The voting fraud dilemma
Commenter “Tom Grey” notes:
The Dems have upped their game on cheating – most Reps refuse to even note that the cheating is happening.
I assume what’s meant there is Republican politicians rather than Republican voters. The majority of Republican voters and those who lean Republican believe the 2020 election was fraudulent and don’t seem shy about saying so.
But many Republican politicians are faced with a dilemma if they want to discuss the issue at all, and their opponents are well aware of their dilemma. In a very red state it probably doesn’t matter. But in any election that promises to be at all close, if the GOP candidate takes a stand on this issue then that candidate risks alienating moderate voters, including moderate Republican voters.
It’s an old old story, although the details keep changing: whether or not to “pivot to the middle” in the general election. The pivot risks alienating the base, and the lack of pivot risks alienating the moderates who are often needed for victory.
The left and the current administration have managed to successfully demonize those who believe the 2020 election involved fraud. The latter are called “election deniers” – as though belief in election validity is some sacred creed and those who don’t believe are “undermining our democracy” and “insurrectionists” as well as “MAGA Republicans.” The message has been relentlessly and quite successfully hammered home, with the help of a complicit MSM.
As I’ve written many times here, once we lose the trappings of election security – voter IDs, strict signature verification, in-person voting – the public is going to doubt the veracity of the outcome of any election that is even remotely close, and some that are not. Without those safeguards, election fraud is possible to pull off and also very difficult if not impossible to prove after the fact. This possibility and the resultant perception of fraud is what “undermines democracy,” whether or not fraud ever occurs or ever can be proven.
l’ve commented before about an audit Washington state did of the signature verification process and rejection rates– looking to see if there was bias at the county level following the 2020 election.
What they did inadvertently find, IMO, is that the rejection rate would be higher if the signatures were accurately evaluated.
One of the recommendations they made was to move away from signatures as a means to verify the legitimacy of the ballot to something like a PIN.
Would that make the voting process more secure? Would people be inclined to share their pin in ballot harvesting schemes?
To read the report, click on “download this report as a pdf”
https://sao.wa.gov/reports-data/audit-reports/evaluating-washingtons-ballot-rejection-rates
It would be unprecidented if the state database of voter PINs were hacked. Not like the state database for professional licenses. (sarc)
Nope, those Democrat minions in Olympia are completely trustworthy, and pragmatic.
African countries have better election procedures than we do. I once thought that the purple ink on voter’s thumbs was primitive and silly. What it is, is low tech and it works. One citizen, one vote. My wife pointed out that the argument that minorities can’t get picture ID is a type of back handed bigotry. “Oh, the poor minorities can’t get picture ID” Why? Are they too poor? IDs are not expensive. Are they too stupid? There is no argument against voter ID that doesn’t insult the voter. EBT cards should be legal picture ID.
On another note I remember, about 25-30 years ago, there was a report about a voting district in Detroit where the Democrat candidate won 104% of the vote.
“The left and the current administration have managed to successfully demonize those who believe the 2020 election involved fraud. …The message has been relentlessly and quite successfully hammered home, with the help of a complicit MSM.”
What they’ve successfully achieved is permanent alienation from the 71+ million who voted for Trump. Through their actions they have removed all doubt of their intentions. What they don’t realize is that we no longer give a sh*t what they think.
We know how to create reasonably reliable and free voting systems, and we also know how to break them down. We know because we’ve installed many of the former in places we’ve helped reconstruct or occupy like Germany, Japan, Iraq, and Afghanistan. And we’ve also either directly broken them down or allowed “our son of a bitch” to run riot over them like in Afghanistan. But we struggle to implement them at home because of domestic opposition, and mostly the Left. Whether it was their favoring voter suppression in the Deep South and New York in the past, or complaining about Voter Suppression in order to stonewall attempts to suppress fraudulent votes.
The problem is that this creates a “Democratic Deficit.” An old saying from Rome is that the Emperor’s Wife must not merely be pure, but must be SEEN to be pure. Likewise, Democracy and Republicanism must not only work, but be SEEN to be working. That’s something the US has struggled with given the long history of political machines, corruption, and vote rigging like from our friends the Tammany and Daley machines, and I fear it is coming to a head.
And take a look at this and try to tell me that this isn’t concerning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VWjBysw0wUM
Even if we’re supposed to pretend this was a singular incident and that nothing will come of it in terms of corroding elections, it is still a huge blow to popular trust. Moreover, it’s not something that can be solved by just “Dump Trump” or “Deify Trump” or “Vote Harder”, and refusing to address it only alienates the base and the public. Angry conservatives risk staying home from parties or pols that won’t address this, the middle of the road voter risks doing the same or just going with the blowing wind to the strongest side like they do, and even many of the more sincere liberals or dissident progs may stay home if they feel they aren’t represented.
And the longer this goes on, the worst it will get. Especially since the left did a superb job demonizing and even criminalizing criticism of this and frank discussion of protest about it, and vast swaths of the right and middle have gone along with it. But the problem is that this doesn’t just hurt the GOP or Conservative independents, in the long term it will hurt everyone. If people see a system is broken and not serving them, eventually they’ll start asking themselves why they should bother sticking with it.
One yuuge (if you’ll forgive the term) plus to the likes of DeSantis is that he has experience fixing this. He turned Florida from being a basket case swing state in 2000 to being solidly Republican and with one of the most impeccable vote integrity systems in the US, and maybe the world. Of course, I don’t think that’ll be easy to fix. 2000 was uniquely humiliating to Florida and the state as a whole was divided so that no overweening party machine could quash it. That’s not going to be so easy with the likes of Virginia, New York, or even Georgia. But I don’t see any other good ways.
Kari Lake has continued her quest to be allowed to inspect the ballot signatures and compare them to registration records, as the case has wound itself through the Arizona courts.
A trial was scheduled for the end of Sept. to allow that, after in May, the Arizona Supreme Court remanded Kari Lake’s suit to review ballot envelope signatures to the Superior Court.
“Specifically, Lake’s claim that Maricopa County violated its signature verification rules during last year’s election was allowed to proceed to trial court after it was improperly dismissed by a lower court, it was ordered.”
——————-
Then in June,“Maricopa County Superior Court judge John Hannah ruled that Mrs. Lake’s request to access affidavit envelopes shouldn’t be dismissed. Mr. Hannah wrote in June that county recorders generally include ballot affidavit envelopes in voter registration records, saying that the court is “not required to defer to the elections officials in how they have historically interpreted” the law.”
“He refuted arguments that were submitted by Maricopa County lawyers, who had argued that ballot affidavit signatures are a portion of the voter registration record. They’re also considered confidential under state law, the lawyers said.
“I am not convinced that the ballot affidavit is a voter registration record,” Mr. Hannah told the Arizona Capitol Times two months ago. “It is a record from which the election officials derive information that becomes part of the voter registration record, but that doesn’t mean the ballot affidavit itself is a voter registration record.”
At the same time, another lawsuit filed by public interest group Restoring Integrity and Trust in Elections (RITE) resulted in a ruling that Maricopa County signature verification process was unlawful.
“The group alleged that Mr. Fontes (Maricopa County elections officials) broke the law regarding mail-in ballot signature verification procedures. Specifically, the group argued that Mr. Fontes’ interpretation of “registration record” in the Secretary of State’s Elections Procedures Manual was unreasonably broad and improperly expanded the pool of signatures to which an early ballot affidavit signature could be compared, increasing the risk of false positives.”
“While state law requires county recorders to match mail-ballot signatures with signatures in the voter’s ‘registration record,’ the Secretary instructed them to use a broader and less reliable universe of comparison signatures,” RITE said in a Sept. 5 statement on the court ruling.
“That means the Secretary was requiring ballots to be counted despite using a signature that did not match anything in the voter’s registration record. This was a clear violation of state law,” the group added.”
—-
“In her statement on the ruling, Ms. Lake expressed relief that the judge ruled that Arizona’s signature matching process is unlawful.”
“Maricopa County’s complete abandonment of signature verification standards has allowed for the integrity of our elections to be washed away,” Ms. Lake said.
Kari Lake Has ‘Utmost Confidence’ in Victory After Court Finds Maricopa County Signature Verification Unlawful
https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/kari-lake-has-utmost-confidence-in-victory-after-court-finds-maricopa-county-signature-verification-unlawful-5487755
The Sept. trial was only to determine whether the envelopes, which voters sign and use to return their early ballot, are a public record under Arizona Public Records Law, which defines what government records the public can see. The law presumes all records to be public, with certain exceptions.
Maricopa county elections officials contend they are not.
As far as I can tell, the judge hasn’t ruled.
Despite Lake’s confidence, I’m not so sure the judge will rule in her favor, despite the fact that the judge ruled in another case the signatures aren’t subject to the same standard as other election records.
So the case will continue back to the Az Supreme Court.
Here’s a summary of the trial.
Trial over access to Arizona early ballot envelopes by Kari Lake goes to judge
https://kjzz.org/content/1858467/trial-over-access-arizona-early-ballot-envelopes-kari-lake-goes-judge
Regardless of the outcome, I hope she continues the fight through the courts. At some point, a judge will realize the catch-22 nature of the impasse. But until then, we can only allege the signature verification is unreliable or non-existent.
In the case of the Washington state audit of signature matches in 2020 the mismatches were somewhere between 2 and 7%. When using software to compare signatures the rejection rate was closer to the 7%. Auditors (friendly to the idea of mail in ballots) squinted at the signatures until they got the mismatches down to around 2%. The official state average is 0.7%.
What 2020 proved to every elected official and every aspirant to any elected office is that if it worth the money to the Left, they can and will cheat so that you lose.
This explains, at least in part, the inaction of the RINOs.
For those elected in solid Red states with solid voting integrity laws, the price to cheat is very high. In solid Blue states, they seldom need to cheat to win but if they do, the cost is very low.
It is the Battleground states (“purple”) where the action is. That’s where our attention should be focused. That’s where it matters. Who can provide a status report on these 6 or so states?
If the vote cheating costs are too high or not workable, they resort to the threat of physical violence. See Senator Rand Paul, assaulted at least twice, Rep. Scalise, almost fatally shot, the conservative members of the Supreme Court with an angry mob outside their doors or with an armed assassin outside Kavanaugh’s door one night.
Where will the Left draw the line and go no further? Where will Americans make them stop?
JFM:
Ami Horowitz: How white liberals really view black voters
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yW2LpFkVfYk
The Left has “the soft bigotry of low expectations” regarding black people.
They actually are exceptionally racist and disdainful of black people as a whole. At the heart of pretty much all progressive race-welfare schemes is the inherent presumption that black people are less capable than “Asians”, who have clearly overcome the issues of racism to the point where they are generally more successful than whites. “But black people, well, they just aren’t capable of doing anything like that, ‘poor things’… THEY need OUR help.”
They’re just as racist as any classic Southern Democrat of the 1930s. They’re just hiding behind altruism to make themselves feel good TWICE. Once for being “better than blacks”, and once for being so “generous to blacks”.
Said it before, I’ll say it again:
PostModern Liberalism is a social cancer. Literally, not Figuratively
Florida has election sheets you sign by your name at your precinct.
I see zero reason that cannot be semi-public knowledge — I say “Semi”, in that it probably should not be published, BUT should be there for open inspection by anyone willing to visit the place of storage. It can even be scanned copies of those same sheets, not allowing general public access to the originals (lest some of them wind up leaving in Sandy Berger’s pants, if you get my drift).
They do much the same thing with court evidence in high-profile murder cases (e.g., something like the OJ murders). The info should be there for public examination, but not in a manner that encourages general voyeurism.
And, as someone who votes routinely, I see no reason why the FACT of my vote is private. The MANNER in which I vote is and should be secret, to prevent reprisals.
Democrats have complained for years about low turnout elections, arguing that if everyone was made to vote then Democrats would win going away every time. (That’s hardly a ringing endorsement – “If all the people who couldn’t be bothered to vote did, we would win!”)
A large part of their strategy for decades has been to mobilize voters who couldn’t otherwise be bothered. That’s exactly what they’ve done with all of their mail-in voting, early voting, ballot harvesting, and similar machinations. (And they certainly didn’t let the COVID crisis go to wast in that regard.)
There are a number of very good reasons why the means that had to use are rotten, and neo lays them out well above. But its done now. The argument for reversing Democrats’ voting novelties now is practically an argument to shrink democratic participation. Absent hard evidence of determinative fraud, that argument is a big fat loser. Outside of the right bubble, arguments for “Election Security” without proof of specific fraud begin to sound an awful lot like complaints that too many people that we don’t like are voting. The fact that so many leaders of the Republican party pushed so many demonstrable lies after 2020 doesn’t help either.
So what’s to be done? Mail in voting and early voting isn’t going to go away, so propose ways to make it secure. Make the argument that clean and accurate voter registrations are vital if we have mail-in voting – basically – be in favor of “easy to vote and hard to cheat” – basically – Brian Kemp.
And don’t count on winning elections based on voting procedure. People just don’t care about it. And most people are jaded by “Stop the Steal” and, therefore, see “election security” as a crazy flag.
And finally, or perhaps first, adapt to the new voting systems and find a way to win elections anyway. Basically GOTV – find low propensity right leaning voters and find ways to mobilize them using the tools that Democrats have introduced.
The alternative is to reenact Grandpa Simpson screaming at a cloud.
“…to mobilize voters who couldn’t otherwise be bothered….”
That’s exactly right.
Especially the dead ones…and the ones who have a predilection—whether it be Nature or Nurture (or both!)—to vote more than once.
(But to be fair, it certainly wasn’t THEIR fault they died, nor was it FAIR to the Democrats, since the deceased WOULD have voted the straight DEM line, you can count on it…so…it’s only right and just to have given them the opportunity…of a lifetime. Kind of like LDS signing up all the deceased for the TRUE religion, I guess…?)
Hey, speaking of predilections:
“Ivy League professor promotes ‘thought-provoking’ pro-bestiality study”—
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/princeton-professor-animal-rights-activist-called-bestiality-thought-provoking
(Lordy…why does it ALWAYS have to be Princeton…?)
what was the joke that buckley made about his father or perhaps grandfather,
(he’s been voting straight democrat 20 years since his death, rimshot) if you really think that arizona is represented by a wiccan lesbian, welll bob’s your uncle,
Barry Meislin – Proof or it didn’t happen. If you can’t provide proof that dead people are voting, then complaining about it is less than useless.
Right-of-center person – “We need to reform voting laws because dead people are voting.”
Leftist – “You can’t prove dead people are voting. Most of the specific fraud allegations made by Trump turned out to be lies. You just want to supress voter turnout by making it harder to vote. And oh, by the way, you’re racist too because the voters you want to supress are minorities.”
How many times do we have to lose this argument?
ONLY Democrats have ever been accused, usually rightly so, of vote fraud. Republicans and Conservatives (like the Party in NY State), NEVER.
Lying, fraud, cheating are parts of the Democratic Party’s way of life. And too many Americans are stupid and/or ignorant of its history. Who invented the KKK? Or Jim Crow laws? The first black Senator was a Republican from Massachusetts! Not any more; the state has been brainwashed with 78% voting for Biden in 2020.
Well I agree that we should be making harder for dead people to vote.
But I guess that would be thoroughly unconscionable.
AND racist—GASP!—against dead people.
OTOH I very much like what the stalwart and indefatigable Kari Lake’s doing with regards to all those signatures that—MY, OH MY—all look alike. (Gosh, how could that possibly have happened?—It’s almost like, like, like all those perfectly punched holes in all those mint-condition ballots. IOW, absolutely amazing!)
But trying to do anything about that would be racist, too…against people with poor penmanship—make that A PERSON with poor penmanship. And one can’t have that, most certainly not!
And so, we present, a combination of The Perfect Crime AND the Purloined Letter (I mean Ballot)—we’ll call it “The Perfect Purloined Ballot” for brevity, which is, after all, the sole of…a very fishy wit…
(And you gotta admit, that the Democrats are chock full a’ WIT…)
Well the white senators like biz markey and red squaw are nothing to write home about
Barry Meislin – You blow right by my point. (Either that or you’re enjoying your flaming strawmen.)
Stop the steal is not a winning argument. It lost both of Georgia’s Senate seats in 2020. It lost Pennsylvania in 2022. It lost Georgia again in 2022. It lost Arizona, New Mexico, and Nevada in 2022. If you want to keep losing, keep running stop the steal candidates.
If you want to win (and make a difference for election integrity) the model is Brian Kemp and DeSantis in FL. (I.e., easy to vote and hard to cheat.)
Frankly, if Kari Lake turns up large quantities of ballots with the same signature, I’ll change my mind. Until then, I’m skeptical. (Also, what does she mean by the same signature? Different names that appear to be written in the same handwriting? Good luck proving that. It’s a Rorschach test. Experts often find it difficult to reach definitive conclusions on whether two writing samples were written by the same hand. That’s a great argument for a different way to validate mail-in ballots, but a lousy argument to reverse an election.)
“Lies”? Specific reports of 2020 election fraud may or may not have turned out to be true — or we may never find out if they are true or not — but people saw things they thought were suspicious, and those reports deserved to be checked out. They were not inventions that people knew to be untrue.
Sadly, Bauxite is right:
” reversing Democrats’ voting novelties now is practically an argument to shrink democratic participation. Absent hard evidence of determinative fraud, that argument is a big fat loser.”
It’s more than right, even with some hard evidence of fraud, reducing the number of voters who vote is a loser argument. I like Vivek’s push for one day voting – but it’s not a winning argument (tho if more Reps pushed it, maybe it would be?)
Every mail-in ballot should be photographed at the time of receipt, before being opened. With daily counts of numbers of vote each day publicized, with access to the daily photos by a county rep of each party on the ballot — Dem, Rep; Green, Libertarian, Am Independent, No Labels (?). These pictures should have less privacy than lists of voters who voted on Election Day.
Before announcing results of counting, the exact total number of mail-in ballots in each mail-in vote counting center should be known and publicized.
Maybe:
Time to have a $100 tax credit/ refund for voting on Election Day (only).
On official ballot envelopes, there should be a black ink pull-off paper, with a required thumb-print on the envelope.
Reps need more on-the-ground folks going around and talking with their neighbors about voting, and making sure their neighbors who vote Rep do actually vote.
Too much is spent by Reps on advertising, not enough on sending nice Rep people to talk to possible voters. (Now I’m thinking of sending a package of two Girl Scout cookies per voter in the household, as a gift for just talking.)
Abraxas – I’m still waiting on the Kraken. And Dominion prevailed in a defamation suit against Fox. Fox paid out over three quarters of a billion dollars, after having access to discovery on the veracity of the claims against Doninion. Call them lies, call them examples of extreme disregard for truth. They hurt either way.
Tom Grey – Good ideas. That is the kind of thinking we need.
Mail-in voting makes it tricky to keep the secret ballot. You would probably need some kind of voter identifier on the outside of the envelope that could be photographed.
Pennsylvania has a system where the absentee/mail ballot has two envelopes. An outer envelope includes voter identifying information and an inner envelope holds the ballot. After the voter is verified, the inner envelope is put into the ballot box. The trouble in PA is that people fail to read the directions and don’t put the ballots together correctly, resulting in a spoiled ballot. There were suits in 2020 to force the state to ignore the law about counting spoiled ballots, and many were counted anyway.
@Bauxite
It also ignores how coercive and invasive it is, as well as the ramifications it has. And it is also one reason why I am leery about the attempts to position it as a duty so unilaterally. The Franchise is a right, privleged, and joy for those that wish to take part in it, and it is one reason why the Founders generally did not ban abstention in most voting bodies (which also made sense due to the era they lived in making technological and logistical boundaries more acute and thus making it absurd to fine someone serving in – say – the State Militia who was away from the polls at the time). It also becomes a nuisance to many countries that have compulsory voting like Australia, and probably without doing much to increase “Democratic Participation.”
Unfortunately the means are still rotten.
Only if you believe that the “voting novelties” improve democratic participation rather than serving as vehicles to diminish it, in a more subtle version of the Liberian 1927 Election, where out of a pool of 15,000 registered voters the dissident Faulkner won 9,000… and the incumbent Charles King won just shy of 230,000 (yes really) until Faulkner cried foul and revealed King’s involvement in the slave trade serving Spanish and Portuguese sugar plantations..
Obviously even Tammany Hall was smarter both at the time and even decades before, but it’s probably naive to assume that we live in vastly different worlds from them. I’ve been harping on the 100+% Voter Turnout in much of Milwaukee and Chicago and Atlanta, and I’m not going to stop, because that indicates the Dem Political Machines there are doing what King did on a local level (because even if we PRETEND that there is a practical way these results could be obtained legitimately, the brutal fact of the matter is that Americans don’t vote at anything like those rates, and even Italians and Australians don’t).
But the Democratic Participation and reduction thereof is going to be the argument they use. So we need to be able to do it.
First and foremost, we do it by hitting them with a “No U.” Pointing out that these novelties are avenues for outright fraud and also for voter coercion. This has already been tried and tested to limited degrees. We need to be bullhorning every conviction for fraud.
Secondly: We need to point out that “Democratic Participation” Has to be balanced with Individual Rights, by pointing to horror stories of Australia and the like where voting is mandatory and it is viewed as a massive nuisance, and how these systems can and are annoyances and infringements upon individual conscience without helping the quality of the vote (which will be useful when they make a push for universal mandatory voting).
Ultimately we do not win these by conceding to allowing these things to remain, and CERTAINLY not on the scale they have been used. THAT is how we get Obamacare being “Settled Law” and also how we get Roe v. Wade existing for decades in spite of being hot garbage.
It’s going to be a big, fat loser if people desperately rationalize reasons to not bring it up. Doubly so given the left’s institutional control over media and messaging. Which is going to be hard to shake, but also makes doing so more important.
This also SHOULDN’T be as much of a big, fat loser. It’s already shaped American history plenty of times, and indeed the Tammany and Daley machines (to cite just a few) underline that by stealing elections like 1960. It also brings the US down to the levels of a Third World Country like the aforementioned Liberia or Venezuela (which I note has the ruling PSUV dictatorship has implemented several similar “Vote Control” measures and dependency systems).
Moreover, we have a somewhat steady drumbeat of people being convicted for voter fraud (mostly expendable lower level goons) and of “errors” or “oopsies” that were clearly POSSIBLY determinative, such as 7% failure rates in the likes of the voter rolls of Washington or Maricopa failing to follow its own standards. Again. The main reason people don’t believe these are determinative is because the Left Media Complex covers these stories with a damn pillow until they stop moving or at least are “No Longer Ripe” and the right generally has a poor track record of doing it, whether we’re talking about Trump or the GOPe. The failure of battlespace prep and battlespace molding has been a consistent flaw in the Republican party for decades.
Moreover, there’s also a cultural problem of Genteel Republican Concession to Dem Shenanigans going back decades. Nobody believed Tammany Hall was honest in the 1860s. Nobody sane believes Chicago Politics is honest. But in general the Right preferred to “graciously concede” for the sake of decorum rather than fight it out in cases like 1960. Which had knock on effects to the point where anybody trying to brook that habit for whatever reason is viewed as a public menace, allowing this stuff to compount.
The time to begin fighting was decades ago, if not a century or more ago. But failing that the time to do it is right now.
The fact that this is going to be contentious and unpleasant and even a “big fat loser” does not in any way change the importance of it.
A: Precisely because the Left in the US has been able to weaponize the history of Jim Crow to paint all attempts at voter security as trying to reinstitute it, and also is able to selectively “localize” stuff by removing global context (and how Poor Untouchable Caste Indians would have every right to look down at us for how insecure our own electoral system is, in a similar way to how the Left will bang on about gun control in Japan while pretending Czechia doesn’t exist and flatly not mention Abortion Control in Europe at all).
B: The Right has generally not been fighting nearly as hard as it should have, and the Republican Party is split on the issue. We do ourselves no favors with the likes of Kemp pretending that Atlanta is all well and good in how it conducts its elections.
Neither of these make the job any Less necessary. They do however make it harder.
This is ironic coming from you, who got caught trying to re-define what “Get Out The Vote” means after I pointed out it doesn’t actually support your claims and particularly your drumbeat of obsession with “Dump Trump.”
https://www.thenewneo.com/2023/11/08/election-results-2/#comment-2707932
It’s also bitterly ironic when Dem Party leadership have been caught pushing far more demonstrable lies. The Russia Collusion scandal and the “Hunter Biden’s Laptop is Russian Disinfo” were far more devious and confirmably false than just about anything a Republican Party Leader has pushed, and that includes Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s less than sane takes.
So why haven’t the Dems suffered for this half as much? Or for things like the inhumane treatment of Jan 6 Suspects (and I have to point out that is Literally What The Overwhelming Majority Of Them Are, SUSPECTS, not convicts)?
To ask the question is to answer is. Leftist institutional control of multiple bureaucracies and especially of the media and messaging in an incestuous, unpleasant ouroboros where the FBI can lean on Twitter or Youtube to justify persecution of anybody pointing out the obvious “suspect cases”, which in turn strangles attempts to gain awareness and momentum for these, which in turn helps translate into lessened political pressure and the ability for Dems to say months or years down the line that that’s Old News and No Longer Germane.
So how do we change that? I wish I had better answers, but I do recognize changing it is vital. In many ways it is far more vital than rolling back individual Dem changes to voting methodology and lack of accounting because message control and awareness will give us more breathing room in detecting shenanigans under the current system and raising the alarm in ways that even the Bureaucracy and the “Left of Center” into either action in accordance with what we want, or humiliating inaction that will allow us to make hay.
The perennial Mark Steyn I think pointed out that forcing the wrong people into situations where they feel compelled to do the right thing is much better than trying to get the right person in. I think that is a lesson we should focus on, especially since many of the truly dire problems here go far beyond any one person.
This is hilarious considering how Kemp’s been the handmaiden to the Dem Atlanta Machine’s fraud, oh excuse me, “Suspicious Returns.”
https://www.naturalnews.com/2020-12-07-georgia-election-counting-boxes-hidden-ballots.html
It also underlines not just the problems with your “Make it Secure” approach and the difficulties there, but also the degree to which that is even possible with several cases, especially with a system that’s already corrupted. Because Personnel is Policy, and since we’re obviously not going to be the people that are selected to choose Atlanta Ballot Counters, it means we need to find better ways to identify and remove those that are rotten and also to get better representatives.
Especially ones that are less willing to play Nixon in 1960 and graciously lose, and who are more willing to play politics as the Dems do. Question the integrity of elections, and demand results.
By this ground alone Kemp is a hideous and revolting failure for allowing his subordinates to smear Trump by selectively editing the audio of his call about electoral integrity. And it’s all the more disgraceful given how Kemp’s state authorities have been party to arm twisting by the Dems, in spite of how Kemp himself had to face persistent smears and “Election Trutherism” from Stacey Abrams, which was largely overcome only by Conservatives and Republicans uniting around him, from Trumpists to the GOPe.
(And yet this past track record tends to be forgotten when people want to blame Trump for his conflicts with Kemp, which shows how convenient memory losses can be.)
That’s unacceptable. And it’s not about being a loyalty test for Trump, because this issue Can and SHOULD be bigger than Trump or even the “Populist” movement. It’s about fundamentally moving the Overton Window.
If you are not willing to stand up to Cook County and its ilk, you are not cut out for what our Republic and Constitution needs, and you are thus not cut out to hold this kind of office. You go. That should also apply to being sloppy with evidence gathering and presentation.
But we don’t solve this problem by arguing with the Left on the finer points of what “Secure” means, at least not primarily. We certainly don’t solve this problem by pretending Atlanta has been rendered into a fine example of republican and constitutional accountability by Kemp’s tenure in office, because it so very obviously hasn’t been. And ironically getting the right personnel in (or out) of office and becoming competitive on the messaging front will help make the issues of mail in voting and early voting less pressing PRECISELY BECAUSE we’ll have more of an immune system to shenanigans and more grounds for raising the alarm without the Goddamn FBI Stormtroopers breaking down the door.
Which even if true goes back to the issue of leftist dominance in the bureaucracy and especially Media. They are jaded and see it as a crazy flag IN LARGE PART because the actual evidence tends not to make the news, and any prosecutions and procedures on the matter tend to go to Page 12, if we’re lucky. Compare/contrast this to the Florida Gridlock of 2000 and coverage thereof, where this stuff entered the mainstream and was bipartisan to some degree (and still helped trigger the spate of Election Denialism we see on the Left from those claiming Gore Won in the face of the evidence, which also points to the limits of the Media).
It also helped spur a fundamental reform in Florida voting, largely under the great leadership of DeSantis. In large part because almost nobody involved wanted to be put under the spotlight and humiliated like that again.
So we need to try and make voter integrity more of a priority. More like the attention it got in 2000. The issue then obviously is: How do you give the bread and butter voter integrity cases or procedurals a fraction as prominent as 2000?
That’s going to be hard and I only have some imperfect answers. But you start by talking about them and making it an issue. Don’t walk away from it by rationalizing that it’s a “crazy flag.” And start picking out evidence – particularly hard and undeniable evidence like I’m going to cover – and stick it to the left.
And don’t quit.
This is ironic because again, I pointed out that GOTV actually isn’t that great of a Conservative Weakness. I spent a great deal of time pointing to “Trumpian GOTV” to the point where you tried to redefine what GOTV even means, but the GOPe has also learned a few tricks.
In either case, GOTV is generally not what loses us elections (to the extent we do). Certainly not while mail in or early voting would make that even easier.
Which is why I keep harping on leftist institutional control and messaging control. Because those are far more consistent killers for us than arguing whether ORCA or Trump’s “Ground Game is in Our Hearts” is the better path forward. Because without the Left’s ability to brush “10% for the Big Guy”, Hunter’s Laptop, Biden’s Racist drivel, Obama’s terrorist ties and racism, and the abuses of Jan 6th Suspects under the table then they would not have anywhere near the amount of victory they have.
This is something Bill Whittle pointed out Years Ago. That without the 80 Point or so leftist media headwind, America votes like Texas. Even if you halve that estimated effect, you still get solid leftist defeats.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bX8E8_S6-04
And this is a bipartisan failure. The GOPe failed to understand the magnitude, but Trump and other populists also failed to do it.
The problem, dear Bauxite, is that we CAN provide proof that Dead People are Voting, and largely indisputable proof at that.
https://revolver.news/2020/12/pennsylvania-election-fraud-exposed-by-suspicious-birthdays/
https://noqreport.com/2020/11/05/william-bradley-from-wayne-county-michigan-voted-for-joe-biden-william-bradley-died-in-1984/
There is absolutely no good explanation for this. Especially the latter. Which is why the Industrial Leftist-Biased “Fact Checks” invariably try to brush this stuff off by claiming “No, William Bradley didn’t vote in spite of Dying in 1984, that result was a clerical Error.”
While overlooking the fact that the mere existence of the clerical error points to a shambolic failure in integrity assessment for this not being red flagged earlier.
Ditto the scads of people with 01/01/1900 birthdates in spite of nobody alive voting, which was excused away by “That’s a placeholder for when the birthdate wasn’t available.” Again in spite of that indicating the identity of these people and the validity of their votes not being able to be confirmed.
Now ask yourself: Have you heard of William Bradley before? If not, WHY?
And if you have, why have you not heard of him MORE?!?!
The problem, dear Bauxite, is that this is bullshit. And the only way they can get away with this being Bullshit is if it is not challenged, Loudly and Vocally.
Because you see, the average Leftist or Left of Center Person, or even an outright Normie KNOWs that dead people vote. Because we can prove it and a bunch of people get CHARGED with doing so.
And how do I know that they know they know?
Precisely because they moved the goal posts from proving Dead People Vote or that Voter Fraud happens (which is generally accepted to happen) to the question of if the voter fraud happened in enough amounts to be “determinative.”
This is a Trap precisely because as Neo pointed out, it’s really hard to determine if fraud was determinative after the fact once it is already baked in. And as Larry Correia pointed out, assessing of Red Flags tends to find far more problems.
So the proper response to Leftist Idiot’s Rebuttal is something like this.
Conservative: “You fucking liar. Of course we can prove dead people are voting, A bunch of people wound up being convicted of this, including some Republicans as your fellow idiots on the Left loved trumpeting with the person who impersonated their mother to vote Trump. You’re trying to gaslight us.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3876216/Drugs-votes-Ballots-sale-Corrupt-poll-workers-magistrate-NUN-Read-list-convicted-voting-fraudsters-ask-SURE-presidential-election-s-integrity-doubt.html
“You don’t get to say most of the specific fraud allegations made by Trump turned out to be lies when their merits were Never Examined and instead they were dismissed by Technicalities.”
“We want to suppress FAKE voter turnout by making it harder for anybody to turn this country into Liberia. in 1927.”
“And this is understandable because it turns out that African Countries Don’t WANT To be Liberia in 1927, nor do most others. Which is why India, Namibia, Botswana, and Chile have far better voter integrity measures than almost any jurisdiction in the US is. Now why are you being a racist gaslighter who demonizes Africans for wanting to safeguard their elections from corrupt and even dictatorial machine politics?”
“And why are you being dishonest by dispossessing minorities of their vote, by putting them in positions where their outnumbered demographic weight can be crushed by not just racial tribalism like the Curley Effect’s Irish Supremacy, but also by the corruption of machine politics?”
This will be a difficult charge to make, but it’s necessary to make it. And the fact that the Republican Party as a whole has not speaks to a great poverty in leadership. But this CAN be a winning issue.
William Bradley and people like him need to be if not front page news, at least a common touchstone in the right wing bubble and among the normies. People need to circulate how many jurisdictions (many of which were curiously in leftist dominated cess pits) allow stuff like 01/01/1900 birthdates to vote in 2020 and elections since then. We need to point out how the “Clerical Error” excuse is just a weak excuse and punt underlining something that shouldn’t have happened in the first place. We need to be open in talking about how most other functioning democracies don’t tolerate this kind of sloppy nonsense and insist on inked fingers and paper ballots.
If the left tries to play the race card, we play it right back. Depending on the civility of the argument, insinuate or outright accuse them of being racists who think Africans don’t want fair elections when the truth is so clearly different as shown by how Charles King’s 1927 “Election” is still infamous to this day. And like abortion, even pitch this as something we could learn from say India or Africa.
And don’t let up. One merciful benefit of this is that Truth is an absolute defense against libel, and there is REALLY no good explanation for 01/01/1900 or William Bradley. So don’t let the left or their fact checkers worm out of it with a cursory “Clerical Error, Not A Problem” (which is itself a paradox because CLEARLY A Clerical error affecting voting rolls IS a problem).
If we can make this more of a meme for the public and get politicians to start talking about Congressional subcommittees about William Bradley or similar cases, we’re making progress.
And that’s ultimately going to be more important than nailing the flag to the mast of any one person, be it Trump, Kemp, or the Great Gazoo. Because people will Let You Down. People will Fail. And even if they didn’t, People will Die, Retire, or become Vegetables.
What matters in the long run will be institutional reform and making the public and conservative cadres more passionate about this.
And we don’t do that by allowing shit like Bauxite’s hypothetical leftist to lie their way out of this.
If we’re losing the argument when we can point to Detroit officialdom on the record trying to explain away William Bradley, that’s an indictment on us.
We need to make it crazy to deny William Bradley is a problem, and make it crazy to dismiss the need for voter reform with accusations of racism.
That’s ironic considering your track record.
This is blowing past the point.
“Stop the Steal is not a winning argument”, you say?
Ok, WHY IS IT NOT A WINNING ARGUMENT!?!?
We have Detroit on record trying to justify how the world should not be concerned about William Bradley voting in spite of supposedly dying in 1984 because you see, he didn’t vote in spite of dying in 1984, that was just a clerical error. In spite of how that clerical error points to a serious and indefensible part of it.
We have India, Botswana, Namibia, and Europe with far greater voter integrity laws than we do. We can turn this into a meme if we want. And indeed some people have.
And it is powerful because at least large parts of it are not in dispute (since even Detroit had to admit William Bradley was an error, they just argue the error was clerical in display rather than something that effected the vote), it is catchy, and it fits with much of what we – and not just in the Right Wing Bubble but American Public Culture – know is true. Detroit’s a corrupt cesspit dominated by the Dems. Making dead people vote is a common form of voter fraud (And indeed the Left took glee in finding one of the few Conservative Trump Republicans caught doing it by pretending his mother was still alive so he could vote for her).
Maybe “Stop the Steal” isn’t the right marketing, but “Voter Integrity” is less (openly) partisan.
DeSantis yes, Kemp No. Kemp as I mentioned has largely co-habitated with Cook County and the Atlanta Machine and has already been showed to be a backstabbing asshole. But that raises the issue of: What helped DeSantis so reform Florida?
Well, at least part of it was the massive bipartisan scrutiny and shame Florida got hit with in 2000. I won’t claim that was all that mattered, far from it, but it was important. And it was an obvious catalyst for Florida’s voter integrity. It also helped break the power of the remaining Dem political machines like Miami Dade.
So pitch it less in connection to Trump (though we can still bring him up) and more asking why Botswana and India have better voting procedures than we do.
And slap down obvious Leftist smears about wanting to be racists suppressing minority votes by shouting back at them and demanding why they are so racist by asking why they think both many of the Darkest “POC” in the World and Western Europeans are wrong on this issue.
Frankly, you should be at least as skeptical as to why Maricopa County violated its own regulations as you are about Kari Lake. Especially because chain of custody is a place where burden of proof is SUPPOSED TO LIE with those that have custody of it.
The left’s ability to shift that with things like “determinative fraud” are great failures.
I’d suggest you follow the legal case better.
While true to some degree, it’s only so far. It also allows for public scrutiny and memability if the divides are particularly glaring, and at least it gets us to litigation.
Indeed, which is why what Powell did and didn’t do needs to be a model for “Don’t Do This.”
To be fair Fox largely threw the case as a result of political bias, as we now know from discovery by Lake and so on. But I also think that underlines why Fox is not an effective platform, either in standing up for its claims or in holding true. It is also a major reason why I ditched American Thinker over similar.
It’s also why I think hitting more on narrower and more defined cases helps. Such as asking why Dominion needs software to split a vote at all, and why they would be installed. This isn’t WWI era Aerial Victories calculating. Votes shouldn’t be split.
But even better is again, getting it narrower and more personalized. Pace Disney, the Dead may or may not speak, but they do Vote. This isn’t subject to serious dispute, as the convictions show. The only question is of the magnitude of it, but that’s in many ways a deflection we need to avoid dealing with in favor of hammering down how this is unacceptable, and attempts by the likes of Detroit to trivialize it are even Less acceptable.
Agreed, but it is necessary.
Considering the corrupt shenanigans in much of Pennsylvania, I doubt that is the only or even main “trouble.” Especially given the power of the Philly Machine.
https://legalinsurrection.com/2020/11/philly-election-day-shenanigans/
People can expend an awful lot of effort not comprehending something if their job or political wellbeing depends on it.
But it is a good idea.
However, we also need to share the danger and make it much more acceptable to question the outcome of elections, as the left does. We need to make normies more familiar with William Bradley and how the “clerical error” there is emblematic of sloth, corruption, and incompetence in Detroit. Moreover, it needs to be fairly grass roots. Dominion has a lot of resources but they can’t sue all of us and win.
That will dovetail well with these other measures and help take the sting out of the capacity for abuse with the new Dem novelties by allowing more breathing room to detect problems and making it more acceptable to cry and audible.
And setting aside whatever differences we have (and at least some of us have DIFFERENCES), I think it’s hard to understate the importance of this. Not even because of having the GOP win elections (though that’s incredibly important), but because of the alternative. If we don’t fix this kind of decay in our republic, it will “fix” us. And I don’t think most of us or the public at large will like the alternatives to that.
@Abraxas
Exactly so, and this is something Larry Correia made clear. Red flags and smoke may or may not be anything, but they are something to check out. It’s basic due diligence and helps exonerate the innocent or the mistaken but condemn the guilty and quarantine grey area suspect cases.
@OBloodyHell
Agreed and well said. I’m sure clever and malicious actors could find ways to make reprisals on the fact of your voting, but it makes it hard.
And making acknowledgement of the fact of your voting is key for things like the William Bradley case and the 01/01/1900 ones, which even if not criminally actionable (though they probably should) can be ammunition for the public debate and help humiliate our opponents.
@Tom Grey
Largely agreed, at least if it is anything like the main push. However I do think coerced or mandatory voting would be a loser (which is one reason the Dems haven’t pushed for it in addition to it probably taxing the limits of their resources). but the main pushes need to be on other things.
Largely agreed. Moreover, if we made that our hell or high water stance we’d have to run into the Left pointing out absentee balloting with Lincoln in the Civil War and the Military, and while there are obvious differences it’d make it harder to appear consistent.
That said I do think Vivek should be able to agitate for it. It helps move the overton window to some degree, and at a minimum it gives other candidates the ability to play off against him and appear “moderate.”
That sounds promising, though part of me fears the massive growth in bureaucracy (which leans Left) it would require, as well as creating a regular repository of who voted election by election that could theoretically be used by bad actors. But I suppose it is far better than what we have and “a regular repository of who voted” is what we want.
Smart, and that makes a lot of sense.
Agreed. I think this is one of our big problems. We need to provide SOME contest to the Dems on their ground, but focusing too much in it or adverts is a stinker. They’re not super effective for us and they cost a lot. GOTV and base mobilization are better, especially since they tend to carry on our information warfare. Some surgical adverts would be nice, and they could help highlight things like the William Bradley case, but trying too much glam and not enough slam has been a consistent problem across the board for the Republicans.
Baker and carter pointed out the flaws in the system a dominion whistleblowers pointed out issues helderman had already diagnosed
“Frankly, if Kari Lake turns up large quantities of ballots with the same signature, I’ll change my mind. Until then, I’m skeptical. (Also, what does she mean by the same signature?” – Bauxite
They are looking for forged signatures- signatures that don’t match. The only way that can be done is comparing the signature on the voting registration form to the signature on the ballot envelope. So far AZ has kept anyone from seeing the signatures on the envelope– which is digitized.
Until Maricopa county through the courts requires a signature match review, we won’t know how legitimate our elections are.
In the case of Washington state, during an audit of the 2020 election, 7257 ballots envelopes were selected and run through a software that compared the signature. 542 signatures were rejected, which is a 7.6% rejection rate. These signatures were then analyzed by teams of auditors that had been trained in recognizing forged signatures. After multiple examinations, the auditors finally found 157 signatures that didn’t match, a rejection rate of 2.1%. The caveats about this audit is not all counties in Washington digitize their envelope signatures, so 16 counties that do were chosen for the sample. The audit didn’t identify the counties, but one of the counties was King (the most populous county in the state). The rejection rate in King was 0.86% and the statewide average was 0.7%, so it’s safe to say that somewhere between 1.3% and 6.8% of the ballots in 2020 were suspicious. Now if a ballot is rejected in Washington state the ballot goes though a curing process where the voter is contacted and allowed to fix their signatures for up to 10 days after the election. What we don’t know as it wasn’t addressed was how many of those ballots were cured–accepted after contacting the voter.
In the case of Washington, we are so blue these discrepancies are unlikely to affect a national election– though it could have tipped a governor’s race or two.
But in purple states like AZ or PA, these illegal ballots could affect an election.
That wasn’t the case in PA, so the PA Supreme Court ruled that ballots couldn’t be rejected if the signatures didn’t match between the envelope and the signature on the voter registration card. As long as their was a mark in the signature box on the envelope, the ballot was accepted.
In the case of AZ, in the 2020 election, during the primary election 3000 ballots of 860,000 or 0.3% of ballots were rejected. Of those only 242 were for mismatched signatures. The rest were for no signatures.
Why such a low rejection rate? Could be a couple of reasons. One could be the cost of curing a ballot– which is labor intensive. Accepting a signature, even if it is questionable reduces the time and cost for the county.
The signature verification process may be unreliable– until we can come up with software that everyone agrees is reliable. The software can be tuned, but we’re back to the same partisan wrangling about how critically should the software compare the signature– where is that level where signature variations are allowed– but forged signatures are detected.
Concerned Conservative™ is so precious and not so clever; lumps all the deplorable election enhancement under the lost cases of Dominion and the Kraken. CC™ the doubles down and decrees that all the losses in 2022 are, what, the OMB?
Sing the praises of Kemp who couldn’t clean up Fulton County, or the Arizona concerned conservative Republicans who couldn’t get the vote scanners to work, but still love’s their “Maverick,” RIP, more than any effective opposition to Democrats?
But wait, there was even more, buying into the Democrat “expansion of democracy” which is expansion of the franchise, i.e., voting by non-citizens, felons, the children, the dead, and of course by fraud.
CC™ is truly, Shirley, precious.
I meant to say PA didn’t have a ballot curing process codified, so the PA Supreme Court ruled that ballots couldn’t be rejected because of signature mismatch– only if there were no signature in the signature box. As long as their was a mark, the ballot needed to be accepted.
Pennsylvania Supreme Court says ballots can’t be rejected based on signature comparisons
https://www.politico.com/news/2020/10/23/pennsylvania-court-ballot-signatures-431794
https://twitter.com/Rasmussen_Poll/status/1723744869644898646
@ Turtker > “adverts is a stinker. They’re not super effective for us and they cost a lot. GOTV and base mobilization are better,”
Some suggestions:
There is not as much money for consultants and their enormous fees in GOTV & base activation as there is in producing advertisements, polls, think tank policy papers, etc.
Ever wonder why the same groups continue to be hired election after election despite miserable results?
Because many of them are staffed by the candidates’ family and friends, IYKWIMAITYD.
In many states, candidates can keep what’s left of their donation bank accounts even if they lose.
The Democrat National Party wants all of its candidates to win the general.
The Republican National Party actively sabotages GOP candidates they don’t want.
@AesopFan
On the whole agreed.
Honestly this is one area where I disagree. To be sure there might not be QUITE as much money for consultants, but there is still plenty of action to be had for them. Taking a look at the sheer largesse involved when people really want it (like the consultants and advisors we sent to the Nicaraguan Opposition when helping vote Ortega out of office, though unfortunately it didn’t stick, or to the Ukrainian Orangeites) there’s a lot to be had.
i think that’s a huge part of it, but also the political connections and graft. The regularly revolving door.
Largely agreed. And to be air there are RARE occasions when sabotage can be justified, like that time David Duke won the primary. But while there is a vast gulf between “Never Justified” and “ALMOST never justified” that is clearly exceeded here.
And we also saw this at hand with the GOP spiking a lot of the lawsuits, and on the more local level. Kemp should have been shunned like the backstabber he was the second he failed to denounce his subordinates for lying about Trump’s call and failed to produce the accurate recording, because it showed they were acting with his support. Which is one reason why I find cloying homages to him by the like of Bauxite to be so out of step with the reality, but not more than his coziness with Fulton and the Atlanta Machine. Comparing him to DeSantis seems so odd in large part because of how different they and their policies are, and how on closer inspection they don’t have too much in common beyond being neighboring Republican Governors who Trump supported in elections but later fell out with (and while I continually criticize Trump for his behavior towards DeSantis, I THOROUGHLY understand his reaction to Kemp).
The relationship between the GOPe as a whole and the party base has taken on a lot of the shades of an abusive relationship. I see it in things like the compulsive gaslighting, the “You didn’t really see wards turn in 202% of the vote”, the idea that the Populist wing hasn’t spent enough time in coalition building (memory holing the fact that we generally show up to support the likes of Kemp and DeWine at the ballot box and how Trump stumped for these people energetically prior to 2020), and spending more time mimicking the left’s propaganda than confronting it. Which is why I asked: Why have you not heard more of William Bradley? Because if the explanation is “It’s a big, fat loser”
A: I don’t believe you.
B: That just raises questions on WHY exactly dead men voting or “clerical errors” depicting such in humiliating fashion for Detroit are big, fat losers.
and
C: Why should we give the MSM an easier time hushing this up with a cursory “Fact Check” that raises more questions than it answers upon close scrutiny?
Ironically of all the “GOPe” figures I think can be useful inspiration, Dubya Bush’s lawyering about 2000 in Florida by forcing Gore etc. al. to try and prove every single case and admit under oath they were using uneven criteria helps. It ultimately was enough to win, and it is a much more useful metric than genteel concessions to the likes of the Chicago Machine. Especially since the Powers that Be in Chicago now make the Daley Clan look like saints.
This kind of nonsense needs to be named and shamed. Especially the conflation of cases where the merits were not examined or were covered up with “lies” and refusal to scrutinize one’s own camp.
Brian E – Signatures are just a really awful way to verify mail-in ballots. Even if you do computerized comparisons, there’s a significant fudge factor and a lot of variability. It really is a Rorschach test, which is why courts keep throwing out signature comparison. (I doubt any of us here would trust a Democratic precinct worker to match our mail-in signatures, and they don’t trust us either.)
It would be expensive, but not difficult, to come up with some kind of two-factor authentication for mail-in votes. But it would also require voters to prove their identity and obtain a token sometime before the election. And that’s why Democrats would fight it tooth and nail.
I don’t think that fraud isn’t the Democrats priority (although I don’t think they really care how they get their votes). Democrats’ game is to turn out as many low propensity voters as possible by making it as easy as possible to vote. Anything that requires the voter to do anything more than filling out a ballot is going to be demogouged as “racist” and “white supremecist,” especially any sort of multi-step process. They have rejected simple voter registration requirements on those grounds.
That’s the challenge. Go charging once again into the teeth of the propaganda machine or get creative.
Is this your card
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2023/11/12/green-energy-buys-itself-a-legislature/
@Bauxite
They’re imperfect but they’re certainly better than what we have. Especially if we are stuck with main-in ballots for the foreseeable future. But a bigger issue I find is in who is doing the verification and who is judging them. And obviously if you have judicial or legislative fiat demanding all ballots with ANY mark be counted regardless of if they have “Lol Fraud” written in the signature, you’re not going to get far.
That’s true, but that’s also why it is important to have the human factor involved and avoid one party dominance.
No, it really isn’t. And it’s also worth noting that the Rorschach test is and remains one of the most scrutinized and studied systems on Earth, and it still was developed something like 300 years after the advent of handwriting analysis in the Renaissance/Graphology (and that indeed might actually be a slight understatement).
Forgive me if I express due skepticism about this and ask to see how these courts have ruled on handwriting and signature evidence and the evidence thereof in cases UNRELATED to vote authenticity. Because I highly doubt courts in their day jobs treat handwriting analysis as a “Rorshach” test given its long pedigree. I DO believe they treat it as a jousting arena with competing experts arguing based on who pays them as well as the evidence, but that’s just modern criminology for you.
So I believe this is more of an indication in the double standard we have for vote integrity, and how legislatures and courts will allow much diminished standards of responsibility for the vote than they would ever allow for say the ballot.
Which is perfectly good and indeed DESIRABLE because our system is meant to work as an adversarial balance of power, where no major party fully trusts the other. The issue is how to use it.
Which is why ballot authenticity and signature comparison should be done by mixed teams of Dems, Reps, Independents, and Experts looking them over. This means that the mistrust works for we, the voting public, because the inherent bias involved in any one actor will be checked by the others.
This is also why to be honest I’m coming around to the idea of “forced busing” for voter districts, with vote observers and ballot counters in a given precinct having a certain amount of their number coming in from elsewhere while some in the home precinct get sent out. This will help undermine or break the strangleholds of machine politics like those in Fulton, Cook, and previously Miami Dade and also make it much harder to have even thoroughly corrupt and politically motivated people engage in fraud.
This will likely make the counting process more cumbersome and a bit longer due to the number of eyes on it, but that’s acceptable. Indeed, we can even try pitching it to the left as avoiding more election lawsuits and another 2000 or 2016. And while I am sure the political machines and hardcore Dem Party operatives know better than to ever buy this, it might be surprisingly appealing to the rank and file.
Agreed, but that’s also why we have to fight tooth and nail for it.
I think it is A priority, and also that they are reliant on a regular drumbeat of political mobilization and fraud in solidly leftist machine jurisdictions like Fulton and Cook to be the foundation of their political strategies. This is also why I think looking for “election deciding” fraud is a trap and goal post shift, because it forms a basis of their calculations and not just an added one.
It also is why going after fraud alone is only one issue.
I’d also add in that another core step they have is in relentless propaganda and messaging control, so that those low propensity voters don’t know much but they do “know” the GOP is the enemy, any given Republican is a Devil, and their Presidential Candidate is Literally Hitler for the duration of the elections.
It’s hard to understate how devastating this is because it allows them to get away with far, far more than they could ever hope otherwise. That’s also why I think contesting the informational space is so important.
It also doesn’t stop on election day. Just take a look at the Hamas propaganda about the Hospital and how that has spilled over, and ask yourself how this is better.
There are many ways to get creative, not all of them effective. I’m definitely not opposed to it (which is why I propose things like turning William Bradley into something middle America knows about), but one issue we often have is lack of good old persistence and hard work. In particular we need to double down on things like signature verification, by pointing out that any court that refuses to use it for votes has almost certainly had people sentenced for capital crimes on it. In what way are our votes less important?
And also work on clamping down on and punishing leftist agitprop and smears, both financially and hopefully legally in the cases where they clearly slide into libel or slander. And at least as much, we need to seriously punish the Liz Chenys, Brian Kemps, and John McCains of the world to prevent defections or “convenient” Mavericky behavior. If political polarization be our fate, it is not something most of us would adore but so be it. Unwarranted cooperation with the Dems – especially to the point of backstabbing your party or base – needs to be something that can get you flung out of office and/or the party.
CC™ thinks that signatures are a
I’m shocked that an awful means of validation was the only method allowed, and even more shocked that the court’s action was to require all mail in ballots to be accepted. You might think that was the intent all along, that mail in voting is intended to be easy and insecure?
Inconceivable.
Turtler – I just don’t think that signature verification is going to be effective. Except in the most eggregious of cases, there is simply is no objective way to do it.
Scenario – A ballot has a signature that appears to be a clear mismatch. The Republican observer challenges it. The Democrat observer disagrees. OK, now what? You have to adjudicate something as nuanced and subjective as signature matching on a ballot-by-ballot basis? With one side insisting that black is white and up is down? No doubt supported by examples of people whose signatures look different from day-to-day? With a judicial system that has repeatedly indicated that it will err on the side of not throwing out a completed ballot?
Another issue is that many of us don’t sign our name that often anymore, and many of the times that we do it is on those stupid electronic pads at odd angles. I strongly suspect that there actually is a lot more variability in people’s signatures today then there was 10 or more years ago, simply from lack of practice.
There needs to be another way. And frankly, if I were on the D team, I would concede signature matching and argue that it makes two-factor authentication, or other more secure methods, unnecessary.
I think the best political argument for the R team is to admit that signature matching is mostly worthless and argue that mail-in balloting is currently on the “honor system.” (Which is is.) And that, because of this, we need two-factor authentication or something else that works. Perhaps add that you need two-factor authentication to check the balance of your checking account. Of course it makes sense to have the same level of security for the most important thing that we do as a democracy.
Two factor authentication to start your car. Two factor authentication to check your debit card balance; who uses a check book anymore? Two factor authentication to stream or view adult content? Two factor authentication to comment on a blAUTHENTICATION FAIL – AUTHORITIES NOTIFIED
Dis is topian times two!
@Bauxite
I agree it’s not likely to be TOO effective in and of itself, but that’s why it should be used as one of several safeguards rather than a definitive one. If worst comes to worst it can be a bargaining chip to be given away in exchange for allowing another methodology.
Firstly, even if I granted this premise were true (and I do not) getting only the most egregious cases would still be a net positive. It’s sure as hell better than what we had in Pennsylvania.
Secondly, I [b] don’t think there is “simply no objective way to do it.” [/b] And legal precedent says I am not the only one. This is an incredibly old and widely observed science, and while like many old sciences it has gone through false starts and missteps it is still used to this day. Indeed, it is almost certainly used to help uphold convictions in almost every jurisdiction where it was disavowed for use verifying votes. Which means that the relevant jurisdictions need to be asked very pointedly if they want to apply the same standards they claim for ballots as they do to their conviction rates, and also to weigh them against those of other, foreign jurisdictions which continue to receive evidence.
Because it is rare to find a court with criminal or civil jurisdiction in the developed world (and many outside of it) that does not accept forensic handwriting evidence. It may not be accepted Across the Board, and it almost certainly is not accepted without contest, but accepted it is. Or else there would be exponentially fewer forensic handwriting expert witnesses selling their talents and knowledge around.
Now, the job is a lot harder in the context of votes both because of the smaller sample size (usually just a signature) and also the time constraints (due to ballot counting) as well as the huge workflow, as opposed to semi-leisurely examining several documents in a specific criminal case. But that just informs the problems and difficulty this field would work in, it doesn’t mean it can’t be done at all.
And we need to start pointing this out to jurisdictions claiming otherwise. It may never be our main line of defense, but it should be fought for and fought fiercely, because it is another tool in our kit, and something the public (inundated with CSI and other forensic or crime procedural shows and popcorn history or “history” documentaries) will be familiar with.
Simple. The same thing that would happen if the Republican believed the vote was authentic and the Dem didn’t, or the inverse. It gets chucked into a suspect “pile” along with the envelope for more dedicated scrutiny, at which point you start running through a check list of indicators for malfeasance or fraud starting with the lowest of low hanging fruit (such as if this person is registered to vote in our rolls at all, or if their birthday is logged as 01/01/1900) and escalating. This continues on until one side or the other persuades the others (such as the Dem coming around to believing the vote is fraudulent, or the Republican dropping their objection).
If no consensus is reached, the ballot gets chucked up for more dedicated, forensic analysis by the expert witnesses.
The problem is setting all of this up, because once it is established it will work REASONABLY well for government work. But it would involve massive scaling up of things such as numbers of expert witnesses, training observers in the new system, and so on.
Yes, if it comes to that you need the ability to do so. But it will likely rarely come to that because signature matching is not the only arrow in the quiver and you can use them in concert to establish a high probability of fraudulence or at least error. And because it’s adversarial it becomes a lot harder to corrupt.
Again, we deal with things like that day in and day out in the running of a civil society. Indeed, as Rufus pointed out regarding Deshowitz regarding OJ’s “Dream Team” we have some cases where we literally structure the system to have adversarial insistence. It’s the legal system, and we already have elements of it in our own vote counting.
So what you do is you get people to sign oaths on subject of perjury and negligence that they will swear by the authenticity of this ballot and the results taken to ensure its authenticity, and that they took reasonable steps to ascertain the results thereof. This imposes legal penalty, and while in practice it’d be moderately easy to beat (by simply claiming people are only human) it will impose some accountability.
If only we had centuries of scholarship on this very issue, as well as not a little bit of legal wraggling…. Maybe something that dates back to the 1500s?
This is quite literally one of the defining subjects of forensic handwriting analysis. Which recognizes that peoples’ signatures do vary from day to day, hour to hour, and year to year. But that the way they vary and evolve is finite and tends to develop in certain ways. And the authenticity and merit of these fields of study has been tested time and again in courts across the country and beyond and it is generally held to be legitimate fields of study and to have evidentiary merit.
As one should hope considering how many people have been convicted or acquitted on strength of that and how much of a scandal it is when an “expert” gets caught behaving badly.
Which is fine, because to be honest that’s probably how we should hope the legal system should err, in keeping with Innocent Until Proven Guilty.
The issue is that we need to impose additional difficulties in getting it through that. We can’t afford to have Pennsylvania allowing any old scratch to go in. This is not our only effort, nor should it be our only one. And to be a honest a huge portion of the signatures detected from it will probably not be invalidated Because of it, but because of other things like the vote rolls not matching up or a dead certificate being found.
And that’s ok. Because the key is to have multiple, intertwining threads of evidence that can combine to indicate guilt or innocence. The key thing is to fight for them, and also not to get distraught because no one measure is a silver bullet.
Which is fair, and I’m one of those in addition to being someone who doesn’t really “sign” at all so much as print. And that’s been a very real subject of study for forensic handwriting. Made worse in my opinion by the reliance on many voting stations on them (for instance, I had to do one by writing it with pencil, and another by writing it on a scanner with my finger). Neither were supremely good, but both displayed some telltale traits of my signature that would be hard to fully replicate.
Let’s not assume that this stuff isn’t being studied and fought over, because it is. Indeed, we’re already dealing with legal cases on this, and frankly the answer is probably more legal scrutiny for these signatures and the methodologies rather than less. Even if – again – the threshold for error has to be set high meaning most errant signatures would get missed.
Because some standards are better than none, and they’d set something we can work towards.
Yes, and there are. Many of which I’d focus our efforts on more such as pruning voter rolls and imposing physical ID like we see in most functioning democracies. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t give up signature authentication and scrutiny without a fight, because if nothing else it’s a measure.
Firstly, we’d then wallop them with cases abroad showing that is not the case.
Secondly, signature matching should not be our main focus in comparison to other measures, including two factor identification. It’s something we are prepared to give up to get a better result, not something we sacrifice to get.
This is a monumentally bad idea because in addition to undermining one of our oldest forensic sciences, it would probably have shockwaves that would radiate FAR beyond signatures. Because even if your average Richard Daley corrupt Pol doesn’t want to have criminals running on the street and wouldn’t want to translate a victory at blocking signature verification into a means to exonerate crooks, there are doubtless many wannabe Squad members and “Justice Democrats” that would. And would immediately take your admission that signature matching is “mostly worthless” to the Courts of Appeals and demand we let a bunch of convicts out.
And THEY WOULDN’T BE WRONG to do so IF signature matching is “mostly worthless.” It’s just that I don’t think for a second it is and I am pretty sure nearly half a millennia of study on the matter ratifies that.
If signature matching is not the hill to die on in terms of voter authentication (and I concede it may not be), then we barter it off in exchange for other concessions or if worst comes to worst we drop it.
And that’s putting it generously.
Agreed and that should be our main focus. But that doesn’t mean we can afford to let up pressure on other fronts. And it certainly doesn’t mean we should throw out hundreds of years of forensic writing research. It can and has had its uses, even if in the modern environment those uses are relatively secondary due to the limitations. And again, even getting rid of the most blatant signature fabrications is a positive.
So is flagging suspect signatures that can then be scrutinized for low hanging fruit evidence of fraud (or not so low hanging fruit). You don’t need to base the exclusion solely on signature matching in order for signature matching to be useful, like it if raises a red flag on a ballot for someone who died a week before early voting began. It should be part of an integrated system of vote security and authentication, even if it isn’t the only or main part of it.
Marc Elias, whose firm Perkins and Coie, operates behind Xi’s Chinese firewall, is an architect of destruction, of the balloting system. he took the framework that frances piven, set up and went into the weeds
the Baker-Carter commission, noted the flaws in the system, but that was the point if you want disenfranchise legitimate voters,