US Politics: Shryke and Commodore agree (and other signs and portents)

[Fez]

In recent years, Democrats have. Sotomayer and Kagan are 60 and 54 years old respectively.

Still doesn't compare to Clarence Thomas though. The man was 43 when he was appointed, so even though he's served two years longer than Ginsburg he's 15 years younger than her. When all's said and done, he might end up one of the longest serving justices in the court's history, and he's undoubtedly one of the worst post-19th century ones.

If Clinton gets an opening in 2018 or whenever, she should nominate some super-liberal fresh-faced law school graduate in his/her late 20s. Fuck it, its a mostly a political position anyway these days.

[Commodore]

What's the proper method for verifying a voter is who they say they are without violating their voting rights?

[Commodore]

lifetime appointments for judges is stupid

one term, 20 years max

[OnionAhaiReborn]

What's the proper method for verifying a voter is who they say they are without violating their voting rights?

We could go with the system widely in place which offers little to no opportunity for effective election rigging and practically zero examples of in-person fraud, where voters show up and self-identify. It's been working for a long while now.

[TrackerNeil]

Nah, Kennedy is Gollum. He's got the Sméagol/Gollum thing into a fine art.

Heh. Good one.

[Fez]

lifetime appointments for judges is stupid

one term, 20 years max

The one good idea Rick Perry had during the 2012 primary season was propose that SCOTUS justices be put on an 18-year rotating cycle, with one justice stepping down every two years. Under such a system, there'd be no lifetime appointments and no randomness, every President would get two (or four, if re-elected) openings during their time in office.

[Suttree]

We could go with the system widely in place which offers little to no opportunity for effective election rigging and practically zero examples of in-person fraud, where voters show up and self-identify. It's been working for a long while now.

Indeed.

A five-year investigation by President George W. Bush’s Department of Justice netted only 86 convictions for improper voting out of millions of votes cast.

[Commodore]

We could go with the system widely in place which offers little to no opportunity for effective election rigging and practically zero examples of in-person fraud, where voters show up and self-identify. It's been working for a long while now.

That's not a verificaton. You would only know if the real person showed up and their name had already been checked off a voter roll.

FWIW I don't think voter IDs laws stop much/any fraud, but they are hardly unconstitutional. There is a level of effort associated with exercising any right. I'm for making voting more onerous (as long as the effort required is applied equally). Uninformed, unmotivated people voting is a bad thing (I imagine an Idiocracy future where the level of effort required is no more than a hashtag).

Mail/absentee voting/registration is where fraud is most likely to occur. You can do it on a much larger scale with far fewer conspirators.

[Suttree]

Mail/absentee voting/registration is where fraud is most likely to occur. You can do it on a much larger scale with far fewer conspirators.

The simple fact is it's a non-issue so this is pretty much pointless.

[davos]

lifetime appointments for judges is stupid

one term, 20 years max

My god. I agree with Commodore on something.

[Commodore]

The simple fact is it's a non-issue so this is pretty much pointless.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368234/voter-fraud-weve-got-proof-its-easy-john-fund/page/0/1

In states where non-photo ID is required, it’s also all too easy to manufacture records that allow people to vote. In 2012, the son of Congressman Jim Moran, the Democrat who represents Virginia’s Washington suburbs, had to resign as field director for his father’s campaign after it became clear that he had encouraged voter fraud. Patrick Moran was caught advising an O’Keefe videographer on how to commit in-person voter fraud. The scheme involved using a personal computer to forge utility bills that would satisfy Virginia’s voter-ID law and then relying on the assistance of Democratic lawyers stationed at the polls to make sure the fraudulent votes were counted. Last year, Virginia tightened its voter-ID law and ruled that showing a utility bill was no longer sufficient to obtain a ballot.

Given that someone who is dead, is in jail, or has moved isn’t likely to complain if someone votes in his name, how do we know that voter fraud at the polls isn’t a problem? An ounce of prevention — in the form of voter ID and better training of poll workers — should be among the minimum precautions taken to prevent an electoral miscarriage or meltdown in a close race.

After all, even a small number of votes can have sweeping consequences. Al Franken’s 312-vote victory in 2008 over Minnesota senator Norm Coleman gave Democrats a filibuster-proof Senate majority of 60 votes, which allowed them to pass Obamacare. Months after the Obamacare vote, a conservative group called Minnesota Majority finished comparing criminal records with voting rolls and identified 1,099 felons — all ineligible to vote — who had voted in the Franken–Coleman race. Fox News random interviews with ten of those felons found that nine had voted for Franken, backing up national academic studies that show felons tend to vote strongly for Democrats.

Minnesota Majority took its findings to prosecutors across the state, but very few showed any interest in pursuing the issue. Some did, though, and 177 people have been convicted as of mid 2012 — not just “accused” but actually convicted — of voting fraudulently in the Senate race. Probably the only reason the number of convictions isn’t higher is that the standard for convicting someone of voter fraud in Minnesota is that the person must have been both ineligible and must have “knowingly” voted unlawfully. Anyone accused of fraud is apt to get off by claiming he didn’t know he’d done anything wrong.

[OnionAhaiReborn]

That's not a verificaton. You would only know if the real person showed up and their name had already been checked off a voter roll.

FWIW I don't think voter IDs laws stop much/any fraud, but they are hardly unconstitutional. There is a level of effort associated with exercising any right. I'm for making voting more onerous (as long as the effort required is applied equally). Uninformed, unmotivated people voting is a bad thing (I imagine an Idiocracy future where the level of effort required is no more than a hashtag).

Mail/absentee voting/registration is where fraud is most likely to occur. You can do it on a much larger scale with far fewer conspirators.

At least you admit that voter ID law are just attempts to get in the way of people voting by making it more onerous, and having nothing to do with fraud. For the record, the required effort imposed by these laws is not applied equally, and disproportionately disadvantages minorities, the poor, and the elderly. Presumably in light of this fact you'll decide that you no longer support these laws, but I won't hold my breath.

[Gertrude]

My father is staunchly in favor of voter ID laws. He sees those 86 convictions as proof that it happens, not that the occurrence is very, very low. His argument is that these are only the ones that were caught, but that much more is happening due to the difficulty in verifying it. His argument, not mine. But that demonstrates a mindset.

Personally, I don't have a problem with voter ID laws in theory. I do however have a problem with the implementation. I don't think any changes to the voting requirements (including voter purges) should take place within a certain time-period before an election. There needs to be a buffer zone and a requirement to inform people of changes as well as help them resolve any issues they may have as a result of changes.

My mother volunteers at elections, and there is a lot of work involved. One thing she is in favor of is eliminating same-day voter registration. This is the one thing she complains about slowing down the process, backing things up and causing more frustration for everyone involved. I can't say I disagree. I don't think it is asking too much for people to register in advance.

[Suttree]

For how many times you get corrected on these forums, you have to know you've been lied to over and over again across a variety of topics Commodore.

The problem with this assertion—from a new book by The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund and George W. Bush Justice Department attorney Hans von Spakovsky—is that it is not just factually wrong, according to Minnesota Supreme Court records, the Minnesota prosecutor who investigated most of the cases, and some of the country’s top election scholars, but it is intended to rile a segment of the Right that thinks it is patriotic to demonize voting by non-whites and disrupt voting for everyone else.

“They are talking in code to their base,” said Rutgers University’s Lori Minnite, co-author of Keeping Down The Black Vote: Race and the Demobilization of American Voters. “My guess is that von Spakovsky and Fund know exactly what they are doing.”

“There is no basis in fact, whatsoever, in these inaccuracies propagated by the Minnesota Majority here, none,” Hennepin County Attorney Mike Freeman said Wednesday. “After the most closely scrutinized election in Minnesota history in 2008, there were zero cases of fraud. Even the Republicans lawyers acknowledged that there was no systematic effort to defraud the election, none.”

“In Hennepin County, 650,000 people voted,” he continued. “The Minnesota Majority presented us with 1,500 cases that they felt there were problems with voting. Our own election bureau gave us 100. At the end of the day, we charged 38 cases. And all but one of them are felons voting who were still under the penalty [of not legally applying to regain individual voting rights]. There was no fraud.”

Problem being you never do a follow up and acknowledge you were wrong.

[aceluby]

Voter fraud and registration has a simple and elegant solution:

1) Registration for state and federal elections happen when you submit your taxes.

2) If you do not have an ID you can submit a picture with your taxes to have a FREE federal voter ID sent to you.

3) If you move and your ID does not reflect this move, you can still vote with the same ID and a current utility bill.

Done and done.

But do you think anyone proposing voter ID would be for it? Some, but not most, because it's not about voter fraud or registration hassles, it's about making voting and registering as difficult as possible to keep the number of votes down. The reason being that high turnout years benefit Democrats. And who is proposing these? Republicans.

This isn't rocket science.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

OAR,

We could go with the system widely in place which offers little to no opportunity for effective election rigging and practically zero examples of in-person fraud, where voters show up and self-identify. It's been working for a long while now.

No pre-registration requirement? If so, how do you prevent someone from voting at 6 different preceincts? Heck without pre-registration how do you tell if someone has voted at 6 different preceincts?

[Summah]

Voter fraud and registration has a simple and elegant solution:

1) Registration for state and federal elections happen when you submit your taxes.

2) If you do not have an ID you can submit a picture with your taxes to have a FREE federal voter ID sent to you.

3) If you move and your ID does not reflect this move, you can still vote with the same ID and a current utility bill.

Done and done.

But do you think anyone proposing voter ID would be for it? Some, but not most, because it's not about voter fraud or registration hassles, it's about making voting and registering as difficult as possible to keep the number of votes down. The reason being that high turnout years benefit Democrats. And who is proposing these? Republicans.

This isn't rocket science.

Not everyone pays or has to file taxes, and those who don't are often poor people living on social security, disability, tanf, some other type of cash benefit or without cash income altogether, so this plan would disproportionately disenfranchise the poorest of the poor. Not cool.

[OnionAhaiReborn]

OAR,

No pre-registration requirement? If so, how do you prevent someone from voting at 6 different preceincts? Heck without pre-registration how do you tell if someone has voted at 6 different preceincts?

Same-day registration is not widely in place, so it's not really what I was talking about, and isn't the same issue as voter ID laws.

That said, I do think same-day registration should be widely in place, so I'll answer anyway. There is little to no evidence that, where it is in place, same-day registration has been used to commit fraud as you suggest it might. That's probably because it's an ineffective method of rigging elections, considering that you'd need scores of people driving to different polling places undergoing the time consuming process of registering and voting for it to have a significant effect on the election, and an effort of this scale would almost certainly be noticed. Additionally, voters are required to prove their residence when they register, or to cast a provisional ballot.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

OAR,

I do see what you are saying and it makes sense for nationwide or statewide elections. That said what about local races where a couple of hundred people can sway an election? Doesn't same day registration present a risk and because at the local level there is less incentive for heavy monitoring or investigation?

[OnionAhaiReborn]

OAR,

I do see what you are saying and it makes sense for nationwide or statewide elections. That said what about local races where a couple of hundred people can sway an election? Doesn't same day registration present a risk and because at the local level there is less incentive for heavy monitoring or investigation?

I think at the local level- particularly the kinds of local races likely to be decided by a couple hundred people- election integrity is probably protected by community members operating the polls. Say you get twenty people to drive across town to the town's other polling station (if there even is another) and register and vote again, I think there's a very good chance someone in a small community is going to notice this.