From your first link:

In other words, this phenomenon can be caused by someone at the polls making a mistake in recording who voted. In fact, that's the more plausible explanation, and your assertion, that these are 100% people who are voting fraudulently, is not supported by any evidence. So, good job at reading the headline and then asserting your conclusion, but I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul.

Furthermore 232 people over the course of 10 years is vanishingly small compared to the number of people who'd be wrongly disenfranchised by voter ID laws.

I should clarify the point I was making in post #199:

Dead people voting is the reason we know actual voter fraud exists, and it's not a big leap in logic to say that shady voter registration drives could be putting fake names on the list for people to later use since they know nobody else will claim to be that person.

Just like when the person who knows Gertrude Smith is dead can walk in and vote and not fear that they were beaten to the punch by the actual (dead) voter.

If I wasn't 100% sure I would go to prison for it, I'd document the process of getting a fake name on the voting rolls and wear a camera while I went and voted in an election with it. If not for me posting the videos on the internet, nobody would ever know I did it.

Everything you say here is false, and it's contradicted by the articles you yourself posted.

Do you even read the articles you post?

Or how about the dead guy constantly touted by the Kansas AG (in his big voter fraud campaign) who turned out to be very much alive?
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmem...ther_probe.php

This whole voter fraud thing is just another GOP Big Lie. If you guys ever stopped believing every BS piece of propaganda they put out, maybe we could somehow move forward as a country some day. If/until that happens WAAF.

and

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/...-fraud-is-real

Hard to say it does not exist. You may argue the scope of the problem or if a election can be stolen or not but it has shown to exist. Also believe it can be just as disenfranchising to read stories how people were allowed to steal votes.

To me a id is a simple solution. In todays society that has security and requirements for just about anything and everything not to take even simple basic precautions to pretect a fundemental right and fairness of the election process is wrong.

You want to know how much voter fraud is going on, and yet you advocate that we outlaw any efforts to find out how much is going on by blocking efforts like ID checking that could find out.

There are other ways to investigate. Indeed, as you'll have seen in the OP, there was an investigation. It was quite large, in fact. It found less than 100 cases nationwide over the span of 10 years. But if you have other evidence of more vote fraud than that, please share it.

How is ID going to prevent absentee ballot voter fraud like this?

That was just a story chosen at random, so I don't know if that number is high or low. Semi-related is when Milwaukee had ~4600 more ballots cast than people who showed up to vote in the 2004 Presidential election. That was just one (albeit large) city. Kerry won the entire STATE by only 11,000 votes. Some of that is probably the ancient poll workers screwing up their paperwork, but it shouldn't happen at all.

I still don't buy the disenfranchisement argument when it comes to free government issued ID cards, given how often a photo ID is needed in every day life, but I'll forego that for the thumb marking program instead.


Cliff notes from a Milwaukee Police Dept investigation on it: http://www.wispolitics.com/1006/electionfraud.pdf

A lot of weight is being given to "bookkeeping errors", FWIW.

My understanding is that the military would be an exception. Most of the other absentee ballots would need to be picked up and id shown at that time. There is also the claim that 5,000 illegals voted in Col. that id may prevent.

That was in the opinion piece you linked, but the author did not provide a citation for that claim. Do you have one that may detail how they came to that conclusion?

"I'm a middle class white guy who uses ID to buy wine, ID to drive a car, and ID to get on a plane. Why would a poor person have issue getting ID?"

Thanks for letting us know. Guess what? You're allowed to vote even if you're too poor to buy wine (or choose not to), too poor to drive a car (or choose not to), and too poor to fly on a plane (or choose not to).


Good thing for your edit, because you were about to get owned again by the text of your own citation. Human error relating to bookkeeping is the overwhelming source of the discrepancy, not vast swaths of people voting multiple times.

Sure, everyone opposing ID voting will grant that there is probably a low level of people voting who aren't supposed to. A lot of these are felons who didn't realize that they were legally disenfranchised and other sorts of mistakes. However, all of these things are occurring at levels much lower than the number of people who would be improperly disenfranchised by requiring ID. You're going to have to make the case that preventing 10 people from voting legally is not as bad as a single person voting illegally.

This may summarize how the figure was obtained better:

http://www.greeleygazette.com/press/?p=9922

What cite do you have for the claim that it would be 10 to 1 or even much lower levels?

And once again, we have an example of an ID supporter getting owned by the text of his own citation. First of all, the use of "illegals," which normally refers to illegal immigrants, appears to be a misnomer. All of the 5000 votes in question appear to refer to legal immigrants, although many of them might not have been citizens at the time they voted. Second, observe how requiring ID would not do a damn thing about this:

Every single one of the non-citizen voters in question would already have had a driver's license. Requiring these people to show their licenses, which they obtained legally, would not have done anything to prevent them from voting.

Ins0, Boa, ogllalabob- This is a broader, more personal question:

What will it take for you guys to stop credulously accepting every damn story that makes you angry that you hear from conservative talk radio "Old White Person Outrage Hour" on your drive home? Like over and over again we see this thing where you hear a story(stimulus going to unions, Wisconsin protestors defaced the Constitution, all this ****) and you post about it on the internet to shut up us whiny liberals, and EVERY TIME a liberal googles up a refutation within like 5 minutes.

What can we do, as fellow citizens, to get you guys to spend those 5 minutes googling BEFORE the post?

Regardless do you concede that a lot of people are voting who should not be voting? whether felons immigrants etc.

I believe a few of the states have gone to notations on Drivers license Id's indicating citizenship or temporary. It is an easy fix.

So now not only do you need an ID, you need to get a completely new ID, all to stop a hypothetical future problem that hasnt happened but definitely will at the next election because something something ACORN.

itt it was stated and implied that there is no voting fraud. The article and piece indictates that there are votes being made by people not entilted to vote and I did not see Wookie disputing it. We have a system that is so wide open that it is amazing we catch anyone not entilted to vote.

It is also amazing how libs will cite the party line about how this will disenfranchize voters it will perevent voters from voting. Without any proof of that either.

Again, I'm going to have to get back to you on how the reforms passed this year will affect next year's election.

Indiana passed this reform in 2005.

You don't refute anything, you nitpick details.

Stimulus may or may not have gone to "unions" but it most definitely was a giant exercise in lighting money on fire. That's where the "right wingers" have their beef. Whether it went to unions or green energy money pits. It still went to money pits instead of doing anything useful.

It's funny that you have to go to the defacing the constitution thing as your second example in a set of two. Couldn't come up with anything a little stronger?

You and I hear the word "desecrate" and we might think someone is pouring coffee on it or drawing penises on the case or something. But the person that passed along that story was an "old timer" type who saw people taping signs and putting glue on the constitution which is on display in our capital and to her, that WAS desecration. Just because it doesn't fit your or my narrow definition of the term didn't make that statement any less true.

Also, that constitution story was something heard in real-time on the radio. I mentioned it in a thread that was active at that moment in time. It's not exactly going to be on the NYT website 15 seconds after it happens.


TL;DR -- I'll stop being a right winger when you stop crying racism every time someone opens their mouth to say something that doesn't fall exactly in line with your personal world-view.

The entire Wisconsin union thread was you being corrected over and over, people can just go read that thread if they want examples.

That was just your perception of it.

IIRC, many things I was "wrong" about were actually proven correct several pages later after we were busy ranting about new things.

I'd love to see your list of **** I was wrong about, now that many months have passed and lots of stories were written about it.

I'm not going to comb back through that thread to pull every example but the last one I remember is you claiming a school district was in financial trouble because they rammed a new union contract through before the cuts went into place. While it was obviously false you even went as far as to change headlines on links to make it seem like proposed offers were signed off on to make it appear like you were correct.