This will have to be short.
I am playing gracious host to some very nice Diplowife relatives from Spain. We spent yesterday in Hollywood (lotta freaks) and today at the Mission in San Juan Capistrano. Tomorrow is a visit to the USS Midway Museum in San Diego and then a Lakers-Warriors game at Valley View Casino; the day after, we are off to Universal Studios. Lot of highway, lot of miles.
While driving, I was listening on the radio to all sorts of progressives whining about "how dare" Trump question the "integrity" of our electoral process. You can link to all sorts of stories reporting the same. We have progressives telling us that it's essentially unpatriotic, even treasonous, to put in doubt the integrity of the electoral system. They cite all sorts of spurious data "proving" that voter fraud is almost unheard of, and very minor.
I have written before (here and here, for example) how vulnerable our electoral system is to voter fraud. As a person who has done a lot of formal election observing all over the world, I can assure you that I would never certify US elections as above board. We are the only country I have seen where voter identification is not required, where voters do not have to prove they are citizens. Of course there is fraud. The way the laws are written, however, makes it almost impossible to prove. God help the brave poll worker who challenges somebody to prove his or her citizenship. Let me be blunt: huge numbers of illegal and legal aliens will vote.
I heard Obama give an absurd defense of the system saying that its decentralized nature makes it almost impossible for fraud. Nonsense. Voting in more than one district is very possible and done. The Diplowife and I, for example, have in the past received mail-in ballots from Virginia, Florida, and California for the same election. We are honest folks so we threw away the extra ballots. And, of course, for decades Democrats have used their urban machines to register dead voters, and to provide multiple ballots to living ones. Our electoral college system makes voter fraud even more important as a small win in a big state, throws a huge chunk of electoral votes to the "winner." Go no further than the JFK campaign of 1960 and the state of Illinois.
I love the business that we are not allowed to "question" the voting process and its institutions. Might I suggest that we also make it not-allowed, for example, for progressives to question the integrity of urban police forces and that they must automatically accept the police version of any shooting? Wonder if the progs would agree to that?
Questioning is the essence of democracy.
Back to hosting . . .
I still don't know what will happen but worry a lot about fraud. It has been a joke about dead voters but this time it may mean the country,
ReplyDeleteNow they don't even need dead voters. Where there is electronic voting they can program the machines to show any result they desire regardless of how people actually vote.
Delete"God help the brave poll worker who challenges somebody to prove his or her citizenship." When I received my poll-worker training in 2004, I was told explicitly not to ask for idendtification, with one exception. The one exception -- when the name the would-be voter gave matched one marked saying the named person had registered by mail and the current election would be the first _federal_ election she voted in, identification was required.
ReplyDeleteI was able to register without showing any proof of age, citizenship, or residency -- and then vote without showing identification either. All I had to do was go to the Tulsa County Election Board office and sign up. I checked with several county election boards in Oklahoma and the Oklahoma State Election Board as well -- and found found that virtually nothing was being done to prevent election fraud. The Help America Vote Act should have been called the Help Everyone Vote Act.
After several years of trying, some tenacious Oklahoma legislator finally managed to get Oklahoma law changed such that voter identification is now required. It was not an easy battle to win.
And challenging the outcome is unAmerican unless you are Al Gore ... If Trump is elected, I surely hope he fixes this fraud ...
ReplyDeleteThe recent revelations of electoral fraud are hardly surprising, but what is startling is the apparent scale of the fraud, its organised nature, and the sheer audacity of some the people involved. I suppose when they have gotten away with for so long, the temptation to scale it up was irresistible.
ReplyDeleteThis sort of thing has gone on for ages, and no one has ever seemed to give much of a damn.
ReplyDeleteIn November 1972, when I was a sophomore at Northwestern, I volunteered to be a poll watcher for the Independent Voters of Illinois at a voting site on the northwest side of Chicago, when the infamous Richard J. Daley was still alive and the city's mayor.
The polling place had mechanical voting machines, which were common in those days. I was received with barely disguised contempt by the election workers, but they tolerated me until 10 minutes before the polls closed, when they threw me out on some thin pretext.
This was deliberate. If they had thrown me out earlier, I could have returned in an hour with IVI officials and possibly made some trouble for them. But by having me ejected so late in the day, they could take the backs off the voting machines and write down any vote totals they thought they could get away with as soon as the polls closed and, crucially, before anyone arrived to look over their shoulders -- which was one of the things I was supposed to do.
It gets better. I did call the IVI, and one of its people managed to show up in 15 minutes. The election workers threw him out, too. He called the Illinois Attorney General's Office, which was run by a Republican and didn't maintain exactly cordial relations with the Daley Machine. An actual assistant attorney general of the state showed up. He, too, was thrown out of the place. (If he had thought to bring along a few state troopers, that particular confrontation might have ended differently.)
And that's where things stood until a few months later, when two FBI agents showed up unannounced at my dorm and questioned me about what had happened. I gave them the whole story, and that was the last I heard about it. I can only guess that the Bureau, long before it was corrupted by Democratic hacks, decided it didn't have enough courtroom-worthy evidence to proceed further.
So there was fraud then, as there is now. It takes different forms these days, but give the Dems credit for adapting their schemes to the times. Let's just hope it doesn't throw the national election the way it probably did in 1960. Local races with smaller margins of victory are another matter, of course.
“It’s a very easy thing for Republicans to say,
ReplyDelete"Well they’re bussing people in!"
Well you know what?
We’ve been bussing people in to deal with you
f---in’ assholes for fifty years and
we’re not going to stop now,
we’re just going to find a different way to do it,”
Foval says.
Sounds about right.
Is that what the president was quacking about? Radio talker Erick Erickson was spouting the same line. Didn't sound convincing coming from either of them. The presiden't motivation for putting out a line of b.s. is obvious. Wonder what Erickson's was?
ReplyDeleteOur British system is pretty free-and-easy. ID is not demanded. For years we all assumed there was little fraud. Then that nice Mr Blair, making a sweeping racist assumption, changed the rules to make election fraud much easier, in hopes of Labour gaining lots of illegitimate votes especially from Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. (Naturally, that's not quite how he phrased it in his public announcements.)
ReplyDeleteYes, I was very disappointed to hear about that, a couple of years back. I had thought that y'all had worked out the kinks and had pretty straight-up elections. I am not happier to hear friends' bad news than my own.
DeleteThis thing seems determined to ID me as unknown, but I am Michael Adams of Round Rock TX.
I hate vote by mail. It's interesting that most of the states where they impose this, don't even get to vote on whether they want it. I can't think of any easier way to hack an election.
ReplyDeleteMy underage college friends were paid $5 to vote Democratic but actually voted for Goldwater in 1964; actual voter fraud now documented by James O'Keefe.
ReplyDeleteIf an election is close, Dems have recounts until it's shown that they won. Then the recounts are over. Like the last Governors race in Oregon.
ReplyDelete