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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

#381

Post by maxerickson »

rayiner wrote: post #44
Animats wrote: post #36

This was done by adding votes. The voter counts of poll watchers should not have matched those of the election officials. Why wasn't that noticed?

I would assume that, in a large city, those counts are routinely wrong and mismatches are ignored. If I try to count even a few dozen items twice in a row, I’d be lucky to get the same count twice. I can’t imagine poll counts are better.

If you have to do it, you can get a little counter doo-dad where you press a button and it adds 1.

https://www.forestry-suppliers.com/product_pages/products.ph...

The flight attendant definitely counted like 3 times on a recent flight I was on though.

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

#382

Post by mulmen »

skissane wrote: post #326
mulmen wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Or maybe the Republicans are better at voter suppression and that's why you don't see the poor Democratic voters?

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

#383

Post by rdtsc »

> Beren would [...] 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. [...] If actual voter turnout was high, Beren would add fewer fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates.

Great, so now this gives extra credence to the "the election was stolen" narrative. Well, I mean it looks like in this case it had actually been stolen for years in that particular ward in Philly.

Hopefully one day we can have paper trails, IDs, registration records matching and so on. We can fly satellites beyond the solar system, but managing voting integrity of a few hundred million people is seemingly unsurmountable problem. Every single election it's an endless tirade of debates afterwards that it was stolen or not stolen and so on. This is stuff that even poorer countries with even more people seem to manage.

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

#384

Post by ModernMech »

xienze wrote: post #322
hef19898 wrote: post #266

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ve…

> Well you see, having to show ID to vote is considered racist in the US.

This is not the argument people are making, so I hope you aren’t making it intentionally. No one is saying that requiring voting id is inherently racist.

The argument is that requiring voting id without a commensurate effort to make sure everyone has voter id ends up disproportionately affecting minorities. These efforts are subsequently dubbed racist by political opponents because the people implementing them know this to be true and do it anyway, because they prefer the outcome that minorities are disenfranchised.

Republicans have been found in court to play these tricks with “surgical precision”, to make sure the rules they come up with impact minorities more than whites.

Another example is closing polling places so that it takes 8 hours to vote in black precincts whereas it takes 8 minutes to vote in white precincts. Yes, the act of closing a polling place is not an overtly racist thing to do. But the way in which it’s done and the actual impact make clear it is done with the intent of disenfranchising minorities.

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

#385

Post by Maursault »

AndyMcConachie wrote: post #236

This guy's name is Michael Myers. Not to be confused with Mike Myers of Austin Power's fame.

Michael Myers was the murderously insane Halloween character.

Also, the indicted former politician is 79 years young.

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

#386

Post by mindslight »

rayiner wrote: post #336
mindslight wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with your basic point, and it certainly applies to both political tribes. However, > a few isolated instances of innocent people being falsely convicted or forced to plead guilty as proof that such errors are pervasive and undermine the integrity of the justice system The justice system does not operate on a best effort "good enough" basis. When the "justice" system harms an innocent person, it takes on the e…

All human systems operate on a “good enough” basis. You can tweak the knobs to trade off false positives versus false negatives in whatever balance is politically viable. But there will always be false positives, and in such a huge country even a systematically low false positive rate will generate many outrage-inducing stories of injustice. Both election results and criminal verdicts are, and should be seen as, stat…

Just focusing on error rates leaves out the details by which false positives are created, which are very important to everyone's individual sense of justice.

For example, one of your examples was "forced to plead guilty". The word "forced" implies something else responsible for the erroneous outcome. Rather than merely saying that was a "false positive" that could be tuned, we should focus on that specific thing responsible - if it was the system's high-stakes dynamics depriving a person of their right to a trial, then those dynamics need to be reformed. If it was a bad faith prosecutor/cops pushing falsities to get a baseless conviction, then they need to be criminally prosecuted for abusing the power of the state to suit their own personal ends.

Everybody knows that bad things do occasionally happen. The outrage isn't merely due to the initial miscarriage of justice, rather it's the nonchalance of the entrenched system shrugging it off rather than reifying and prosecuting its own crimes.

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

#387

Post by tptacek »

dionian wrote: post #380
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…

Quoted post unavailable.

This would be a more credible claim if "certain people in DC" had any control over the voter rolls; they don't, because voting policy is delegated to the states.

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

#388

Post by hitovst »

rdtsc wrote: post #383

> Beren would [...] 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. [...] If actual voter turnout was high, Beren would add fewer fraudulent votes in support of Myers’ preferred candidates. Great, so now this gives extra credence to the "the election was stolen" narrative. Well, I mean it looks like in this case it had a…

As long as liars can claim that everything they oppose is bigoted, and adults listen to them, your hopes won't be recognized.

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

#389

Post by maerF0x0 »

slg wrote: post #356
maerF0x0 wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

unsure the exact math here, but certainty isn't the required bar for an investment, just positive EROI .

I wasn't addressing a question of whether election fraud happens or the motivation for it. I was specifically criticizing the idea that "changing the outcome of a Presidential election" is possible without a "sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign". The EROI doesn't matter in that context because the goal is a singular binary event. It either was enough to sway the election and it qualifies for this discussion or it was…

If the EROI is high enough you try it prior to knowing the outcome. Because there is a curve of investment that eats into the Return portion of the equation, they should push up the number of votes (cost) until they hit their desired (cost of capital + profit margin). That is the rational way to act at least.

If someone says to you pay $1 to have a 75% chance at $2. you definitely should take it. It's the same with millions of dollars or billions of dollars.

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

#390

Post by systemvoltage »

shadowgovt wrote: post #151
systemvoltage wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So instead of opposing the entire idea of voter IDs, why do we not pass a Federal law that makes getting an ID free of charge? Seems like that's the root cause or the main contention.

There's a big can of worms here. The thumbnail sketch is "Americans have some (as viewed from outside the US) odd and severe hangups about being tracked by the government that is, ostensibly, theirs." Reasons range from the practical / legal ones listed by the ACLU ( https://www.aclu.org/other/5-problems-national-id-cards ) to a small-but-vocal subset of voters who actually believe (because so much of the US is desce…

No, I meant, passing a law that says "$0 for all state IDs". Not talking about National ID.
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