Wednesday, May 17, 2017

 

Sentence First -- Verdict Afterwards



Yesterday the ever shrinking NYT had this "dictated by the DNC" unsigned editorial called Trump's Fraudulent Voter-Fraud Commission.

Here's the background. The states each have rolls of voters but no access to the federal rolls of non-naturalized resident aliens. The Obama administration wanted illegal voting (which usually is for Democrats) so the administration never compared the state and federal lists to see if any aliens were voting in the states. The responsible states wanted to see the non-citizen resident alien list but the Obama administration would never show it to any of the interested office-holders the states.

The whole purpose of the  proposed commission is to go through the 50 state lists of voters and compare them at last to the federal lists of non-naturalized foreign born individuals living her to see how many, if any, voted. That would necessarily be an illegal vote. Only then will we know if it's a big problem or not. But the NYT already knows and uses that special knowledge to disparage our president in the smug, really annoying way the NYT and other Democrat-dictation-takers have. Behold.

To state the obvious, this isn't a commission. It's a self-driving vehicle programmed to arrive at only one destination: that strange fact-free land in which, according to Trump and many conservatives, hordes of foreigners and people without valid photo identification flood the polls, threatening the nations's election integrity.


The NYT says we know this is a non-existent problem (four links are given and discussed below) but the truth is we don't know. We've never cross-referenced the lists to see how many people are on both lists.

Rational people welcome more information. People who are afraid what the information will be don't want to know.

The first link, from 2014, is from a law professor at Loyola in Los Angeles. He didn't have the federal list of non-citizen resident aliens. He didn't find many illegal votes by non-citizens. No kidding.

The second link from 2007 is from writers at the NYT. They didn't have the lists either. They found it was a crime not often prosecuted. I believe that. It's hard to catch people when your not trying.

The next link, from 2014, is by two writers in the Election Law Journal (I think -- the link was broken). They also didn't have the lists, weren't looking for people who couldn't legally vote voting, only for people who pretended to be someone else when voting.

The last link, from this year, is a report of a survey by three authors from the Brennan Center for Justice. They didn't have the federal list either and drew the conclusion that because hardly any non-citizens were caught voting, it doesn't exist.

That's a strange conclusion. Maybe there are lots of them but they rarely get caught. I found each of these links wholly unpersuasive. I'd still like to see the number of people who are both on the federal list of non-citizen residents (and that list only has the know aliens living here--there are plenty the federal government doesn't know about) and are on a state list of registered voters.

It might not be a problem, but we don't know yet.

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Comments:
http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/trump-picks-al-capone-vote-rigging-investigate-vote-rigging
 
OK, according to your alternet guy, the Republicans in several states purged ("scrubbed") 1.1 million names from the poll lists without telling the people de-listed. So did any of those people happen to show up at the polls on election day? Why would real voters unaware their names had been purged not show up? And were they turned away? How many of those who turned up and found their name had been purged went on and voted provisionally? I can't find any of that information in the article. Do we have numbers of provisional voters in these states mentioned specifically by the author? Were the numbers of them up, down, the same as in recent past elections? All states allow provisional ballots or are same day registration so either Greg Palast doesn't know the answers to the questions I'm asking (and he's thus a fool to say the election was swayed anywhere by the purging of the lists of registered voters) or he does know and he's not telling because admitting that this wholly nefarious and only done by evil Republicans voter roll purging had no effect on voting would make all his allegations specious. My best guess is that the purged names were mainly of people who couldn't vote legally and who didn't show up and so the purging was proper in the main and had no effect on election outcomes. Where am I going wrong?
 
Note that in most states, purging a voter's entry on the rolls is not an overnight process. Excerpted from info at the link, below:

"When a state receives information that an individual on the voter list is no longer eligible from one of the checks listed above, most states (though not all) require that the election jurisdiction first contacts the individual. Typically the state will send out a card to the voter, wait for a given period of time and if there is no response the voter will be removed, cancelled or moved to an inactive list."

In Ohio, for example (which state is the subject of a relevant lawsuit just accepted by SCOTUS for the next session), after 2 years of voter inactivity, the voter is mailed a notice at his enrolled address that states he's been inactive and if he wishes to remain enrolled he must contact the SOS, or, after 4 ADDITIONAL years of inactivity & no contact, he will be purged (caps added for emphasis.)

I don't consider that an onerous burden if one is at all interested in being an active voter. If someone disagrees, then they should suggest a better, less prone to error, method for a state to clean up its voter rolls so as to remove opportunity for fraudulent voting. Anyone have a better idea? Let's hear it.

http://www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/voter-list-accuracy.aspx

 
Well said. The voters for Obama didn't show up for Hillary in several states. That's why she lost. The serial, untrue explanations why she lost which Democrats are trying to sell (and clinging to in the denial stage of grief) are merely Vital Lies they tell because facing the truth, that they are not popular in a majority of states, is too hard for them to admit. I'm glad they remain largely in denial as you can't solve a problem you don't at least acknowledge.
I can say this openly without fear they will twig to the truth because I'm just a stupid, evil Republican, so what do I know.
 
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