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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

#251

Post by anderskaseorg »

daenz wrote: post #207
anderskaseorg wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We already have a public list of people who voted. In order for a corrupt election official to undetectably add a large number of votes, they may need to add people to that list (perhaps registered voters who didn’t vote). Election transparency measures and audits might make that harder; voter restrictions do not.

Huh, the DoJ article didn't make it clear that they were using existing identities for the padded votes, only that they were incrementing tallies. From the way it is written, it sounds like they don't need any existing identities at all. Do you believe it impossible to accomplish what Michael Myers did without re-using existing identities?

I’m not sure of the details, but it seems in this case small numbers of votes were added in down-ballot contests, where there were likely sufficiently many voters who would have voted in the election but not in those contests.

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

#252

Post by BitwiseFool »

thepasswordis wrote: post #139

In case you were curious for more info about him: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Myers_(Pennsylvania_po... >Michael Joseph "Ozzie" Myers (born May 4, 1943) is an American politician who served in the United States House of Representatives from 1976 to 1980. A member of the Democratic Party, Myers became involved in the Abscam scandal during his tenure in Congress and was later expelled from the House of Repres…

No post body was provided.

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

#253

Post by corrral »

_-david-_ wrote: post #237
corrral wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Republicans do offer free IDs in every state where they mandate IDs for voting. It may not always be the easiest to get since you have to go to the DMV though. Do you think Democrats would be willing to have voter ID laws if the post office offered free IDs?

> Do you think Democrats would be willing to have voter ID laws if the post office offered free IDs?

Possibly. The Democrats' motivations aren't enabling voter fraud—they're driven by concern that these laws will disadvantage them at the polls for non-fraud-related reasons, and probably to some degree by not wanting to give the Republicans a "win" over something they see as political grandstanding without an actual, realized-in-the-world problem that it's addressing. If you can address enough of one or both of those, they'd probably at least not fight it very hard, if not support it.

[EDIT] I love that I have no idea which sort of person I've upset enough to get two downvotes on this. I truly have no clue. Seemed like a very neutral observation, to me, but I guess not.

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

#254

Post by tomrod »

Vladimof wrote: post #243
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…

> In Chicagoland, every polling place has a team of 4-5 judges, and they all have to sign off on the final election result but what if they are all from the same party?

Does political affiliation affect integrity somehow?

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

#255

Post by daenz »

guerrilla wrote: post #247
jokethrowaway wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very true. And that's why we should decentralise power to the most local entity we can (somewhere between a central government and the individual affected by a choice) and have as few elected officials as possible.

Indeed, confederations of liquid democracies. The only people to make a decision should be the ones effected by it.

Now try to define "affected" and that's where the war will be fought.

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

#256

Post by adamrezich »

vkou wrote: post #227
jjslocum3 wrote: post #114

Earlier 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.

> make it easier for everyone to get an ID. The same people that push for voter ID also make it difficult for everyone to get an ID. Those people also have a stranglehold on their state legislatures, and executive agencies that assign IDs. They also push for other laughably biased voting rules, like only allowing mail-in ballots from demographics that vote for them (65+). [1] It's not about fairness for them, it's ab…

does this notion solely come from people who live in states with ridiculous taxes on everything?

here in SD it just cost me somewhere around $22 to get my driver's license renewed. when I lived in WA I went to the DMV with a friend who had to get her license renewed one day and I said screw it I might as well get a WA license while I'm here. my jaw fell to the floor when, at the end of the process, they said it would cost me $80.

$22 is not hard for anyone to save, especially with all the generous welfare programs we have. if you're impoverished, you can easily get EBT to buy food, WIC to buy baby formula, and, here at least, Section 8 housing and other programs to get a place to live. no amount of "think of the poor people whom I've never met but assume exist somewhere despite me never interacting with them directly" will ever convince me that someone who really wants to vote can't save $22 to acquire a legal ID.

hell, if it's that big of a deal, then start some charity program to pay for people to get legal ID!

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

#257

Post by shadowgovt »

president wrote: post #179
mercy_dude wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Luckily, Justice Department and FBI will likely have no incentives for investigating that given how they actively positioned themselves in the political debate. So we may never find out.

There is no evidence of fraud because our institutions are unwilling to investigate allegations of fraud. If you ask why they aren't willing to investigate fraud, there's an excuse for that. Then, any attempt to audit or secure the election process is shot down with another excuse. Then you start to wonder, how long has this been happening for? No wonder there is zero confidence in this system - it's all corrupt. The…

Actually, there's plenty of evidence of fraud. This article is an announcement of the prosecution of some of it.

What's lacking is evidence of widespread fraud sufficiently coordinated and systemic to sway the results of a national Presidential election, which we aren't seeing because the system is already set up to monitor for it. 2020 wasn't the US's first time to the election roe-day-oh, and there's been 200 years of infrastructure put in place to detect and punish fraud, malfeasance, and attempts to infringe, dilute, or steal people's right to vote. That's why the claims one candidate made are extraordinary (and they failed to pass a smell test, much less bring actionable claims or evidence that would withstand legal scrutiny).

Most claims we see bandied about online are so risibly ignorant of the existing process that anyone with basic knowledge of how elections work does not take them seriously. They're equivalent in credibility and grasp of the system's machinery itself to saying foreign agents can compromise your computer by infiltrating the 1-bit.

To be clear: I'm excited that people are interested in the process (welcome to the club! There are literally t-shirts!). But I'm disheartened how many people come to the conversation thinking they already know how it works when, no, they don't; like many large and old systems, it has non-obvious quirks and Chesterton's Fences, and common sense doesn't always match up with the how or why of the system. Screaming "fraud" every time one sees something one doesn't understand isn't how one learns; it's how one guarantees continuation of ignorance.

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

#258

Post by tastyfreeze »

seoaeu wrote: post #108
routerl wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Dilute the vote tallies by using the voting machines to increment the votes for specific candidates > Why is it so easy? I don't know, it doesn't seem easy to me. I mean, it seems like the result of a ton of long-term planning to implement processes that allow each instance of this to be easy. But the fight against electronic voting machines was fierce, and took a long time. We lost, by the way.

Stuffing paper ballots into a box or tapping the screen of an electronic voting machine are both very easy. This stuff has to be fixed at a higher level, like by making sure the folks running the precinct aren’t corrupt or by having a neutral observer present

You can never be sure that people running the precinct, or any office, are not corrupt. The rules should be such that it doesn't matter who is in office. Violation of the rules must be met with stiff penalty or the rules are not really a deterrent.

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

#259

Post by yonaguska »

Animats wrote: post #55
causi wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fudging your personal count to make it match means less work for you. It could be as simple as that.

Usually, both parties have poll watchers present. Although some local party groups don't bother.

Except that didn't happen in 2020 where poll watchers even suspected of not fitting the desired demographic were excluded.

And that looks to be a continuing trend judging by stories like this.

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/06/01/gop-contest-electio...

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

#260

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]
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