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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

#651

Post by claytongulick »

hef19898 wrote: post #414
telotortium wrote: post #397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Obviously you should only be able to get a mail-in ballot if you request it. But I live in California, and ballots are mailed out to all registered voters. While convenient, it's bonkers to do it at all, let alone in any state that, unlike California, has close elections.

I still fail to understand why the US has such a hard time figuring out the simolest of things: elections, healthcare, gun control... I mean almost all developed countries did figure those out ages ago. EDIT: Thinking of it, I'll add policing to the list. Made worse by the fact that even dictatorships solved it better then the US, totalitarian regimes tend to have better rules and control over law enforcement resulti…

Yet, it's weird how the U.S. is doing pretty well overall.

Maybe it's luck?

Or maybe something to do with the prescience of several men who laid out a framework for federalism and distributed power with clear checks and balances, ensuring resilience and the longest running constitutional democracy in the world [1], understanding that reasonable people can disagree and that the most effective form of governance is a non-centralized distributed system that serves the needs of state citizens first.

Or it could be all the corn. [2]

[1] https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2011/aug/08/jon-huntsm...

[2] https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets-economy/090316...

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

#652

Post by soheil »

tptacek wrote: post #365
subsubzero wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right, you can't make people up, but this has happened throughout history by unscrupulous actors using either very old people or dead people and "casting votes" in their name for certain candidates. I remember seeing a few examples of this firsthand on twitter in MI where a candidate was over 100 years old(and was dead) and voted!

I'm not sure how this attack even works. You can't make up dead people; you have to know who the dead people are. You can't cast votes for random dead people; they have to be dead people from the precinct you're EJ'ing . I buy that you could get 1-2 votes cast this way, but not how you could cast a material number of them. Meanwhile, getting caught just casting 1 such vote is a guaranteed prison sentence. You can't h…

Why are you so incredulous about this topic? The OP linked two sources showing that it did clearly happen:

https://www.clickondetroit.com/news/2020/11/05/did-a-dead-11...

https://www.bbc.com/news/election-us-2020-54874120

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

#653

Post by claytongulick »

girvo wrote: post #501
LAC-Tech wrote: post #495

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, every other country outside the US is the best at everything. That's why every American is desperate to make a better life for themselves in the EU, Australia, New Zealand and Canada while the reverse almost never happens.

You’re right, the reverse, ie “every Australian (etc)” wanting to make a better life for themselves in the US does never happen. You can’t start your topic broad “every American” and then use the much less broad amount of immigrants to “prove” your point. Because “every American” means I can’t bring up the non-zero amount of Americans that do emigrate elsewhere. Your entire argument is in bad faith.

Bad faith?

Seemed like a tongue-in-cheek quip to demonstrate that there are a lot more folks in the world who are trying to come to the U.S. than the opposite, which as far as I know is pretty true.

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

#655

Post by Izkata »

rootusrootus wrote: post #636
Izkata wrote: post #568

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet it didn't when tons of people were told that in the 2020 election. Two examples from a quick search: https://nypost.com/2020/11/03/houston-woman-turned-away-from... https://abc11.com/nc-vote-provisional-ballot-voter-already-v...

I guess it depends on how literal "all hell will break loose" is defined :). It was worth a story in the news, which is significant. How many of those does it take before it becomes a national headline? Way before we get to enough votes to matter. Imagine in either location it was, say, a dozen people saying that? There'd be calls to invalidate the election results in those areas and redo.

From the second link:

> North Carolina State Board of Elections data shows more than 2,600 voters cast provisional ballots during early voting this year. Around 19% of ballots cast were due to voters--like Prince--who were told they already voted.

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

#656

Post by saghm »

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…

>You can't just make people up! Every vote is tied to a specific registration. We do same-day registration, but those votes are cast provisionally, with a paper log; there aren't many of them, and they can all be set aside and audited after-the-fact.

> You certainly can't just make up a final tally. The numbers from the individual voting machines and the paper ballots have to match up; we had to stay an extra 2 hours after the polls closed last time I did this (in 2020) because of an equipment screwup that kept us from doing the final certified count/reconciliation.

Honest question: what if the final count _didn't_ match, or people _were_ made up? If all of the judges were corrupt, and they gave a false count, whose job would it be to step in and fix it? The police? The current (potentially lame duck) government? Ideally the regulations would be enough of a disincentive that no one would risk it, but if the set of people who finalize the counts blatantly lie, who has the authority to overturn them? And what's stopping that authority itself from being bribed to overturn legitimate results?

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

#657

Post by tptacek »

Izkata wrote: post #566
tptacek wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't just make people up. They need to have the name and address of the registered voter who's voting. They can't just re-vote at the same precinct. The EJs will absolutely notice a person coming in and voting more than once. If that gets noticed a single time , the EJ calls the sheriff (in Cook County, at least). It takes, like, best case, 10-15 minutes to vote in a precinct. There are lines! How many votes ca…

> They can't just make people up. They need to have the name and address of the registered voter who's voting. To quote further up: > 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. And: > They can't just re-vote at the same precinct. The EJs will absolutely notice a person coming in and voting more than once. I…

There isn't one election judge. There's a team of 4-5 of them.

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

#658

Post by krapp »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #649
dahfizz wrote: post #592

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

I can’t tell if this is a joke. Is that really a Democrat position? I feel like there must be a “quiet part” no one is saying out loud, because it makes no sense to me.

The "quiet part" is the US' long history of using ID requirements and other tactics to suppress and disenfranchise black and other minority voting[0,1], especially in the South, for example in North Carolina[1] and Texas[2], going all the way back to poll taxes[3].

If considered in a vacuum, completely absent the context of historical precedent, voter IDs seem like a simple common sense solution to the (practically nonexistent) problem of voter fraud. Unfortunately, we are talking about the US, and it's simply not possible to assume good faith.

[0]https://time.com/5855885/voter-registration-history-race/

[1]https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/new-...

[2]https://www.npr.org/2021/09/17/1038354159/n-c-judges-strike-...

[3]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poll_taxes_in_the_United_State...

[4]https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/22/politics/ted-cruz-texas-voter...

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

#659

Post by l33t2328 »

saghm wrote: post #656
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…

>You can't just make people up! Every vote is tied to a specific registration. We do same-day registration, but those votes are cast provisionally, with a paper log; there aren't many of them, and they can all be set aside and audited after-the-fact. > You certainly can't just make up a final tally. The numbers from the individual voting machines and the paper ballots have to match up; we had to stay an extra 2 hours…

What if all the citizens are bribed to vote for someone else?

Really, all these systems rely on humans so they have inherent weaknesses.

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

#660

Post by claytongulick »

JoBrad wrote: post #576
rootusrootus wrote: post #527

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I meant brown people, but I expect you know that. Give the FEC the power to issue photo ID for voting. Legislate that it is only valid for that purpose and any other use is illegal. Send out census-style teams to track down every citizen and issue them a card, free of charge. Of course, there are all sorts of problems with this that are entirely self-inflicted. Someone will oppose a national ID, even if we already ha…

Please - we don’t need another single-purpose ID card. Why not just make a single ID card that all privileges that are recognized in all 50 states can be added to? Driver’s license classes, concealed carry, voting, security clearance, donor preferences, etc. everyone has to get a new one every 4 years, and there’s an electronic record for verification of basic info like photo and name when internet access is availabl…

Because this is not a power granted to the federal government, it is reserved for the states.

IANAL, but I believe that something like this would require a constitutional amendment, unless it could be squeezed in under the umbrella of the ICC like most other federal overreach laws.

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