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Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

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Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would take a Constitutional Amendment to get rid of the Electoral College. That’s 2/3rd of both houses of Congress and 2/3rds of the State legislatures. Better to call a third Constitutional Convention.

The unfortunate irony is that 2/3 of state legislatures will never vote to abolish the electoral college in favor of the popular vote, because a vast majority of states get relatively more voting power than they would with the popular vote, since every state gets a minimum of 3 electoral votes no matter how small their population is. This comes at the expense of the few most populous states (e.g. California), which a…

If the electoral college did go away, I wonder if it would end up actually increasing the animosity between the coasts and 'fly over country'. Fair or not, the current system does appear to serve as a bit of a pressure relief valve. Allowing things to escalate to the level where the urban/rural divide becomes so great that one or both sides decides it's time to break the country apart is unlikely to have a better outcome than the last time we arrived at this point, even if on a different path and for different reasons.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#122
post #115
post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your own links say that it happens, but then hand wave it away as not significant. Your [1]: >However, in only 26 cases was there a conviction or a guilty plea by the citizen. From your [2]: >n the state of Washington, for example, six cases of double voting and nineteen instances of individuals voting in the name of the dead yielded twenty-five fraudulent votes From your [3]: >Although Republican activists have repe…

Washington uses mail-in ballots. Obviously, filling in, and mailing a ballot for a dead, comatose, or absentee relative is possible. When we're talking about voter disenfranchisement, though, we're not talking about mail-in ballots. We're talking about people showing up at polling stations, and being unable to vote.

>When we're talking about voter disenfranchisement, though, we're not talking about mail-in ballots. We're talking about people showing up at polling stations, and being unable to vote.

A counted ballot cast by an ineligible voter disenfranchises a eligible voter. How is that less of an issue than preventing someone from casting a ballot in the first place? If the second is a concern then the first should be also.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I remember the outrage when the original Diebold hacking announcement was made in the Bush Jr era. The concerns in that were never addressed and doubtless things have simply since got worse. If Google, Facebook et al wanted to make amends for biasing the election, they could bring some of their engineering prowess to bear on defeating systematic voting machine fraud.

> engineering prowess to bear on defeating systematic voting machine fraud Simple, don't use fancy electronic voting machines. There's really no benefit.

That isn't a systemic solution and this is a systemic problem.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#124
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most countries have centralised voter registration Most democracies haven't lasted more than a century. De-centralisation is an annoying but core feature of American democracy. It's wise to be conservative when discussing its dismissal, particularly in respect of something as fundamental as voting.

Was America actually a democracy prior to the voting rights act of 1965? (Not trolling, this is a critical part of the issue, the extent to which black people could actually participate in said democracy)

Since you’re asking a reasonable question...

the probable answer is somewhere around 85% “yes”. And about 15% “f$&@ no!”

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#125
post #4

This is a crime. The power to unregister voters must be forcibly taken away from states; especially red states, since they are the only ones abusing this power. It should require federal action, instead.

You do realize that every time a person moves from one state to another that they need to be removed from the voting rolls of the prior state, right?

Honest question, as I’m not sure where you’re headed with this.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#126
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Washington uses mail-in ballots. Obviously, filling in, and mailing a ballot for a dead, comatose, or absentee relative is possible. When we're talking about voter disenfranchisement, though, we're not talking about mail-in ballots. We're talking about people showing up at polling stations, and being unable to vote.

>When we're talking about voter disenfranchisement, though, we're not talking about mail-in ballots. We're talking about people showing up at polling stations, and being unable to vote. A counted ballot cast by an ineligible voter disenfranchises a eligible voter. How is that less of an issue than preventing someone from casting a ballot in the first place? If the second is a concern then the first should be also.

It's not an issue.

People passing laws that disenfranchise voters aren't doing it in states with mail-in ballots.

Your examples of voter fraud are in a mail-in ballot state. Please provide equivalent, widespread, impactfull, examples in an in-person voting state. You won't because you can't.

Never mind that adding an extra vote to a voting pool does not have the same effect as denying a person the right to vote. Stealing half a penny from a million people is not viewed the same as stealing $5,000 from one person. Perhaps it should be, but its not.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#127
post #113
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You claim that there are a significant number of fraudulent votes happening. If you mean "significant" in the sense of large, then no I did not. If you mean "significant" in the sense of meaningful, then I assert that even one illegal vote cast is significant as it disenfranchises a legitimate voter. One group has found that between 2011 and 2017, 1852 ballots were cast by illegal aliens in Virginia.[1] 1: https://…

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, which you cited, is a right-wing crank group. https://www.mediamatters.org/research/2017/06/07/right-wing-...

Your media matters link doesn't provide an academic work showing that the cited statistic is incorrect. The closest it comes to doing so is by linking a paper by the Brennan Center which says in a footnote that the PILF report uses an unreliable methodology. That's about what you can expect from a left-wing advocacy group.

Here is the footnote in full:

>See, e.g., Public Interest Legal Foundation, Alien Invasion in Virginia, 2016, https://publicinterestlegal.org/ files/Report_Alien-Invasion-in-Virginia.pdf; Public Interest Legal Foundation, Aliens & Felons, 2016, https://publicinterestlegal.org/files/Philadelphia-Litigatio.... Despite using unreliable methodology, these reports, authored by an organization that promotes the myth of widespread voter fraud, identified few noncitizens on the rolls.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#128
post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It should require federal action Shooting from the hip is a good way to trash a democracy. What you're proposing would allow a single, centralized actor to purge voters from the rolls. De-centralised systems will always have longer, more-idiotic tails. That's the tradeoff for their robust central tendencies.

Software means one idiot's algorithm can quickly become every idiot's algorithm. That said, the urge to federalize everything is troublesome. Democrats want to protect Alabamians from Alabama, but who's gonna protect us when Alabama takes over the federal government? De-centralization at the very least makes it easier to fix mistakes piecemeal, even if it doesn't prevent everybody from making the same mistake.

One benefit of the electoral college is that it compartmentalizes voter fraud to the state in which it happens. If I'm a corrupt election official in a state that is going to give a presidential candidate a large margin of victory, I have no incentive to risk being caught manipulating vote tallies (for president). If we ever switch to using the national popular vote instead, think we'd see lots of cases of local officials trying to 'save the country' by offsetting votes from other states that vote primarily for another candidate.

Re: Indiana Purging Voters Using Software That’s 99% Inaccurate

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> engineering prowess to bear on defeating systematic voting machine fraud Simple, don't use fancy electronic voting machines. There's really no benefit.

That isn't a systemic solution and this is a systemic problem.

It's not a "the engineering isn't sufficiently sophisticated and cutting edge" problem.
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