Back to the original discussion.
1. Do we have close elections? yes
Originally Posted by discreetgent
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2. Do we probably have non-citizens that vote? yes
Originally Posted by discreetgent
Why do we allow this?
3. In a close election is it possible that the number of non-citizen votes was more than the margin of victory/defeat? yes
Originally Posted by discreetgent
Agents of a foreign government installing a president. Is this sound policy?
4. (Leaving aside issues of possible fraud and ballot stuffing) If the non-citizens had not voted would the results of an election have changed? We have no way of knowing.
Originally Posted by discreetgent
Why continue to risk it?
re: IBH: Kennedy won by .1%, but we ALL know by now that the margin of popular vote on a national basis in Presidential elections means nada, nothing, zippo ... See Gore-Bush 2000 if you need proof. Florida 2000, Minnesota Senate 2008 are much better examples.
Originally Posted by discreetgent
The 1960 election was closer than the 2000 election. In 1960, Kennedy carried 12 states by 3% points or less. Illinois [Daley and Sam Giancana: 27 electoral votes] and Texas [LBJ: 24 electoral votes] were swing states. Kennedy “won” those states' 51 electoral votes; thus, a majority in the Electoral College. Subsequently, voter fraud was discovered to be rampant in both states. However, Nixon did not formally question the returns. BTW, some 93% of Cook County’s “registered voters” managed to vote in the 1960 election when the national average was only 63% – which remains the highest percentage since 1952 – kinda makes you wonder.
In Chicago, where Kennedy won by more than 450,000 votes, local reporters uncovered so many stories of electoral shenanigans—including voting by the dead—that the Chicago Tribune
concluded that “the election of November 8 was characterized by such gross and palpable fraud as to justify the conclusion that [Nixon] was deprived of victory.”
Some fraud clearly occurred in Cook County. At least three people were sent to jail for election-related crimes, and 677 others were indicted before being acquitted by Judge John M. Karns, a Daley crony. Many of the allegations involved practices that wouldn't be detected by a recount, leading the conservative Chicago Tribune
, among others, to conclude that “once an election has been stolen in Cook County, it stays stolen.” What's more, according to journalist Seymour Hersh, a former Justice Department prosecutor who heard tapes of FBI wiretaps from the period believed that Illinois was rightfully Nixon's. Hersh also has written that J. Edgar Hoover believed Nixon actually won the presidency but in deciding to follow normal procedures and refer the FBI's findings to the attorney general—as of Jan. 20, 1961, Robert F. Kennedy—he effectively buried the case.
Before midnight [on election night 1960] back East, the New York Times
went to press with a banner headline: KENNEDY ELECTED PRESIDENT. But Nixon kept gaining and soon the race was too close to call. Times
Managing Editor Turner Catledge, fearful that he'd be embarrassed by his headline, began to hope, as he later recalled in his memoirs, that “a certain Midwestern mayor would steal enough votes to pull Kennedy through.”
He was referring, of course, to Daley, a pol believed to be so powerful that he could make the dead vote. But as election night dragged on, Nixon took a lead in Illinois.
That news stunned Sargent Shriver, who was the Illinois campaign manager for his brother-in-law Jack Kennedy. Shriver was watching TV at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., when he saw returns that showed Nixon ahead in Illinois.
“I damn near collapsed,” he recalls. “I was devastated. I thought that the fact that I had lost my state, Illinois, would mean that Kennedy would lose the presidency.”
He sneaked out of the room. “I didn't have the [guts] to face those people,” says Shriver, now 85. “I went back to my bedroom and almost cried myself to death.”
Suddenly, somebody was rapping on his door, saying “Sarge, the votes in Illinois have changed completely.”
Shriver hustled back to the TV room. It was true: A late surge of votes from Chicago had put Kennedy back in the lead in Illinois.
Across the country, Nixon and his aides were watching the same returns.
“We were getting good reports out of Illinois but we noticed that a lot of precincts in Chicago weren't reporting,” says Herb Klein, who was Nixon's press secretary. “Then they reported en masse, and we were a little suspicious.”
Leonard Hall, Nixon's campaign manager, grumbled that the Chicago Democrats were up to their usual tricks.
In Texas, Kennedy's 46,000-vote margin was the closest statewide race there since 1948, when Kennedy's running mate, Lyndon B. Johnson, won a Senate seat by 87 votes (the origin of the nickname "Landslide Lyndon"). Morton's operatives, aided by local Republicans, uncovered plenty of political chicanery. For instance: In Fannin County, which had 4,895 registered voters, 6,138 votes were cast, three-quarters of them for Kennedy. In one precinct of Angelia County, 86 people voted and the final tally was 147 for Kennedy, 24 for Nixon.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer
http://www.slate.com/id/91350/
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=124208&page=1
http://cstl-cla.semo.edu/renka/ui320...0_election.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_...election,_1960
He also ignored my second post that we really don't know how not allowing .2 percent not to vote might affect an election. Say we knew that those .2 percent voted in the same proportion as the rest of the electorate did, would it then be a problem???
Originally Posted by discreetgent
Excuse the late reply, I was indisposed: whips, chains and ostrich feathers.
*sniff – sniff* I smell equivocation. I say remove all doubt and do not let non-citizens vote. BTW, according to the 2000 Census, there were over 200,000 resident aliens (some 12.5% of the population) living in Broward County, Florida. How many, do you imagine, helped screw up the vote count down there in 2000? 1,000 – 10,000 – 100,00?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broward_County,_Florida
The New York Times did its own analysis of how mistaken overvotes might have been caused by confusing ballot designs. It found that the butterfly ballot in heavily Democratic Palm Beach County may have cost Gore a net 6286 votes, and the two page ballot in similarly Democratic Duval County may have cost him a net 1999 votes, each of which would have made the difference by itself.[7] The rest of the media consortium did not consider these because there could be no clear determination of a voter's intent.
Originally Posted by charlestudor2005
I hurriedly made my earlier post, and immediately recognized I hadn’t taken your post head on because my post didn’t deal with the NYT. When I double checked, I found the same Wiki article you are citing. I think that last line (now in bold) in the citation says it all.
MEDIA RECOUNT: BUSH
