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Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
321–330 of 889 posts
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#322Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn't hack the machine. They actually voted on the machines multiple times. The same scheme would have worked with mechanical machines or paper ballots.
I know for a fact that where I vote it is impossible to vote more than once (or close to, Berlin managed to fuck up voting last year for some reason). How is it impossible? Everyone is centrally registered with their primary residence. Based on these records, invitations are sent out prior to elections. With that invitation, or passport or ID, you show up at your voting local (of which there are plenty, the school ju…
> With that invitation, or passport or ID
Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US. It’s OK if you didn’t know that, lots of people from other countries are dumbfounded to learn that all you have to do in the US is show up and give the poll workers the name of a registered voter in order to vote.*
* Well, in some states you have to show ID. But one political party in particular fights very hard against this requirement.
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#323Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand the us v them mentality. I have lots of right wing friends and family and many of them have been against electronic voting from the beginning. For example, in my home state of oregon, many right wingers are against vote by mail and have been since oregon became the first state to go fully vote by mail. These issues are not so binary as you're making them out to be, and I think everyone would do wel…
I'll agree, our elections are shit. They're designed that way so that interested and connected individuals can manipulate them. The most successful ways of doing so are the time honored traditions of gerrymandering and voter suppression. My problem with a lot of popular right-wing complaints are that they are rarely directed at those things, they're directed at things like vote by mail which helps alleviate the latte…
> vote by mail which helps alleviate the latter while, as far as I can tell, not being significantly worse than voting in person for security.
How anyone could state this with any particular confidence is beyond me. The truth is, when someone votes by mail, you have no idea who filled in the ballot. How could anyone possibly collect metrics? No one can possibly say what's going on, unless you trust the populace at large, which not everyone does. Many countries have systems for dealing with this. In many countries, they ink your finger to indicate you voted. Why not just do that at physical polling stations.
Honestly, mail-in ballots are very difficult for me. They get mailed to you, and by the time I finally have a chance to sit down, I often have to go searching for where it went / whether my toddler put it somewhere. On the other hand, when I voted in person, I would just go to the polling booth in the morning and be done. Super easy. I don't understand the desire for pure vote by mail.
One year, I didn't even receive my ballot, and it was difficult to get a replacement. Whereas, when I lived in CA, it didn't matter. You show up to the polling station (which is conspicuously noted), and just vote.
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#324Earlier quoted context omitted.
They didn't hack the machine. They actually voted on the machines multiple times. The same scheme would have worked with mechanical machines or paper ballots.
I know for a fact that where I vote it is impossible to vote more than once (or close to, Berlin managed to fuck up voting last year for some reason). How is it impossible? Everyone is centrally registered with their primary residence. Based on these records, invitations are sent out prior to elections. With that invitation, or passport or ID, you show up at your voting local (of which there are plenty, the school ju…
How would it be "impossible" to vote more than once when the volunteers who are enforcing that have been paid off to allow it to happen? That's exactly what happened in this case.
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#325Earlier quoted context omitted.
As a non-American what's wrong with asking for voter ID? A particular party pushing for open border and waving voter ID requirement seems like a ploy to influence the election. I am open to hear how people can justify both of these policies at at the same time.
Nobody is pushing for an "open border" and the absence of a voter ID leading to fraud is just a dumb conspiracy theory promoted by people that are ignorant of how elections actually work. All voters need to be registered in the first place at which point they verify your identify, your ability to legally cast a ballot, and your address (falsely registering is a felony in most jurisdictions). On voting day, you show u…
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Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#326Earlier 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…
> Voter ID laws have different outcomes based on economic status. It’s especially difficult for poor people to exercise their rights.
Increasingly, Republicans are the party of the poor and Democrats the party of the rich. In the 2020 election, "the wealthiest parts of the country overwhelmingly voted for Biden and the poorest overwhelmingly for Trump". [0] In 2016, "the Republican Party won almost twice the share of votes in the nation’s most destitute counties — home to the poorest 10 percent of Americans — than it won in the richest". [1]
If voter ID requirements are all about suppressing the vote of the poor, does this mean that Democrats will start supporting them and Republicans start opposing them, now that the vote of the poor skews increasingly more Republican than Democratic? Or, could it be, that very many poor Americans have no trouble getting ID, and even support voter ID requirements?
Increasingly, even many poor minority voters vote Republican. Trump made significant gains in the 2020 election in Hispanic majority counties of southern Texas – which are also among the poorest areas in the state. [2]
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-the-2020-election-reveal...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/27/business/econ...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/02/28/republica...
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#327Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
The first step to processing mail ballots is checking that the signature matches the voter's known signature (usually submitted at the time of voter registration). Are you proposing a conspiracy where crooks are somehow forging hundreds (if not thousands) of signatures? And there's no paper trail of communications or money changing hands to coordinate it all?
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#328Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not about us vs them. People are labeled "right wing" when they ask questions, regardless of their political affiliation. I think that's wrong.
That isn’t true. People are labeled right wing when they’re regurgitating Tucker Carlson and “just asking the questions” in bad faith. There’s asking questions with the intent of answering them in good faith, and there’s asking questions to generate fud in bad faith. The Republican playbook and talking points right now are to generate fud. That’s why every Republican tries to stuff “fraud”, “radical”, “far left” etc…
> regurgitating Tucker Carlson and “just asking the questions” in bad faith
In my experience, non-conservatives tend to believe conservatives are 'regurgitating' Tucker Carlson. Most of Carlson's audience are actually democrats. Polls show that most conservatives distrust fox news. And the whole 'bad faith' thing is a way to dismiss people. You shouldn't every think that what people are telling you is in bad faith. If you think that what someone is telling you is so preposterous as to not possibly be in good faith, perhaps you need to recalibrate as to what is normal.
> And it just so happens that turnout is negatively correlated with republican election victories.
This is increasingly not true. The democrats have kind of maxed out on their voter turnout. It turns out that they mainly have voter turnout efforts for people who will vote democrat. They've ignored the non-democrats (not their fault of course), and these are the bulk of the people who don't vote. Several South Texas districts for example have seen higher turnout amongst formerly non-voting Hispanics, and most of these are new GOP voters.
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#329Americans 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…
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>Multiple pieces of analysis
Cough them up, then.
Re: Former U.S. congressman, operative pleads guilty to election fraud charges
#330Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that the progressive default argument on this topic is pretty transparent BS. If it's too hard for some people to get an ID, make it easier for everyone to get an ID. Don't open up elections to an obvious fraud vector.
The Republicans aren't interested in ensuring IDs are easy & free to get as part of their voter ID bills, because it defeats the purpose of why they're so enthusiastic for this to begin with. Democrats don't trust anything short of very concrete and explicit measures in that regard, for fear that the rug will be pulled later, similar to polling-place distribution/availability issues in some places. Standard, universa…
Can you name a single state with voter id laws on the books that does not offer a free form of ID suitable to vote? Reminder: a _drivers license_ and state-issued ID are _not_ one and the same.