Comments on: REFLECTIONS ON THE FIRST OBAMA/ROMNEY DEBATE

By: MD Mat

MD Mat — Sun, 14 Oct 2012 16:06:48 +0000

At Hanza:
I’m not sure where you’re going with this. I think we’re talking about two different things. Voter fraud, the process of signing up non-residents, dead people, and fictional identities to vote is different than election fraud, directly screwing with the vote counting process.
Election fraud is a legitimate problem and will be as long as one person hopes to get one over on the system.
Even so, I don’t see voter ID laws stopping the kind of situation you’re talking about.

By: MD Matt

MD Matt — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 13:44:16 +0000

At Tim,
Not disagreeing with anything you said. I’m legally blind and still have a State ID, even though I don’t drive. My concern has more to do with the precedent voter ID seeks to establish then any practical objections.
My reasoning runs like this. Citizens should be able to vote. Citizenship doesn’t require one to have a state ID. So providing the state ID requirement is a small hurdle now, but one that could morph into something much larger down the line. See the original gun control movement pushed between the 1950s and 80s. Per the documents and reports I’ve seen, those laws were never intended to apply to the population at large. They were intended to be selectively enforced against those undesirable groups who were thought to represent the seeds of civil unrest.
Nobody thought then that upstanding Americans would lose their rights. Those laws were meant to apply to “those people” and not “my people.”
I see some parallels with the push for voter ID and that makes me nervous. It also frankly bothers me to hear each party state that their desire is to protect the system’s integrity when their intentions are so clearly self-interested. While there may not be that much actual voter fraud out there, when you see the Democratic Party fighting for those without IDs, it’s hard not to question their intentions. Likewise, when I see republicans trying to limit who can vote, the sinic in me has to question whether or not they might be more interested in keeping legitimate voters from casting opposing ballots than truly protecting the system.

By: Hanza

Hanza — Thu, 11 Oct 2012 00:47:59 +0000

@MD Matt said: Every study I’ve seen on the subject says that large—scale voter fraud is a myth.

Even *one* instance of voter fraud is one to many.

Several elections cycles ago the current govenor of Washington State was elected through voter fraud.

Ballot boxes had been removed from a storage room for counting. During the counting process another ballot box was “discovered” in that previously empty room. There was a suite against allowing the ballots in that box to be counted but the judge ruled that they could be.

There were enough votes in that box to just barely give the Dem candidate the election.