The US Attorney's office has just completed a press conference regarding its investigation into possible voter fraud.
From the local daily:
"Investigators today said they had found evidence of fraud in the Nov. 2 election in the City of Milwaukee, including cases of felons voting illegally and people who voted twice.
They found more than 100 instances of suspected double-voting and more than 200 felons who voted improperly in the city."
There is no way of knowing who those violators voted for in the election, but thankfully these numbers aren't nearly enough to affect the margin of 11,813 by which John Kerry won Wisconsin. However, since it's only the city of Milwaukee that's being investigated and not the suburbs or other municipalities in the state, some Republicans are going to infer that they were all Kerry voters. There's no evidence to support such a claim, but it's illustrative that these folks see a world where Republicans are law-abiding and Democrats are criminals.
posted by Scott @ 1:41 PM
9 Comments:
The evidence to support the claim is better than the outcry the Dems had in Ohio.
Double voting? Ok, both sides can/do engage in that.
Who do you think felons would vote for? I have a pretty good idea.
Add the tire slashing crime and other reported incidents and you get a clearer picture.
A few hundred here, a few hundred there and pretty soon your talking about a whole lot of votes...
That's quite a talent you have to know that all felons are voting for Democrats. Also, as a Democrat who condemned the tire slashings, don't assume that act speaks for the actions of all of us.
What of the phone jamming done by New Hampshire Republicans on election day? Using your logic, I guess I can assume Republicans typically commit dirty tricks. Taking that to the next level, I could then assert that it's Republicans who are responsible for any fraud since they can now use the revelations to garner support new voting restrictions.
Scott's previous comment on
5-4-05
"While there has been no evidence that voter fraud has been committed,........"
There is no way of knowing, of course, but we can conclude that therer were more Democratic votes than Republican votes very easily.
1. If the fraud was random and unorganized, and the votes simply reflected the Bush/Kerry breakdown of the rest of the city, then Kerry was helped.
2. If organizations were involved, Democrats were still the beneficiaries, because, one again, it's Milwaukee. And we've seen this before with abuse of absentee ballots.
3. Republicans may have cheated too, but if they did it was probably not in Milwaukee. It makes sense to cheat in an area where you are already strong (in a national election) because the results don't look out of the ordinary, and if anyone notices they are more likely to look the other way.
4. You are correct that it probably did not matter as to the outcome (just as any irregularities in Ohio did not matter). That being said, it is still a problem.
5. Most criminals vote democratic. We know this because we poll felons. This is not to say that democrats are felons, or even that felons are necessarily soft on criminals (although it would be hard to argue that they are harder on criminals than republicans), but it is still true.
6. Your conclusion, that Republicans see themselvesas as law abiding, whereas they see Democrats as criminals, doesn't follow from the rest of your post.
7. We can make educated guesses about the content of the fraudulent vote because when dealing with voting we necessarily deal in generalities. Is it possible that 200 felons all voted for Bush? Sure it is. But it is statistically very very unlikely.
By the way, phone jamming is pretty much par for the course these days. The Dems ran a similar operation in Florida 5 years ago:
http://www.time.com/time/pacific/magazine/20001120/florida.html
Dirty tactics all around.
It's not the same as voting twice.
PS. I voted for Kerry.
"or even that felons are necessarily soft on criminals."
Whoops. That's supposed to be "Democrats" not "Felons." And that was not a Freudian slip, that was an "I have to run off to a meeting" slip. My apologies.
I read today that they plan on expanding the investigation into the suburbs which seems like a good idea to me. My main concern is that there is this standoff at the state level right now, and a lot of posturing on election reform. The Republicans are advocating voter ID as a simple solution. However, without good record keeping at the local level, voter ID won't prevent things like double-voting. On the other end, Gov. Doyle needs to be much more aggressive in pushing his own election reform plans which would go a long way toward getting rid of the crappy record keeping and incompetence we're seeing coming out of all this.
Speaking of slip ups, strike "voter ID" and insert "photo ID" for the comment above since they are not one and the same.
I agree that the record keeping needs an overhaul as well. I'm higher on Photo Ids (if I said "voter ids" before, I meant photo ids), because it is a non-institutional reform. It is more in the public eye, and less reliant on the good nature of government workers. That said, I would be happy with reforming both, and the Gov's plan isn't half bad (the last two items in particular) but his focus is solely on institutional concerns, and I don't think that's enough. But it is better than nothing.
Gerrymandering is almost worse in some ways.
I was actually talking about my own comment on that correction. :)
Agreed on the gerrymandering problem. This is something that's become more of a problem over time. Doyle's plan would address the problem with gerrymandered state legislative districts. Hopefully at some point, we can also deal with the problem of uncompetitive congressional districts as well.
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