Florida's Election Officials Questionable Behavior During the Recount is Harming Rick Scott

[Final-Fan]

NightlyPoe said:

Final-Fan said:

The degree to which SpokenTruth has validated your previously-stated position is very narrow IMO.  He demonstrated that voting fraud is probably a real issue in some places, yes.  But a mail-in voting fraud scandal doesn't justify laws that make it significantly harder to vote in person but do nothing to stop the sort of fraud that allegedly happened.  What laws are you referring to that this demonstrates the necessity of, and (if this isn't already self-evident after the previous) what is their relation to the laws that you were previously defending? 

Don't worry, I haven't forgotten the Supreme Court thing.  Real life is getting in the way and I'm afraid I don't have the energy to give it too much of my free time.  (My car is dying, work is in a crunch, and I have to build a computer.) 

Actually, I did point out mail-in voter fraud as a potential problem.  SpokenTruth mocked me for it.  I'll also point out that new laws like California's ballot harvesting would make chicanery of the type being alleged here easier.

As for other laws, it is what I said.  People will always try to cheat a system.  Particularly one with low barriers.  It doesn't make sense that this would be the only method anyone would use.

Ahem, yes.  Yes, the fact that you pointed out mail-in fraud as a potential problem is what I was referring to when I said SpokenTruth "validated your previously-stated position" to some extent.  However, in this thread it appears to me that you have focused on defending laws purporting to protect against in-person voter fraud, and you have argued that such fraud is enough of a problem to justify the laws and the burden they impose. 

(In fact, you went so far as to say "voter suppression laws are not a thing", contradicting the verdicts in court cases such as the North Carolina one with the infamous "surgical precision" line.  I would be somewhat interested to hear how you reckon "let's find out what types of ID white people use and black people use and then allow the predominantly-white IDs and disallow the predominantly-black IDs" is not a "voter suppression" law.  But anyway...)

The problem with characterizing the report of mail-in ballot voter fraud as a sweeping validation of your position is that it in no way supports your position that in-person voter fraud is common enough to justify the measures being put in place with the alleged goal of stopping it.  Nor does it validate your support of said laws from the perspective of the law doing anything to prevent the fraud that allegedly occurred, when as far as I know there is no relation between the laws you went to bat for earlier and the alleged fraud SpokenTruth reported. 

Nor does it "blow a hole in" the main thrust of SpokenTruth's point in that he is putting himself in opposition to the aforementioned positions.  His additional objection to the idea of mail-in voter fraud has proven to be wrong; when he discovered that this was the case, he duly reported it.  You took this report as evidence for "the necessity of laws"—presumably laws that would do something about fraud such as what was reported, although you had not AFAIK advocated in favor of such laws in this thread, whereas you had advocated in favor of other laws that AFAIK would do nothing about this specific type of fraud.

The main difference between the fraud suggested in the report and the vast amounts of voter impersonation envisioned by Trump is that the latter would be novel fraudulent votes.  Intercepting legitimate votes and either altering them or discarding them is not something done once or twice by many individuals; it's most effective done prolifically by a small number of bad actors.  There is simply no justification for the idea that there is anyone out there voting hundreds of times by live in-person voter impersonation.  If anyone is doing it by mail, I would imagine they'd have to do it by a scheme at least somewhat similar in concept to the one reported, which is to say that at a minimum it would have to identify legitimate voters whose vote had not yet been counted and who would not be voting in the future.  The interception of mail-in ballots (which is the alleged fraud in this case) is one of the few ways I can see this being done; the only other reliable way would to identify people who literally cannot vote (e.g. dead people), though like you I am not a master criminal.  Therefore, it seems more profitable to police voter registries for nonexistent people; yet so many Republicans, and you, focus instead on in-person impersonators who, if impersonating actual voters, are literally more likely to expose themselves in direct proportion to the magnitude of their crime—collectively, not individually—yet time and again searches for such in person impersonations have been fruitless. 

Relatedly, I'd like you to put your agreement on record that it is absolutely ridiculous that "only six of the 31 states with voter ID laws also impose similar requirements on people who mail in absentee ballots".  (sez Wikipedia, while I was fooling around in the writing of this post)

Last edited by Final-Fan - on 06 December 2018