Election being called for Harris

Stop hedging Tiny. It’s not they MAY have lied. It’s they lied. It’d be easier for me to respect your opinion even if I disagree if you didn’t keep the lies going with your noncommitment to stating truth.

I mostly agree. The number of fraudulent votes on the Heritage database isn't miniscule, but there are rarely enough to sway an election. And even in those cases it's a pissant local election nobody cares about.

Having forged fake school ID's to buy beer, I disagree on that point.



Trump and his proxies may have lied but this hasn't been going on for 20 years. More like a few months in 2020 and 2021. Yes, they did hope to massively disenfranchise voters in a handful of states, and limit voting to a few dozen alternate electors.

But otherwise the purpose of voting legislation advocated by Republicans has usually been to make elections more secure, not to have fewer voters. Democrats have convinced their base that the Repubs are trying to prevent them from voting though, and as you say, that has increased their participation. You prohibit Dems from passing out barbecue and beer in election lines and you have a lot of pissed off Democrats. Originally Posted by Tiny

The numbers from Heritage are miniscule. MN, the state with the most cases (and a small population, so the highest percentage) has less than 0.0005% fraudulent votes of all votes cast in the last twenty years.

The question then becomes why pass restrictive laws when the elections are secure. As we see with all the suits Republicans bring, they want fewer votes to count. It would take a helluva spin to make that less than glaringly obvious.

The Brennan Center tracks how those restrictive laws work, how they burden eligible voters.

You might want to have a look at how France does its voting. It’s very very local and it does appear to be far quicker than US voting. They do have some advantages, it takes place on Sundays when most people are not working (rather than midweek) and because it’s so local it can be in person and hand counted on paper ballots. In fact people out side of France in their territories actually poll there rather than mailing in votes.

Their entire electorate is less than the votes any major party candidate has received in an election since I’ve been able to vote. So there is that. Originally Posted by 1blackman1

My polling place is my church. That wouldn't fly. Day needs to be a weekday to not disenfranchise a few major religions

Stop hedging Tiny. It’s not they MAY have lied. It’s they lied. It’d be easier for me to respect your opinion even if I disagree if you didn’t keep the lies going with your noncommitment to stating truth. Originally Posted by 1blackman1

PLEASE. "May" was an admission they lied, not a hedge. Read all of what we both wrote. How could I agree with you, and also say, "They did hope to massively disenfranchise voters in a handful of states, and limit voting to a few dozen alternate electors," without believing they lied?

Cognitive dissonance? Rationalization? Irrational thoughts?

The numbers from Heritage are miniscule. MN, the state with the most cases (and a small population, so the highest percentage) has less than 0.0005% fraudulent votes of all votes cast in the last twenty years.

The question then becomes why pass restrictive laws when the elections are secure. As we see with all the suits Republicans bring, they want fewer votes to count. It would take a helluva spin to make that less than glaringly obvious.

The Brennan Center tracks how those restrictive laws work, how they burden eligible voters. Originally Posted by yeahsurewhatev

1560 cases is not miniscule:

https://electionfraud.heritage.org/search

As Blackman implied, laws supported by Republicans that make voting marginally more difficult backfire. They piss off Democrats and make them more likely to vote. The Dobbs abortion decision and Trump's attempt to steal the 2020 election are also motivating Democrats to vote. As such, measures to "restrict" voting, like fewer voting days or requiring people to remember to bring ID, favor Democrats, because they're more motivated. It's why Democratic politicians outperformed the polls in 2022 and probably will again this year. I don't understand why you're complaining.

Cognitive dissonance? Rationalization? Irrational thoughts? Originally Posted by HDGristle

No. Too much time spent practicing law. He lost whatever interpretive reading skills he once had.

1560 cases is not miniscule:

https://electionfraud.heritage.org/search

As Blackman implied, laws supported by Republicans that make voting marginally more difficult backfire. They piss off Democrats and make them more likely to vote. The Dobbs abortion decision and Trump's attempt to steal the 2020 election are also motivating Democrats to vote. As such, measures to "restrict" voting, like fewer voting days or requiring people to remember to bring ID, favor Democrats, because they're more motivated. It's why Democratic politicians outperformed the polls in 2022 and probably will again this year. I don't understand why you're complaining. Originally Posted by Tiny

As blackman keeps pointing out, if you didn't have such a casual relationship with the facts, you'd be easier to get along with. 1560 fraudulent votes nationwide in 40 years is miniscule. When that's the problem you claim to address, you're lying. The plan may backfire (2022 was largely about stopping stop the steal), but that doesn't change the plan. It could matter this time.

Why do Republicans want fewer votes to count? That's obvious, but maybe too factual for you.

As blackman keeps pointing out, if you didn't have such a casual relationship with the facts, you'd be easier to get along with. 1560 fraudulent votes nationwide in 40 years is miniscule. When that's the problem you claim to address, you're lying. The plan may backfire (2022 was largely about stopping stop the steal), but that doesn't change the plan. It could matter this time.

Why do Republicans want fewer votes to count? That's obvious, but maybe too factual for you. Originally Posted by yeahsurewhatev

Your argument here makes just as much sense to me as Trump supporters’ argument that he was the rightful winner in 2020.

Maybe you could provide some examples, aside from Trump and his supporters, of how Republicans have disenfranchised Democrats, instead of just saying it’s obvious? And actually Trump et al didn't disenfranchise anyone, because the courts and Republicans like Brad Raffensperger, Mike Pence and Rusty Bowers did what they should have done.

As to your claim that I'm a liar for the way I used "miniscule," you're really grasping at straws, I guess to try to feel morally superior to anyone who's not a Democrat. I wrote,

The number of fraudulent votes on the Heritage database isn't miniscule, but there are rarely enough to sway an election. And even in those cases it's a pissant local election nobody cares about. Originally Posted by Tiny

And no, 1560 is not miniscule, by my definition anyway. There were 87 cases btw in 2022 on the database, the last full election year.

Really? This forum is full of people still claiming the dumpster won in 2020... Originally Posted by 69in2it69

Thank you thank you thank you for that. I'm so happy it caught on.

Unless you had the dump truck carrying the Dumpster in mind.

1500 out of a 1,000,000,000 is statically insignificant. Minuscule even. It’s nonsensical to imply otherwise. That is 1.5 per 1,000,000. Basically nothing. That’s why the whole “make voting secure” line from republicans is false. It’s already secure and reducing that number by creating any kind of inconvenience is silly. The predicate for needing to protect elections due to fraud is simply a false narrative.

Take the 20 election. Biden got 80,000,000 votes. Let’s assume 120 of those are fraudulent. That’s essentially nothing considering 50 states and 1000s of precincts. The implication that somehow our elections are being affected by fraud is just a lie that republicans have continuously pushed which isn’t backed by any evidence.

If a super conservative group can only come up with an insignificant number then that should tell us that the premise is false.

1500 out of a 1,000,000,000 is statically insignificant. Minuscule even. It’s nonsensical to imply otherwise. That is 1.5 per 1,000,000. Basically nothing. That’s why the whole “make voting secure” line from republicans is false. It’s already secure and reducing that number by creating any kind of inconvenience is silly. The predicate for needing to protect elections due to fraud is simply a false narrative.

Take the 20 election. Biden got 80,000,000 votes. Let’s assume 120 of those are fraudulent. That’s essentially nothing considering 50 states and 1000s of precincts. The implication that somehow our elections are being affected by fraud is just a lie that republicans have continuously pushed which isn’t backed by any evidence.

If a super conservative group can only come up with an insignificant number then that should tell us that the premise is false. Originally Posted by 1blackman1

I'm glad you and yeahsurewhatev aren't censors in a police state. I'd be in jail, for agreeing with you. Because you imputed a different meaning to "may" and "miniscule" than what I intended.

I don't disagree with the gist of your post. Again,

I mostly agree. The number of fraudulent votes on the Heritage database isn't miniscule, but there are rarely enough to sway an election. And even in those cases it's a pissant local election nobody cares about. Originally Posted by Tiny

You're comparing apples and oranges, and the reason may be the way I worded the quote above. The "1560" represents cases, not votes. There actually were more votes affected than 1560, because some cases involve multiple votes.

On two or three occasions I went back and looked at the 40 or 50 most recent records in the database. I remember one instance where a candidate for a local office got access to election results and changed around 10 or 20 votes so he won. And others that affected a number of votes but probably wouldn't have affected the outcome. Another observation from the database, you can sometimes identify the political party of the accused. And in the records I looked at, from memory, around 70% were Democrats, versus 30% Republicans. I didn't look at enough records to believe that's statistically significant though. And a third observation, a number of these cases were for ex-convicts who voted, who probably didn't know they weren't allowed to.

I don't necessarily agree with "(Voting is) already secure and reducing that number by creating any kind of inconvenience is silly. The predicate for needing to protect elections due to fraud is simply a false narrative." If one party or the other is, say, trying to gerrymander Congressional districts, then yeah, the other party should and will react. But if the measure is simply to make voting more secure, within reason, what's the downside, assuming the costs aren't significant? It's going to make some Americans more comfortable that elections are fair, and perhaps deprive people of the opportunity to recreate what Trump tried to do in 2020/2021. Also there have been people in American history who perpetrated larger scale election fraud. LBJ, Huey Long, and perhaps JFK were beneficiaries of that. There's no sense letting your guard down. The most significant instance of attempted election fraud in the 21st century occurred after the 2020 presidential election, and the perpetrators worked on behalf of President Trump.

21st century voter fraud

In 2002, 2004 and 2006, eight prominent Clay County, Kentucky politicians were involved in a scheme to gain control of the local board of elections and fix election outcomes. The group notably included a former United States circuit judge and former county school superintendent.[196][256]

In the 2003 East Chicago, Indiana mayoral election, the Indiana Supreme Court invalidated the Democratic primary citing "a widespread and pervasive pattern" of absentee ballot fraud. Forty-six people, mainly city workers, were found guilty in a wide-ranging conspiracy to purchase votes through the use of absentee ballots, which included the coercion of sick people and people with limited English skills.[8][257][258]

In 2009 and 2010, Massachusetts state representative Stephen Stat Smith illegally cast absentee ballots for voters who were ineligible or unaware of ballots being cast in their names. Smith pled guilty in 2012 and resigned his seat in 2013.[259][260]

In 2012, Indiana Secretary of State Charles P. White was convicted of multiple voter fraud-related charges, causing him to lose his position.[261][262] In the 2012 United States House of Representatives elections in Florida, Jeffrey Garcia, chief of staff to 26th district incumbent Joe Garcia, was charged with orchestrating a scheme to illegally request nearly 2,000 absentee ballots. Garcia pled guilty to a misdemeanor.[254] In the 2012 Massachusetts House of Representatives elections, Republican candidate Enrico "Jack" Villamaino and his wife forged more than 280 voters' names on absentee ballot requests.[100] Also in 2012, Cincinnati, Ohio poll worker Melowese Richardson made national headlines for using her position to vote twice.[263][264]

In the 2014 and 2016 Philadelphia elections, former congressman Michael "Ozzie" Myers was found to have bribed election workers to stuff ballot boxes in local races. Myers pled guilty in 2022 and was sentenced to 2+1⁄2 years in prison.[265]

Bridgeport, Connecticut mayor Joe Ganim won re-election in 2024 after a primary invalidated for ballot stuffing.
One of the most notable recent cases of fraud occurred in the 2018 United States House of Representatives elections in North Carolina. The fraud involved a ballot harvesting scheme undertaken by McCrae Dowless, a campaign operative working for Republican congressional candidate Mark Harris in North Carolina's 9th congressional district. Mark Harris initially won the election by 905 votes, but multiple inconsistencies – only 19 percent of ballot requesters were registered Republicans, for example, but 61 percent of absentee voters selected Harris – and credible reports from workers hired by Dowless led to an investigation, refusal by the North Carolina State Board of Elections to certify Harris, a new election (in which Harris did not participate), and the arrest of Dowless and several other Republican party operatives for ballot harvesting and ballot tampering.[266][267][268]

In 2022, Southfield, Michigan poll worker Sherikia Hawkins pled no contest to misconduct after she was accused of covering up a failure to count 193 absentee ballots in 2018.[269][270] In 2024, Kim Phuong Taylor, wife of Republican Iowa congressional candidate Jeremy Taylor, was convicted of 52 counts of voter fraud for illegally filling out or submitting voter registrations and absentee ballots in 2020.[271][272]

In the 2023–24 Bridgeport, Connecticut mayoral election, a judge ordered the Democratic primary to be re-run after ruling that there was enough evidence of ballot stuffing to throw the results into doubt. According to the New York Times, illegal ballot manipulation is not uncommon in Bridgeport elections, and has included apartment residents being pressured to apply for absentee ballots they were not entitled to.[22] Incumbent mayor Joseph Ganim, who had won the initial primary, also won the do-over primary and the general election.[273]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electo..._United_States

Of course cheating occurs. Some may succeed, some not.

https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1...272774230.html