Monday, October 29, 2012

Pants on Fire # 21: Voter Fraud

The Lie: Democrats and liberal organizations have been committing voter fraud, and it's only the fantastic new Republican-passed laws against voter fraud that will save our great nation. 

The Truth: Instances of actual voter-ID and registration fraud are minuscule (something like 6 cases in the past 20 years), while Republican legislatures and voting officials are actively conducting voter fraud to influence elections in their favor. Now. Especially the Romney campaign.

This letter from a Dear and Gentle Reader elaborates on the issue:  

Dear Madame L,  

I feel like I live in the United States of Iran, where elections are rigged, a religious minority rules, and people in other countries where they have a free press and real news talk about how corrupt our government is. 

How sad is it that I got excited when RTV, the English-language news network, got picked up by my local cable TV news provider? I can now watch a news program where the stories covered aren't chosen according to some American's political persuasion.

I find that exciting because I think I'm getting neither true stories nor the really important stories from any U.S. news sources.

Specifrically, it turns out that, according to these foreign politi-watch groups, the U.s. Republican Party is actually attempting to steal this presidential election!

And now that other countries are sending election monitors here to observe--remember when the U.s. used to be the one that monitored elections in other countries?--local officials in Texas and elsewhere are threatening to harass and arrest these people.  

Sincerely,

Voter Fraud, My Goodness



Dear Friend,

Thank you for alerting Madame L to these news articles. Madame L had heard something about this, but as always she appreciates hearing from her Dear Readers with new sources.

The truth is that the Republican Party's supposed attempts to curb so-called voter fraud by Democrats and groups like Acorn (which they managed to shut down over lies and false accusations), the Republicans are themselves guilty of overt and covert attempts to manipulate the elections on many levels.

From the UK Progressive article:
   
    "Retired NSA analyst Michael Duniho has worked for nearly seven years trying to understand voting anomalies in his home state of Arizona and Pima County. This publication has written extensively about apparent vote machine manipulation in a 2006 RTA Bond issue election that is still being fought in the courts.
 
     "Said Duniho, 'It is really easy to cheat using computers to count votes, because you can’t see what is going on in the machine.'

    "When Duniho applied a mathematical model to actual voting results in the largest voting precincts, he saw that only the large precincts suddenly trended towards Mitt Romney in the Arizona primary – and indeed all Republicans in every election since 2008 – by a factor of 8%-10%. The Republican candidate in every race saw an 8-10%. gain in his totals whilst the Democrat lost 8-10%. This is a swing of up to  20 point, enough to win an election unless a candidate was losing very badly.
Francois Choquette wondered why the differences were so much larger in larger precincts, and here's what he found, again, quoting from the article:

    "[Choquette] examined and applied all of the normal statistical markers to see where a variance might occur: income level, population density, race, urban vs. rural, even party registration numbers. He found no correlation to explain why Romney votes trended upward while Paul and Santorum votes trended downward -yet only in large precincts.
     "Choquette then looked at all 50 states and found roughly a 10% switch in votes from Democrat to GOP. This was noted in every state except Utah, where the presumption was, as it was Mitt’s religious home state and very conservative, there was no chance of Romney losing and no variance was found."
Why does this not always work? Choquette found that it can be influenced by large vote margins:
     "Choquette even saw in Maricopa County, which is Phoenix and its suburbs, that in 2008 Romney used this technique against John McCain. But McCain beat him by too much for a 10% fraud gain to matter. McCain tried to do the same thing in the general election to President Obama but 9 million votes nationally were too many to make up."
And so, Dear Readers, we learn that our elections have turned into opportunities for unscrupulous and immoral politicians to win what they want, even when it is not what the general public wants. Have we turned into some kind of banana republic? 

We must all fight against this dishonesty in the public arena so our government won't be run by a bunch of crooks!

Sincerely,

Madame L








2 comments:

AskTheGeologist said...

I suppose what bothers me the most is the deliberate and cynical attempt to use a non-issue to gain a dishonest advantage in an election.

We have been complaining about the rigged elections in the Ukraine and Venezuela... but if we do so, we are hypocrites.
~~~~~

AskTheGeologist said...

This is one of those things that would be hard to nail down before the election. However, having raised the issue, you can bet that there will be people tuned to watch for any evidence cropping up.

AFTER the election, if there WAS any fraud, there will be an inexorable legal process that will see people doing jail time. You can't want your guy to win so badly that you would risk that, now would you?

Uh... WOULD you?
~~~~~