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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

#421

Post by mod »

pvg wrote: post #127
jaywalk wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> No, it doesn’t happen often enough to undermine the integrity of elections in the aggregate. Ridiculous to just throw this out as if it's a concrete fact. Even changing the outcome of a Presidential election doesn't require any kind of sweeping, nationwide fraud campaign. Just enough well-placed ones where the vote will be close enough that the fraud doesn't have to be too large. I'm not saying it has or hasn't hap…

Ridiculous to just throw this out as if it's a concrete fact. It appears to be a concrete fact this fraud did not change the outcome in any election. The scrutiny also goes way up as you move up hierarchy of election importance.

I don't think concrete facts are generally arrived upon by appearances. I consider your first sentence self-contradicting.

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

#422

Post by dreamcompiler »

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…

Chicago invented sophisticated election fraud 100 years ago. It may be the case that recent Chicago administrations decided they didn't want to continue to be known as the worst place in the US for honest elections.

https://blockclubchicago.org/2018/10/24/chicago-and-rigged-e...

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

#423

Post by tunesmith »

ModernMech wrote: post #384
xienze wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> But the way in which it’s done and the actual impact make clear it is done with the intent of disenfranchising minorities.

Which is racist.

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

#424

Post by LocalPCGuy »

upsidesinclude wrote: post #306
hef19898 wrote: post #281

Earlier 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.

And doing that on any kind of scale will undoubtedly end with the perpetrator in jail for voter fraud. It's easy to speculate about how, it's a lot harder to do it in a way that gets away with it without leaving a trail that eventually catches up with them.

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

#425

Post by tamaharbor »

hammock wrote: post #216
daenz wrote: post #31

They make it sound so simple: Bribe the Judge of Elections who oversees everything. Dilute the vote tallies by using the voting machines to increment the votes for specific candidates. Certify that the fake results are correct. Lie if anybody asks. This person did this with 2 separate judges. Why is it so easy?

Could it be widespread?

No post body was provided.

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

#426

Post by CircleSpokes »

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…

>Hopefully one day we can have paper trails, IDs, registration records matching and so on.

You understand this happened right..? The extra votes weren't just ballots stuffed into a ballot box. The numbers of ballots matched the turn out numbers. They specifically used registered voters who they knew wouldn't be voting in this specific election. The issue was the people who check registration, ID, etc were in on the scam.

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

#427

Post by mistermann »

LocalPCGuy wrote: post #413
mmcgaha wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let me google that for you: https://detroit.cbslocal.com/2022/02/24/macomb-county-nursin... https://hotair.com/jazz-shaw/2020/11/12/texas-nursing-home-w... https://www.apr.org/2007-07-13/two-charged-with-voter-fraud-... https://ktla.com/news/nationworld/4th-resident-of-villages-f... https://www.tmj4.com/news/local-news/wisconsin-sheriff-wants... https://www.inquirer.com/philly/news/vote-fraud-election-sen...

All told those cases total less than 200 votes. No one (edit: to be clear - no reasonable folk) claims fraud doesn't happen. Just not on the scale that has been claimed at times, and not enough to tip an election with millions of votes. Could a coordinated attack swing a local race, maybe. But as seen by the links you provided, there are people watching for these kinds of fraud, and people get caught all the time, ev…

> No one claims fraud doesn't happen.

False. I've encountered easily thousands of people who make such claims on the internet.

You might then say "No officials make such claims" - here you're technically correct, but somewhat misinformative: the people in such situations have public relations professionals at their disposal, and also tend to have years of experience (or at least observation) of how to do PR.

When election fraud is discussed, they choose their words carefully, opting to discuss not election fraud, but massive election fraud.

If the topic was other than this one (if "the shoe was on the other foot" so to speak), I don't think these things would be hard to notice...but, human psychology is what it is, so here we are.

> But as seen by the links you provided, there are people watching for these kinds of fraud, and people get caught all the time, even when it's just a single extra vote, much less enough to actually make a difference.

This is speculation, stated in the form of a fact - this, combined with the topic, may cause readers to form a belief that it is necessarily factual.

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

#428

Post by r00fus »

hef19898 wrote: post #269
unethical_ban wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Other than speeding up voting calculations, reducing paper usage, enabling arbitrary language use at the booth, and other things. If electronic fraud is a concern, we should mitigate it, because encryption, identity, and date integrity are solved problems. Furthermore, spot auditing and paper receipts/copies are a thing, or could be. (Also, voting may be "solved" but voting systems and universal access to the ballot…

Access to polling places has also been solved, including India where officials carry voting machines through the jungle for or only a handful of voters. And first past the goal post works, or rather can work. It is aggressive Gerrymandering, allocating senators by state and not population and the electoral college that screw it up in the US.

FPTP is a disaster. Even if you have perfectly representative elections, FPTP essentially disallows anything but 2 parties. This makes both parties more easily corruptible (less people to bribe if you're paying for specific result or legislation).

Multiple parties makes gaming elections much harder for moneyed interests.

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

#429

Post by mod »

roleplayer wrote: post #408
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…

> Great, so now this gives extra credence to the "the election was stolen" narrative. Did you look at the data at all? I am curious if you, individually, even looked at it at all even once

Did you think about the ramifications of the story at all? The data is totally irrelevant to whether or not this will bolster "stolen election" narratives for 99% of people who hear the story.

These things have an impact even if the data doesn't support the narrative.

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

#430

Post by mulmen »

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…

Voter fraud is a made up problem. It simply doesn't meaningfully exist. We already have guardrails on it. They work.

Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voter_suppression_in_the_Unite... for inspiration on how Voter ID laws could be used to suppress votes in a targeted manner.

There absolutely are people in the United States today who do not have government issued ID, do not want it, and still are and should be entitled to vote.

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