable), then the proper course would have been to correct this “equal protection violation” with proper and uniform recounts (and to do so statewide, as the Florida government was preparing to do). But this is precisely what the Dubya people wanted to stop, and which the U.S. Supreme Court did stop, thus ensuring that the alleged “constitutional problems with the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court that demand a remedy” would in fact be left in place. IOW, the very “violation of the Equal Protection Clause” the per curiam found in Part I would be left in place … no actual remedy would actually be ordered.

Cheers,

How do you know for whom a particular fraudulent vote is cast? If a fraudulent vote is cast for your candidate then your right to vote has been amplified by fraud.

egd responded:

So voter fraud is O.K., as long as the right guys are doing it?
Is this really the Democrats position on voter fraud? It would explain a lot of party actions.

I’m having a hard time figuring out how you got from what I wrote to what you wrote. Kindly bear in mind that I was responding to the unwarranted assumptions of another commenter.

Seriously, I have no idea what you are talking about.

“Anything that promotes more absentee voting – inclu inccluding in person voter ID laws – promotes fraudulant voting.”

One thing that promotes absentee voting is poor management of the in-person vote. A couple of years ago, my partner and I went to vote in a local election and discovered that the optical scan machines (where you mark a paper ballot, as with a scantron exam) had been replaced by touch screen machines. The touch screens were poorly calibrated, making it difficult to register a vote for preferred candidates, and they provided no paper record to reassure us that our votes were properly recorded. The elderly poll workers were clearly befuddled by the technology. We vowed right then to vote absentee until the machines were changed, because absentee voting produces a tangible ballot that anyone can verify. (Fortunately, within the next couple of elections, optical scan machines were brought back.)

Sure, let’s provide free government id and then check that id at the polls. But unreliable voting equipment is a more serious problem.

There’s a difference between being poor and being so removed from society that one has no id. My husband has had no employment for a year, our net worth is far below zero, and yet he still has a way of proving who he is. Try walking into Checksmart et al without an ID and see how well doing anything works without it. Actually, just try cashing a personal check over $25 at any of them, even with an ID. Took me three tries to find one willing to do it this summer, and they took 10% right off the top. A person without any ID is a person who hasn’t cashed any check anywhere (so not a government beneficiary), hasn’t worked a job above the table, has never purchased or rented housing, in short is a person who is completely unfamiliar with the real world and is probably a tax evader.

(BTW, I completely agree about expired driver’s licenses ought to be valid proof of identity, and state issued ID should always be free.)

As for provisional ballots being “second class ballots for second class citizens,” I’ll define a second class citizen as one so unengaged from the political process that he didn’t register in time, doesn’t know to which precinct he belongs or doesn’t know where he ought to vote — those being the three main reasons a person must cast a provisional ballot.

And here is our fundamental difference between Oren and me — I think voting is so important that if a person isn’t willing to register in time, read the mailings from the precinct that state where one is to vote, and then be able to demonstrate who they are, that person doesn’t really deserve to vote. Whereas the opposing view is that anybody, no matter how little they know or care about the process, needs to be able to walk in wherever they damn well please to fill in their bubbles, and how dare you even ask that they prove they are who they say they are. I suppose the aphorism should be “better that ten fake votes be counted than one society dropout’s vote be missed.”

BN: In person voter fraud is a wicked huge problem despite the fact that there isn’t any evidence it is a wicked huge problem. Thanks for that insight my friend.

Actually, if you want an example, please take a close look at the voting patterns in Cook County, Illinois during the 1960 Presidential Election, when Daley’s Democratic Machine provided buses which were loaded up with bums and winos and driven from polling station to polling station; at each stop, each person on the bus was handed out voter registration cards, usually for people who were dead or had moved out of Chicago years ago, and directed to vote the straight Democratic Ticket. Each Wino was handsomely rewarded with bottles of Thunderbird or Mad Dog at the end of the tour, during which each had voted several times. Few people remember how close the 1960 Election was – without Illinois, JFK would have lost the Election, and Richard Nixon would have had little reason to become the bitter, paranoid man he was in later life. The Democratic Machine in Chicago stole the Election for JFK, using means that could have easily been prevented if a photo ID requuirement for voters was in place.

mattski: How do you know for whom a particular fraudulent vote is cast? If a fraudulent vote is cast for your candidate then your right to vote has been amplified by fraud.

So voter fraud is O.K., as long as the right guys are doing it?

Is this really the Democrats position on voter fraud? It would explain a lot of party actions.

Bob in SeaTac: Zuch clearly doesn’t understand what Bush vs. Gore said: Counting rules cannot be changed in the middle of vote counting.

But as we learned in the 2008 Minnesota senatorial election, changing the rules in the middle of the game is the only way Democrats can win close races.

In the end, there is no real difference in your state of affairs if you are denied the right to vote, or someone is allowed to vote illegally for the opposing candidate. The bottom line is the same. The candidate that you wanted to win has one fewer votes in comparison to the opposing candidate than if the denial/fraud had not occurred. Anything else is word games, and exalting form over reality.

Nonsense. Aside from the point mattski made, the asymmetry I pointed out — winner take all means no one’s right is affected in almost all cases; depriving an eligible voter DOES involve the loss of a right — leads directly to an important conclusion: we should devote more effort to protecting the right of people to vote than we do to preventing ineligible voters from voting.

Now, this equation could change if ineligible voters constituted a greater problem (Joe’s point). But so far, the evidence for that is non-existent.

Bruce Hayden: In the end, there is no real difference in your state of affairs if you are denied the right to vote, or someone is allowed to vote illegally for the opposing candidate. The bottom line is the same. The candidate that you wanted to win has one fewer votes in comparison to the opposing candidate than if the denial/fraud had not occurred. Anything else is word games, and exalting form over reality.

The only problem is that you’re constructing a hypothetical with no basis except the “worst-case scenario” of your imagination. Unless you assume that “fraudulent” votes will always go against your candidate your argument is completely incoherent.

***You should also prepare to be schooled by zuch re Bush v Gore.

In the end, there is no real difference in your state of affairs if you are denied the right to vote, or someone is allowed to vote illegally for the opposing candidate. The bottom line is the same.

Agreed. My intuition is that voter-id laws suppress more legitimate votes than they prevent fraudulent ones, although I admit that empirical data for that assertion (or the contrary assertion) are hard to come by.

You do seem to have an amazing ability to redefine reality better to your liking.

Perhaps there’s something I said that doesn’t comport with your “reality”? C’mon, man, don’t keep us waiting, out with it!

Cheers,

Rights or not, at some point (see Iran) even if the person with the most votes won, a tainted result will cause much disrespect of the whole system, which has a tendency to lead to harm to the rights being enjoyed. If the system is deemed too fraudulent, e.g., fewer might vote. etc.

The ultimate point is in this country the problem is trivial [to be generous], the solution ["solution"] more harm than it’s worth. Slamming flies with mallets, and doing so selectively in the process.

I have witnessed countless voters standing outside a polling place, distributing campaign literature or taking the names of voters to support get-out-the-vote programs, while their names are listed on the wall inside that polling place among absentee ballot submitters.

Unlawful use of an absentee ballot by the identified voter is one problem. Misuse of an absentee ballot (by a spouse, a parent, someone with access to ballots mailed to institutions) is a different problem, and a crime far easier to commit than arranging in-person voter fraud.

Anecdote: My municipality is approximately 40 percent Republican, 35 percent Democratic, 25 percent non-partisan. The absentee ballots (which identify the voter’s party registration) are generally at least two-thirds Republican. For years, I have checked the posted absentee ballot lists at hundreds of polling places and would, based on those observations, wager that Republicans submit substantially more than half of absentee ballots despite constituting less than one-third of the registered voters in the relevant region. Interestingly, the proportions seems to be closer among politically active persons (committee members, candidates, poll watchers, etc.). The disproportionality appears to derive from ‘nonpolitical’ Republicans.

In the end, there is no real difference in your state of affairs if you are denied the right to vote, or someone is allowed to vote illegally for the opposing candidate. The bottom line is the same. The candidate that you wanted to win has one fewer votes in comparison to the opposing candidate than if the denial/fraud had not occurred. Anything else is word games, and exalting form over reality.

zuch: But the decision was to terminate the recount and thus leave the hundreds of legal but uncounted ballots uncounted, thus making sure that votes would be counted differently in different counties (some had done manual recounts under court order, but others [in Republican-leaning areas] had done their own “stealth” manual recounts, and others had no manual recount done at all). After much hand-waving about “equal protection” and how it was such a travesty that different ballots might possibly be treated differently, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a halt to the effort to remedy this with a statewide recount, and ordered that the unequal treatment be allowed to stand. IOW, their “remedy” was to produce the very situation they railed about in Part I of their cowardly and dishonest per curiam opinion.

You do seem to have an amazing ability to redefine reality better to your liking.

Somehow the panel counts the dozens of voters who used provisional ballots and did not subsequently verify their ID as evidence of disenfranchisement rather than as evidence of ineligible voters trying to vote.

Second class ballots for second class citizens.

Got any solid evidence that there are significant number of eligible voters who have no government-issued ID at all?

Yes, here you go. LINK

Ah yes, Georgia, et al. v. Billups, et al.
http://www.ca11.uscourts.gov/opinions/ops/200714664.pdf

I suspect that they might have done better if their database of people “without ID” did not include the district court judge who heard the case. They eventually found some plaintiffs who in-fact did not have ID, but only after delaying the court date as I recall. Perhaps the Voter ID being free, and even a bus-pass counting as valid government issue ID for voting, made it a difficult case.

Just as the Indiana case might have turned out differently of one of the “harmed” was not actually a registered voter in a different state. The link to the Indiana case above is to a sob-story about elderly nuns who were “turned away” after voting provisional ballots. They would have been eligible to vote with absentee ballots. As it stands now, however, despite the “win” for the Indiana photo ID law in the US Supreme Court it has been struck down by a state court panel because of the disparate impact on absentee and polling-place voters.

Somehow the panel counts the dozens of voters who used provisional ballots and did not subsequently verify their ID as evidence of disenfranchisement rather than as evidence of ineligible voters trying to vote.

But again, we run into the issue of whether our system should be arranged around allowing those without jobs or assets to vote conveniently.

This an astonishing comment. Perhaps we should just return to poll taxes or property qualifications?

We, who claim that ours is the truest [representative] democracy in history, should be most scrupulous about ensuring the ability of every citizen to vote.

By the way, some citizens – an increasing number in the current economic situation – do not have “jobs or assets.” That does make them less than full citizens.

Indeed, some of us think that those who benefit least from existing systems most deserve to make their voices heard in elections.

To stop in-person fraud, why not take a DNA sample from each person as they vote?

Because it’s too expensive as yet. And photo ID will get you 99% of the way there, very cheaply.

Zuch clearly doesn’t understand what Bush vs. Gore said: Counting rules cannot be changed in the middle of vote counting.

On the contrary, I know well what it said. And it didn’t say that. OTOH, it did say pretty much what I said. The proper plaintiff in an equal protection claim is the person whose rights were violated. That wasn’t Dubya (who wasn’t even a Florida voter who might plausibly have claimed vote dilution or some such nonsense). But the decision was to terminate the recount and thus leave the hundreds of legal but uncounted ballots uncounted, thus making sure that votes would be counted differently in different counties (some had done manual recounts under court order, but others [in Republican-leaning areas] had done their own “stealth” manual recounts, and others had no manual recount done at all). After much hand-waving about “equal protection” and how it was such a travesty that different ballots might possibly be treated differently, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a halt to the effort to remedy this with a statewide recount, and ordered that the unequal treatment be allowed to stand. IOW, their “remedy” was to produce the very situation they railed about in Part I of their cowardly and dishonest per curiam opinion.

Cheers,

But again, we run into the issue of whether our system should be arranged around allowing those without jobs or assets to vote conveniently. I’m not terribly sympathetic to the argument that those who have made such a mess of their lives they have no ID nor a convenient way to acquire an ID should have the luxury of a voting system arranged around their needs.

Perhaps you are right, such a system would be preferable to what we have now.

As I understand it, our current Republic is not organized on that principle, but rather on the principle that a homeless man’s right to vote is equal to mine.