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Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

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Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#301

Post by darawk »

tptacek wrote: post #194

It's weird that you can bribe individual EJ's in Philadelphia like this. In Chicagoland, every polling place has a team of 4-5 judges, and they all have to sign off on the final election result, and all the procedural steps that arrive at that number; every individual vote is recorded in the pollbook. I don't even know how you'd generate fake votes in the first place, even if you bought off all 4 EJs. You can't just…

> Myers acknowledged in court that on almost every Election Day, Myers transported Beren to the polling station to open the polls. During the drive to the polling station, Myers would advise Beren which candidates he was supporting so that Beren knew which candidates should be receiving fraudulent votes. Inside the polling place and while the polls were open, Beren would advise actual in-person voters to support Myers’ candidates and also cast fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates on behalf of voters she knew would not or did not physically appear at the polls.

> Beren and her accomplices from the Board of Elections would then falsify the polling books and the List of Voters and Party Enrollment for the 39th Ward, 2nd Division, by recording the names, party affiliation, and order of appearances for voters who had not physically appeared at the polling station to cast his or her ballot in the election. Beren took pains to ensure that the number of ballots cast on the machines was a reflection of the number of voters signed into the polling books and the List of Voters. After the polls closed on Election Day, Beren and her associates would falsely certify the results.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#302

Post by lp0_on_fire »

the_snooze wrote: post #273
hammock wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It would have taken roughly 80k votes to switch the 2016 election from Trump to Clinton. However people had no idea of that beforehand. What if they paused ballot counting on the night of Election Day, assessed how many votes they needed, and worked overnight to get the votes needed, reporting new totals the next day? Wouldn’t that solve the issue you raise here?

Election returns centers have a lot of people in it. You'd need a pretty sizeable conspiracy to carry out an attack you describe. At the very least, such a conspiracy would produce some kind of written communications or financial transactions. You'd need pretty good coordination to pull it off, and people are neither psychic nor capable of playing verbal "telephone" at scale.

> Election returns centers have a lot of people in it.

In Philly they barred GOP poll watchers from observing the process and they (GOP) had to get a court order to force the center to allow them in...so all it takes is a few partisans at the top of the food chain.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#303

Post by jnosCo »

tastyfreeze wrote: post #170
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a lot of progressives would be in favor of voter ID laws if you could ensure it was reasonable for every eligible voter to get their ID. That isn't usually what happens though. Here in Wisconsin when the republican party tried it, their solution to the problem was to make people show up to the DMV and fill out forms for their free ID, then they proceeded to close a bunch of DMVs, conveniently in areas likely…

Isn't it possible that closing DMVs had absolutely nothing to do with voting? Alaska, for example, has been restricting services provided by DMVs to cut back on spending. Democrats have claimed an inability for some to get IDs as a wedge every time voter ID is proposed. Often the claim is that minorities aren't able to get an ID. What a condescending statement. Everybody that wants an ID has an ID. ID is required for…

> Skin color certainly is not a factor on ability to get an ID.

  "GAO compared turnout in two states—Kansas and Tennessee—that changed ID requirements from the 2008 to 2012 general elections with turnout in fourselected states—Alabama, Arkansas, Delaware, and Maine—that did not. GAO used a quasi-experimental approach, a type of policy evaluation that compares how an outcome changes over time in a treatment groupthat adopted a new policy, to a comparison group that did not make the same change. GAO selected states for evaluation that did not have other factors in their election environments that also may have affected turnout, such as significant changes to other election laws. GAO analyzed three sources of turnout data for the 2008 and 2012 general elections: (1) data on eligible voters, using official voter records compiled by the United States Elections Project at George Mason University, (2) data on registered voters, using state voter databases that were cleaned by a vendor through data-matching procedures to remove voters who had died or moved, and (3) data on registered voters, as reported to the Current Population Survey conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. [...]
GAO also estimated changes in turnout among subpopulations of registrants in Kansas and Tennessee according to their age, length of voter registration, and race or ethnicity. In both Kansas and Tennessee, compared with the four comparison states, GAO found that turnout was reduced by larger amounts:

among registrants, as of 2008, between the ages of 18 and 23 than among registrants between the ages of 44 and 53;

among registrants who had been registered less than 1 year than among registrants who had been registered 20 years or more; and

*among African-American registrants than among White, Asian-American, and Hispanic registrants. GAO did not find consistent reductions in turnout among Asian-American or Hispanic registrants compared to White registrants, thus suggesting that the laws did not have larger effects among these subgroups."

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-14-634

I'd like to see a more recent study, but analysis shows voter ID law impacting

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#304

Post by wolverine876 »

rayiner wrote: post #30

Americans have a really tough time with the notion of materiality. America is such a big country that, as a matter of statistics, anything that can happen is happening. That doesn’t mean it happens often enough to call into question our basic systems. In this case it’s the right that fails to grasp materiality. Yes, people vote illegally, ballot boxes get stuffed, their is collusion, etc. No, it doesn’t happen often…

> a few isolated instances of innocent people being falsely convicted

And otherwise abused by the legal system. It's not a few isolated instances; plenty of research shows that it is widespread and systematic.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#305

Post by hammock »

the_snooze wrote: post #273
hammock wrote: post #223

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It would have taken roughly 80k votes to switch the 2016 election from Trump to Clinton. However people had no idea of that beforehand. What if they paused ballot counting on the night of Election Day, assessed how many votes they needed, and worked overnight to get the votes needed, reporting new totals the next day? Wouldn’t that solve the issue you raise here?

Election returns centers have a lot of people in it. You'd need a pretty sizeable conspiracy to carry out an attack you describe. At the very least, such a conspiracy would produce some kind of written communications or financial transactions. You'd need pretty good coordination to pull it off, and people are neither psychic nor capable of playing verbal "telephone" at scale.

>such a conspiracy would produce some kind of written communications or financial transactions.

How would we ever know if those exist?

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#306

Post by upsidesinclude »

hef19898 wrote: post #281
nostromo wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's two steps to the process: Step one, check the signature, the voter roles, and remove the envelope. Throw the ballot into the bin to be counted. Step two, count the ballot. This ballot now has no identifiable information on it at all. There's no way to verify that a person's ballot was correctly tallied. So if you wanted to ballot stuff, you could do so prior to step two. Recounts wouldn't identify fraud, you'…

And still this never happened in any other democratic country doing paper ballots. Simple reason: If there are more votes in the ballot box then registered voters (ideally this means everyone above voting and eligible to vote) you know someone tempered the ballot box. And having more than one (where I live I'm always puzzled how they find the hundreds of people to monitor the dozens of polling places since we have at…

You find a bunch of people that can't or wouldn't vote and collect their automatically mailed ballots, fill them out and have them dropped off in boxes.

That's one way to illegally harvest votes. One that almost certainly occurred in nursing homes around the country in the last election.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#308

Post by WillPostForFood »

rayiner wrote: post #30

Americans have a really tough time with the notion of materiality. America is such a big country that, as a matter of statistics, anything that can happen is happening. That doesn’t mean it happens often enough to call into question our basic systems. In this case it’s the right that fails to grasp materiality. Yes, people vote illegally, ballot boxes get stuffed, their is collusion, etc. No, it doesn’t happen often…

Take Florida in 2000, population 16 million. Assume no fraud at the presidential level, but even a tiny amount of fraud in local city/county races could have tipped the Presidential count one way or the other. With 6 million votes cast, it seems likely that there were 600 fraudulent votes in the state. TLDR; even a very small amount of fraud can have world changing consequences.

Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges

#309

Post by Georgelemental »

mulmen wrote: post #72
systemvoltage wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For some reason progressives are against voter ID laws. I've said that before and will say it again: Most of EU requires ID to vote. I will support Republicans that want to do this. It is sad to bring EU in the picture to convince progressives but it is a magic word that somehow brings logic and reason. We shouldn't have to say "They do it in EU, so it must be good". People have stopped thinking for themselves. Anyth…

> For some reason progressives are against voter ID laws. It’s a barrier preventing citizens from exercising constitutional rights. The need isn’t clearly demonstrated to justify the restriction. Voter ID laws have different outcomes based on economic status. It’s especially difficult for poor people to exercise their rights. > People have stopped thinking for themselves. Or maybe someone else thought of something yo…

> It’s a barrier preventing citizens from exercising constitutional rights.

No, election fraud enabled by lack of voter ID is a barrier that prevents eligible voters from fully exercising their constitutional right to the franchise by diluting the power of their legitimate votes with fraudulent ones.

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