trinityvixen | Fuck no

Entry tags:

Fuck no

Not again.

What is with Republicans and this bullshit about people voting who shouldn't be? The problem is people who are registered being denied! For every yahoo who manages to spend at least eighteen years of their life in this country not knowing that you have to register to be a voter and who walks into a polling place in November, you have thousands of people who registered and did the right thing being disenfranchised unfairly. For every one voter who votes illegally on purpose to skew an election, you have people who lose track of where they're registered and aren't trying to sabotage anything but are just honestly mistaken. I mean, I hate the vapid know-nothing scum, but didn't Ann Coulter have that problem?

So what, precisely, the shit is with this:

On Monday, the Ohio Republican Party filed a motion in federal court against the secretary of state to get the list of all names that have been flagged by the Social Security database since Jan. 1. The motion seeks to require that any voter who does not clear up a discrepancy be required to vote using a provisional ballot.

Republicans said in the motion that it is central to American democracy that nonqualified voters be forbidden from voting.

Do I believe they're really and truly worried about this? Yes, they're stupid enough to assume that's where vote discrepancy comes from. What worries me is that I am sure that they know that! They are aware that facts are against them! Voter fraud is not the problem, but it's a convenient cloak to challenge voters in hotly contested areas; who are probably new, young votes and therefore less likely to vote Republican; and as a way to cut down the slight lag their candidate is suffering in the polls.

Barring catastrophe--Rovian or real--McCain is going to lose this election if we can trust the trending we've seen now. (That's another can of worms, one marked "DO NOT OPEN.") If things stay the same (and they won't because jesus look at the last few weeks), the only way he could win is if voter monkeying happens en masse. We've already had two elections in a row decided in ways that left sour grapes. If it goes McCain's way, there'll be hell to pay.

(If everything stays the same, which: see above.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I am truly, truly worried about the outcome of this election even though Obama seems to have it locked. I worry that it's going to be stolen again and all hell will break loose and life as I know it will change for the worse. :/

It's time we stopped sounding like whiners who lost in years previous. There is no way in hell the last few elections haven't had more than a little monkey business going on. Either people were sabotaging the counts or they were willfully ignorant and allowed faulty conditions to exist.

If that happens again, when we're staring down a real crisis (not just one kept aflame by fear-mongering), I'll be out there, protesting.

I worry that it'll be stolen too--by Democrats. Like the ACORN buses rounding up the homeless to go from county to county in OH, registering and voting on the same day. Like the guys who ACORN pushes to register 10-15 times.

A fraudulent vote is just as bad as a disenfranchised vote. And some disenfranchised voters aren't Dems--like the Republicans whose applications for absentee ballots SecState Brunner turned away because of an unimportant technicality.

Let us agree, as I think we do, that every vote that is misrepresented is a fraudulent vote.

Let us also agree, as I think we do, that people turned away from registering and/or voting for technicalities or "reasonable" slip-ups (forgot to change voter registration after a move, that sort of thing) are being cruelly denied their right to vote.

Now let us discuss the plans to correct this. Do we focus our attention on what a quick search has totaled less than a hundred people or so every tried/convicted for the sort of voter fraud that the GOP is screaming their heads off about? Or do we look at the causes of most voter disenfranchisement, which are power plays like using SSN to boot people after deadlines (they aren't supposed to use that SS info anyway). Maybe we should look at machines that count more votes than were on the list of checked off voters, many times with the numbers being off by thousands? Perhaps we could examine the fact that we still don't have a paper trail to which we can turn to confirm that choices made on the machine are the ones the person chose and aren't just the ones the machine recorded.

Are Dems any less culpable? No. For not trying to correct these problems earlier, they are not. However, they might have been in power earlier than 2006 if they'd not been artificially supressed in the vote. Note: this hasn't been "proven," but the smoking gun is there. This is according to the extreme disparity between the historically reliable, precise, and accurate exit polls that suddenly became not only off-the-mark but were frequently at odds with the eventual "results." (Link to the paper published here. (http://www.appliedresearch.us/sf/Documents/ExitPoll.pdf))

What's noticeable in that paper, and why the GOP draw my ire (more than they do about a lot of other things, which is impressive) is that the disparities overwhelmingly favor them. They know it, too, I suspect, which is why they cover their actions with "Oh, but we're just trying to nab the six or seven guys who're voting fraudulently." Because that's an admirable goal. It's just not what they're really doing. It's more of a consequence of what they're doing, and the net of good votes lost to bad ones eliminated is not worth it. I'm not throwing thirty good votes out so the GOP can prove they got The Guy who voted illegally.

A fraudulent vote is just as bad as a disenfranchised vote.

I don't actually agree, but granting it for the sake of the argument, let's go on and ask: Is one fraudulent vote just as bad as ten disenfranchised votes? A hundred? A thousand?

If someone came up with a way of preventing ten fraudulent votes, at the cost of disenfranchising a hundred qualified voters, would you approve of it?

Actual fraudulent voting is a pretty marginal phenomenon, and the specific kind of vote fraud that this law is designed to address -- in-person voter fraud at the polling location -- is almost non-existent nowadays. (Most actual modern fraudulent voting is done by absentee ballot.)

Disenfranchisement of qualified voters, on the other hand, is a thriving practice, demonstrably having thrown at least one recent presidential election, and I don't know how many lower-level elections.

ACORN is the new conservative bogeyman, but ACORN itself has not engaged in illegal activity. The "ACORN pushes to register 10-15 times" is just pure BS. Canvassers have engaged in hankypanky but that's always a danger when you have under-supervised field workers.

Then after this comes the caging mail lists that have been used to "demonstrate" that African American voters registered fraudulently. Slap a "do not forward" instruction on some voter information forms and ship them to students away from home, the homeless, soldiers, vacationers and you can pick off people from any demographic you care to make a list for. That's proactively targeting voters solely for the purpose of preventing them from voting. The Republicans have been doing this since at least 2004.

As was pointed out by a blog or four, the problem isn't voter registration fraud. Even if you got fraudulent registrations, you'd still then have to get people to vote fraudulently on top. Producing the vote is much harder to do then just preventing the voter in the first place or tampering with the votes afterward.

Never assume a large conspiracy when a small one is more efficient.

Oh yeah, I saw this one when it made the rounds. I often wonder with these YouTube videos if the people in them ever find out. This woman doesn't seem to be the right age or type to go seek this out. She'll never realize that the sound was never turned off, and the nebulous "points" she thinks she won for harassing the videographer have been lost to internet notoriety.

The ultimate result of the anti-intellectualism and rampant nationalism that's been brewing in this country for twenty years, but especially the last seven, is that it doesn't matter any more. It doesn't have to make any sense whatsoever.

We just need someone to blame, and the field has been sown for it to be those faceless "liberals" who are terrorists because they want to help disrespectful, worse-than-worthless poor brown people.

I think I'm with Krugman on this one -- there's a strong possibility of backlash violence when McCain loses this election, because this country is creeping towards hyper-reactionary fascism.
I'm honestly, deeply concerned.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only