Donald Trump and US politics

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DalaiLama wrote:

So mail in ballot voter fraud isn't rare, and only in person voting fraud is rare? So voter registration fraud, and dumping ballot fraud isn't rare? So, delaying and withholding military absentee ballots isn't rare? So "discovering" enough extra votes to swing an election during a recount isn't rare?

Absentee ballot fraud is rare but far more common than in-person voter fraud. I don't see republicans clamoring to require that absentee ballots be notarized. Voter registration fraud is considerably less rare. It also has virtually no impact, because fraudulent registrations are usually fairly easy to weed out. I have no idea about withholding military absentee ballots or "discovering" votes.

But you know what none of these things have anything to do with? Voter ID! Absolutely none of these issues are resolved or even addressed by the demand that people voting in person display a valid, up-to-date photo ID from the state they are currently living in.

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The methods used to cheat in an election are myriad. People don't drive voters around from district to district because they get to "knock off early". Dead people don't vote inadvertently.

I await with bated breath for you to relate this to what I said.

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If you can't connect the dots between all the efforts put into defrauding the legal voting system, than you can't connect the dots. Prosecutors will. They weren't before, because we we had a president who looked the other way (and possible actively encouraged it - that investigation may come to light in the next few weeks) and we had politicians so afraid of "racism" cries - via fear of "voter disenfranchisement" that no one wanted to touch it with a 10 ft pole.

More stupid conspiracy theories. The Bush administration went looking for voter fraud and found fuck-all. Less than two hundred cases nationwide between 2002 and 2007. You could probably find a similar number of people in that time frame who claimed to have seen a UFO. And even then, the majority of those cases were people unclear about whether or not they were allowed to vote, not malicious attempts to swing the vote count.

This actually makes perfect sense, because trying to swing the vote count with in-person impersonation voter fraud is stupid.

Really, really stupid.

Like, "Trying to fill up a swimming pool by spunking into it" stupid.

Think about what it takes to fraudulently vote in person via impersonating another person once. Well, at the most basic level, you need to wait in line in one polling station, then go to another and wait in line there. Then, at that second polling station, you need a valid identifier of some kind - in my home state, it's a valid paycheck, bank account statement, utility bill, or government document of some kind. Then you need to hope nobody notices this happening, that the person you are impersonating has not already voted/does not come in to try to vote later (in the former case, you're fucked; in the latter case, this was a huge waste of time). And all of that for one extra vote, in a contest where last year, the smallest margins were in the tens of thousands. If you are really dedicated, and the lines are reasonably short, you can maybe pull this off a handful of times per voting day. So assuming you bust your hump all day, every day during the voting period, don't get caught, have everything lined up perfectly, what's the best-case scenario? What can you expect as your return?

Maybe a hundred votes?

And for that, you worked your ass off for several weeks, probably spent that time again gathering or forging documents for people you knew had registered, and for each fraudulent vote you cast, you risked a large fine and up to a year in prison, plus any additional charges of things like conspiracy, forgery, et cetera. And all of this assumes that there's no contingency plan in place by the government to detect things like this. Another thing I would not assume, particularly if you, say, were voting for a dead person.

And with that amount of effort, you... Didn't even get Florida to go for Al Gore. You got about 1/7th of the way there. You're 1/120th of the way to the amount of damage the Florida voter roll purge did.

Seriously, impersonation voter fraud is really, really dumb. If you want to swing an election away from the will of the people, you do it via ballot stuffing. Or voter disenfranchisement. Or purging the voter rolls of people who are allowed to vote. Not in-person voter fraud. That makes no fucking sense.

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I did put two sources in for one story - was editing my original post in an effort to add some info about what the links were for and meant to replace one source with another.

And they were both wrong. Both contained the same fundamental (let's be charitable for no good reason here) mistake of conflating voter registration fraud with voter fraud. Why is that, do you think?

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I'm not sure which is funnier: BCP and Sarah pretending that illegal voting almost never happens, or Dalai for thinking that it's an overwhelmingly Democratic endeavor. Probably Dalai; the other two's naivete is more pathetic.

Our elections have poor security, especially considering it's customary for the losing candidate​to concede before November 9. The prudent don't wait until breaching important systems becomes a major problem, then increase security; the fix it before it becomes a problem.

Hey, why not. Let's fix the system. First, let's make sure that everyone has or can easily and cheaply get photo ID. That way, the problem of "People who don't have photo ID and can't easily get it deciding not to vote" doesn't become a bigger problem than "People who decide to add two jizzworths of water to an olympic swimming pool instead of one". Then we can make that photo ID a requirement to vote, and fix this huge problem that is so common that The Daily Caller feels the need to lie about a separate problem to make it seem like there's more of it.

And if you're going to accuse me of pretending something almost never happens, it would be nice to provide evidence that it happens more than almost never.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Actually mildly alarmed at Breitbart's support of Netherlands' Wilders and his PVV. Unlike Trump and Le Pen, Wilders is a true fascist — he'd ban Islam and the Koran from his country if he could, as explicitly stated in his party's policy platform. I don't think it's a good look for Breitbart to actually become a platform for the hard alt-right. Wilders is an example of the pendulum swinging clear past the middle and towards extremism on the other side.

[Removed by Support] Also according to the MSM Bannon and Breitbart are antisemitic. Shit doesn't add up.

When the fuck did the line about McCain become "war criminal"?

Then again, I'm a little out of touch, I missed it when the line about JonTron became "racist", so what do I know?

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Actually mildly alarmed at Breitbart's support of Netherlands' Wilders and his PVV. Unlike Trump and Le Pen, Wilders is a true fascist — he'd ban Islam and the Koran from his country if he could, as explicitly stated in his party's policy platform. I don't think it's a good look for Breitbart to actually become a platform for the hard alt-right. Wilders is an example of the pendulum swinging clear past the middle and towards extremism on the other side.

You're surprised that a site that has made no small number of allusions towards the white nationalist and fascist movements would endorse a white nationalist and fascist?

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SarahAustin wrote:

Yay, Trump Organization Caught Communicating with Russian Bank. The fun never ends.

Communicating? Holy shit, this is literal treason. Drumpf is finished.

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Budget_player_cadet wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Actually mildly alarmed at Breitbart's support of Netherlands' Wilders and his PVV. Unlike Trump and Le Pen, Wilders is a true fascist — he'd ban Islam and the Koran from his country if he could, as explicitly stated in his party's policy platform. I don't think it's a good look for Breitbart to actually become a platform for the hard alt-right. Wilders is an example of the pendulum swinging clear past the middle and towards extremism on the other side.

You're surprised that a site that has made no small number of allusions towards the white nationalist and fascist movements would endorse a white nationalist and fascist?

I've frequented the site plenty. Previous claims of Breitbart's white nationalism and/or fascism have been either invented whole cloth and/or based on the site's YouTube-style comment section (which is admittedly as prone to fringe opinions as, say, YouTube comment sections). I guess the closest the Leftstream media could truthfully get pre-Wilders was "Breitbart's lax moderation of its comment sections allows those sections to become platforms for the ethno-nationalist alt-right."

And technically, these new pro-Wilder articles never explicitly call out his party's extremist platform and praise it. They simply depict Wilders in a vaguely positive light.

To be clear, I'd have zero issue with a politician who said "the Koran is a horrible book full of horrible ideas." There are some good ideas in the Koran, but certainly plenty of ideas worth condemnation. The line in the sand is "because it's a horrible book, we should ban it." That's an immediate cause for alarm for anyone who worries about tyranny. And although the anti-Sharia portions of the PVV platform might seem temporarily justifiable, the way they dominate the party's short platform and the excess to which they rail against Islam are beyond worrisome. As I've explained before with anti-racist racism, fighting fire with fire isn't a movement which stops itself; even after the defeat of European Sharia, aka European islamofascism, Wilder's fascism would not stop, and would need to seek and find real or imagined Islamic threats in the general population as a justification forself-continuation.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: the PCV points to a real problem, but offers a horrible solution. I don't think their chance of political success is high, but if it was ever total, the cure may prove worse than the disease.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/15/us/stand-your-ground-florida.html?_r=0

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The Florida Legislature is on the verge of passing legislation that would bolster self-defense laws and shift the burden to prosecutors during immunity hearings to show that such laws should not apply.

A dude shoots you, and YOU have to prove that it wasn't self-defense...