• AdelleChattre
    +1

    Well… The Washington Times is a conservative daily broadsheet newspaper run by an international mind control cult. So nothing strange there. Same nutjobs run UPI. It’s one of the more grounded of the Republican chattering teeth on the Beltway. On a good day, it might not be any less sane than outlets I’d rank in about the same class: Hot Air, Free Beacon, American Thinker. At least a couple of Times people know about Snapzu, I think, so due respect.

    The story you linked, though, represents the kind of gruel these outfits crank out day in and day out. It’s made up, given the color of science, but ultimately it’s not a good meal, is it? It satisfies a hunger of bigots. Some little thing to justify bottomless self-pity about how oppressed they are. But not for long. It’s habit forming. Before long, they’ll need more, then more still. Because appetites for resentment like that neither satisfy nor subside on their own. People, brought low, want people they can feel better than. Provoked by, to focus their anger.

    What’s my take? The president of the United States is lying through his teeth, citing as evidence not this sham here but some nebulously more credible study. The author will gladly tell you they ultimately found zero evidence of non-citizens voting. What are nativists going to believe, though, their gruppenführer or the science they use for torches?

    American elections are corrupt down deep, deep into the soil of our history. Like so much else about U.S. politics, the kayfabe of partisan rancor is used to mask the reality about which so much sturm und drang is made. The function of this issue is to satisfy Trump’s nativist constituency, not to delve into the actual corruption of our elections. For instance, voter ID sounds easy enough. Until one of these high status, high ranked, Republican governors decides to close every state facility that can provide that ID within a four-hour drive of your house, leaving one one such office that’s open two hours a week. That’s the kind of real world, every day brass tacks corruption of our democratic process this kind of fake news is meant to distract from.

    • Project2501 (edited 7 years ago)
      +5

      Looking through the wired article:

      “Trump and others have been misreading our research and exaggerating our results to make claims we don’t think our research supports,” Richman says. “I’m not sure why they continue to do it, but there’s not much I can do about that aside from set the record straight.”

      Richman himself is not backing down from his initial findings. He says that even if some people did check the wrong citizenship box, enough respondents repeatedly reported voting as noncitizens to indicate that some noncitizens do in fact vote. Even some of Richman’s detractors, such as Rick Hasen, author of the Election Law Blog, acknowledge that “noncitizen voting is a real, if relatively small, problem.” Richman says those on the left are just as wrong to reflexively claim that voter fraud doesn’t exist at all as Trump is to continue insisting voter fraud is a national conspiracy.

      Here’s what the math should look like (that is, if Richman’s initial study was accurate—which many researchers doubt). If 6.4 percent of the estimated 20.3 million noncitizens in the US voted, and if just 81.8 percent of them voted for Clinton (the percentage who voted for Obama in his 2008 study), that’s an added margin of a little more than 835,000 votes. In other words: Even with all of those supposedly fraudulent ballots, Clinton still would have won the popular vote by more than 2 million votes.

      AKA ... that didn't disprove the republican nutters I linked. If anything, it didn't provide an accurate critique of Richman's results, found here. You have to go for a paywall for that. But there's an app for that. These researchers accept the results. These one only acknowledge that it caused controversy. And that is just by going off of the only 6 papers that cite the original article through google scholar.

      So no, even reading the critique, and reading the wired piece, I am still convinced that more then "0" noncitizens voted. So yes, Trump is insane, and going on about 2 million. However, much like the project veritas videos, the dead voter turnouts in Colorado, and California, the all smoke and no fire with the machines in Detroit, this is another case of another story refusing to die when it comes to election fraud in the States. Calling everything fake news only leads to more people actually reading brietbart, and RT.

      And why wouldn't the left champion voter ID if it can fall under the bracket of government services? And it is a little bizarre to think that offices could not have a geographical minimum requirement, and only offer voter ID. People do happen to get passports and drivers incenses issued by the government all the time with minimal issues. It is almost as if Voter ID can be wrapped into these services. Looking at wikipedia, it seems you have seven states already with strict photo ID laws, and non strict photo ID in another ten. People can fill out a form, submit it with original and photocopied* documents/passport photo, and have the final ID mailed out, with minimal fuss. I would think solidifying attacks from political opponents by tackling the same problem, and providing a solution that falls under social services would help ensure these offices stay open. Plus, voter ID is once every 5 years. A day to get proper ID is not an issue, even with the "brass tacks corruption. "

      You're right, Voter ID does sound simple enough. I have been dealing with it all my adult life, and as far as I ...

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      • MAGISTERLUDI (edited 7 years ago)
        +3

        "And why wouldn't the left champion voter ID"

        Because it would loose voters, as in illegal voters, as in voter fraud.

        It has been exposed/documented in local elections. Never has a government investigation been done on the national level.

        The only question to be answered by such an investigation is:.....how many?

      • AdelleChattre
        +3

        However, much like the project veritas videos

        James O'Keefe? That's a shame. I thought you might've been serious. The only way you fall for hoaxes like his is if you want to or maybe you're so strung out on your bigotry you need to. Which one are you?

        The Bush Administration tasked all the U.S. attorney's offices with not just finding in-person voter fraud but prosecuting it as their highest priority. It just wasn't there to find. Eventually, the attorney general started purging the U.S. attorneys that were failing to bring in those non-existent cases, and it brought him down. You can believe in James O'Keefe or the Easter Bunny for all I care, but if you think there's any problem with in-person voter fraud in the U.S. you've got an underlying personal problem. That said, if you think James O'Keefe found what America's U.S. attorneys couldn't, again, that goes to a personal problem.

        And why wouldn't the left champion voter ID if it can fall under the bracket of government services?

        Voter ID? You know, because I'm pretty sure I've told you, I've always enjoyed your contributions. To this day, I think you've made the best snap I've ever seen here by sheer force of research on a great topic. But you seem to be on another side of this issue and I want to clarify for you that it's not an issue but a creed. This is about political subjugation by some people of other people.

        Today, one of the ways Jim Crow works has to do with voter ID. Your tone above leaves no doubt you think it's good policy. Require some new form of ID that's never been needed for civic participation before then make sure it's practically impossible to get. The thing is it's not always voter ID.

        Sometimes it's a literacy test, because if you can't read then somebody must be telling you for whom to vote. Literacy tests certain people always seem to fail. Sometimes it's a poll tax, a fee you have to pay to vote, because otherwise somebody might be paying you to vote a certain way. A fee that's always more than certain people seem to have. Sometimes it's a noose.

        There are counties in this country where the vote totals somehow come out before the sheriff brings in the ballots to be counted. There are electronic voting machines that need 'calibration,' those that have all the security required by the state elections board switched off, and those that're so easily hacked it defies belief that they aren't routinely. There are so many backwaters and eddies in the electoral system in this country that either and both parties can, have, do and will corrupt the voting process beyond the dreams of modest people.

        I myself have had 'irregularities' occur with my voter registration and ballots in 2016 that mean my votes were almost certainly never counted. That's the real, baseline corruption. What this old time Know-Nothing gadfly Trump is after here is more than pleasing crowds of knuckle-dragging white supremacists and moronic, scapegoat-hungry nativists like MagisterLudi. He wants to broaden, lengthen and deepen Jim Crow without disturbing in any way the traditional, longstanding ways that U.S. elections have always been corrupt.

      • Appaloosa
        +3
        @AdelleChattre -

        Project is not a bigot, and you know that. There is a cultural difference, perhaps. Distrust in our neck of the woods, where we have seen, even been victims of manipulation in our real lives. Others maybe come from a more homogenized environment, not so threatening. I get where Project is coming from, and it is not from anything other than being honest.

      • AdelleChattre
        +1
        @Appaloosa -

        Fair. Something Jim Crow has always pretended to be.

      • Appaloosa
        +2
        @AdelleChattre -

        There is nothing fair about Jim Crow.

      • Appaloosa
        +3
        @Appaloosa -

        Have to show ID in many countries to vote.

      • AdelleChattre (edited 7 years ago)
        +3
        @Appaloosa -

        Many countries aren’t Texas, or Alabama, or North Carolina, or the neo-Confederate South of an Attorney General Sessions’ Justice Department under the Roberts Court and the Trump presidency.

        Having ID seems reasonable. And you don’t have to worry about getting it. More over, once folks that’ve never needed these forms of ID to vote before succeed in getting it, Jim Crow will move onto the next way to manipulate you into resenting the victims of whatever that voter suppression scheme is.

      • Appaloosa
        +1
        @AdelleChattre -

        Totally agree with this in the US context. Real ID is a good example. Some states have not adopted it. They won't be able to go on military bases or board a plane or enter certain federal building without the Real ID recognized driver's license. It is a de facto National ID...and nobody thinks that a problem?

      • AdelleChattre
        +1
        @Appaloosa -

        Enough for a quarter of the states to pass laws specifically forbidding complying with the federal REAL ID Act. Enough so that “Homeland Security,” (eesh, that still sounds creepy) keeps pretending to give out ‘waivers’ to states. Until they don’t.

      • Appaloosa
        +2
        @AdelleChattre -

        My parents live in PA, one of those states not complying...and they didn't even know about it.

      • AdelleChattre (edited 7 years ago)
        +1
        @Appaloosa -

        With so many state legislatures dead set against it, my guess is that Motherland Security will extend the requirement deadline for air travel past 2018.