Election Question

[Variol (Farseer) Elmwood]

I would lie to ask what the "holy rollers" here are voting?

If y'all don't mind sharing,

[Cerek]

Originally Posted by Papa Schlumpf Just to make sure, anyone claiming that Republicans have never participated in any kind of voter sabotage in the last decade is factually incorrect. In fact, one of those who did just that even wrote a book about it called 'How to rig an election', after he got out of prison. "After ten full years inside the GOP, ninety days amongst honest criminals wasn't any great ordeal." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allen_Raymond Plus an interview with the guy regarding his book: http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=LnH8i1rQHdo

I don't recall anyone stating Republicans had never participated in any type of voter sabotage. What has been stated is that the level of alleged sabotage was insufficient to reverse the results of the last two Presidential elections. And your example does nothing to refute that, since it doesn't deal with the Presidential race at all.

While Mr. Raymond may have been guilty of jamming phone lines, the actual impact that had on the state election can be debated. I will agree jamming the phone line of the Fire Department offering free rides to the polls could have an affect. I'm not sure of the purpose of the 5 Democratic "get out the vote" lines. If the calls were just to encourage citizens to vote, then you can hardly say preventing those calls changed the elections. Anyone in the US has faced a daily flood of campaign ads for every race available, all leading up to November 4. Last night, I got 4 robocalls in less than 5 minutes myself. So if the voters didn't already KNOW to "get out and vote", not getting a call on election day wasn't going to change that. Now, if the Democratic lines were being used to offer or arrange rides to the polls for voters, then you might have grounds for an argument that the election was altered, but the impact is still only theoretical.

So far, you and Wellard have produced two examples of very minor tampering and irregularities. Out of these two examples, the principles involved spent a total 39 months in jail. That's because the infractions were misdemeanors. Your example had nothing to do with either Presidential race. Bung pointed out that Wellard has incorrectly labeled the two ladies in his example as "Republican party officials" - which they were not. His example also invloves only one county (out of 99, IIRC) in Ohio and the irregular hand recount actually gave Kerry a net gain of 23 extra votes in that county - so the error was in favor of Kerry, not Bush.

As for the illogical math of "Kerry only needed 6 more votes per county to win the election", let's examine that. In other words, Kerry needed an extra 594 votes to win Ohio (6 votes from 99 counties). These two ladies were convicting of counting discrepency in ONE county. Their efforts had NO EFFECT on the numbers from the other 98 counties! So that means it would have to be proven their error cost Kerry at least 594 votes in that county for the election to have been reversed. This county is the most populous in Ohio and is heavily Democratic, which means most of the registered votes were likely already in Kerry's favor. If you have two groups in a county and one group has much larger numbers than the other, doing a smaller sample count will - on average - favor the larger group since they have more ballots than the smaller group. The net result of the miscount confirms this - Kerry actually gained a few more votes, but not enough to represent a significant difference in the outcome.

In other words, the improper counting by two election officials (one Democrat and one Republican) was NOT significant enough to alter the overall outcome of the Ohio ballot - which is one reason Kerry chose NOT to contest the results.

Of course, I'm sure the liberals will continue to ignore this fact and continue to cry from the rooftops about the "stolen elections" despite ample evidence to the contrary.

[Cerek]

As for the Florida election in 2000, it has already been noted that (a) the results were announce prematurely because the polls had NOT closed in the panhandle region, which extended into the Central Time Zone and (b) several thousand military absentee ballots were not counted (or were suppressed) during the original count. Guess who tried to prevent those ballots from being counted? You only get one guess - and it wasn't the Republican Party.

So, if any attempts were made to "steal" the Florida votes in 2000, it came from the Democrats, not the Republicans. The fact that it failed is one reason they are still so upset about it.

[Papa Schlumpf]

Originally Posted by Cerek *snip*

Wow, that's quite a response to my post. Addressing many things I never even raised! Guess you're struck with election fever, huh? Just a note, everything in my post is merely stating some facts. You can read into it all you like or even put it in a context I never even considered, but it's just that, facts. The main point that it *does* raise is that, according to Mr. Raymond, jamming the phone lines is apparently merely the tip of the iceberg. I'm not saying all (or even any) of the claims in his book are correct, I'm just saying that a former hardcore GOP groupie is making claims of wide(r) spread voter sabotage by the Republican party, sanctioned by senior party members.

Anyway, to raise another issue: to those who do not believe it is even possible to tamper with voting machines, there's a documentary online in which exactly just that is being demonstrated. There's no hard evidence that it actually happened (otherwise there would have been convictions aplenty), but the ease with which a computer programmer was able to rig the diebold machines was astounding. I'm not blaming either party of doing so (although the documentary does raise some suspect activities on the Republican side, so feel free to yank out the old 'liberal bias!' pitchfork), but the system is definitely not waterproof.

Part 1: http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=iVlZTWH7u8w
Part 2: http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=I4KIkOzw4XM
Part 3: http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=D346bkr15VU
Part 4: http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=Z74jIT9pJ7s
Part 5: http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=7DFb8pjuEuk
Part 6: http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=OZPmckj3Oi8
Part 7: http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=bYkck4JNNMg
Part 8: http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=BeXtPNP2a-s
Part 9: http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=xIAzCM3OYYc

[Papa Schlumpf]

Originally Posted by Papa Schlumpf Wow, that's quite a response to my post. Addressing many things I never even raised! Guess you're struck with election fever, huh? =

Ah, upon rereading the thread and reading another one in Current Events, I can at least see what situation you (and wellard) were referring to. Still don't really understand why you had to post the same rebuttal more or less twice, though. Maybe I've overlooked it, but I don't see anyone challenging your earlier assertion that wellards examples of voter fraud are moot since the last time you posted it. I certainly didn't challenge you on that, I simply referred people to an example that *does* implicate a Republican (and maybe more than one) of committing voting sabotage.
I just don't see what one has to do with the other, though.

[Yorick]

Originally Posted by Lavindathar Firstly it's insulting to compare your states to our country. So Don't. We are countries, part of a bigger group of countries called Great Britain. We are not comparable to the State of Florida.

I certainly will compare. And it's not just the USA either. The States in Australia are also analogous to conjoined countries, and, as it is in the USA, each state is divided into counties as well.

Perhaps you don't understand what a federation is?

"State" is another word for "country". Who is the "head of state" in Great Britain? The Queen.

Furthermore, let's look at the populations shall we? The STATE of New York has roughly the same population as the Dutch State. (20 million or so)

The State of California has around 36 million, only 4 million less than the Spanish State's 40 million.

We could also look at the land area too. England and Florida are roughly similar sizes.

But the biggest thing you ignored is that English counties are analogous to New York counties. Or New Jersey counties.

If 20 million strong New York State, with it's own Governor, Senate, house of representatives and laws and judiciary is akin to Essex County (1,300,000 or so) and not Kings County, NY (with a 2,400,000 population) then what are the counties in Australia and USA?????

Do the counties have to get extradition treaties to arrest a person who's escaped to another county? Hey, that sounds like state/national issues to me. Someone runs from Denmark into Germany, or Arizona to New Mexico, and lo' the police must stop.

The counties in USA certainly don't. Unless the next county is in a completely different state!

They leaders are picked internally, by the partys themselves. That was my point. I beleived the American people voted on each partys leader.

As it is in the USA. Only registered Democrats can vote in the Democratic primaries. It's essentially a massive party vote. But done on say a Europe-wide scale.

But im not very knowledagble on policitcs, im a bit out of my depth.

Then ask questions instead of making insulting demeaning remarks that make your system out to be completely superior to the low-brow Americans, who just happened to usher in modern democracy in western society.

At least the Americans don't have an antiquated hereditary monarch who does pretty much NOTHING to rule, sucking up taxpayer dollars and reminding us of a heinous system of autocratic feudalism that repressed the lower classes at the whim of the monarch.

The American system isn't perfect but then what is? It's as good a go as I've seen. I'm a fan of the Westminster system (in Australia anyway) but that's not perfect either.

[Unglaublich Verwustung]

Originally Posted by ElfBane Is this a remnant of the "rotten borough" problem that plagued UK elections in the past?

What do you mean by remnant? You seem to imply that it went away...

[Cerek]

Originally Posted by Papa Schlumpf Wow, that's quite a response to my post. Addressing many things I never even raised! Guess you're struck with election fever, huh? Just a note, everything in my post is merely stating some facts. You can read into it all you like or even put it in a context I never even considered, but it's just that, facts. The main point that it *does* raise is that, according to Mr. Raymond, jamming the phone lines is apparently merely the tip of the iceberg. I'm not saying all (or even any) of the claims in his book are correct, I'm just saying that a former hardcore GOP groupie is making claims of wide(r) spread voter sabotage by the Republican party, sanctioned by senior party members.

My lengthy post was done in response to your own example of reading things into posts that aren't there. Specifically, you opened your post with.....

Originally Posted by Papa Schlumpf Just to make sure, anyone claiming that Republicans have never participated in any kind of voter sabotage in the last decade is factually incorrect.

I don't recall anyone stating Republicans never participated in any form of vote tampering. What has been thoroughly discussed (and disputed) is whether Republicans effectively "stole" the last two Presidential elections. All discussions here relating to voter fraud and/or tampering have been in relation to these elections. So your post refuted a claim that had never been made and referenced an election that had never been discussed. In other words, it had very little to do with the topic at hand.

However, since you brought it up, I expanded on my post. I had promised a more thorough rebuttal to Wellard when time permitted. I had the time when I started my rebuttal to you, so I combined the two posts.

I felt it was appropriate to combine the two since you both mentioned documented cases of tampering or irregularities with voting. I also felt it was appropriate to point out that both of these cases were very minor offenses and the effect, if any, either of them had on the related elections was questionable at best.

[SpiritWarrior]

I think he is referring to FSA's comment here, which came beforehand.

"I think someone already pointed out that it was due to a premature announcement on the part of the media, that the mis-understanding arose. Not sure where that post was, possibly in the "bloodbath" thread over in CE."

[Cerek]

Originally Posted by SpiritWarrior I think he is referring to FSA's comment here, which came beforehand. "I think someone already pointed out that it was due to a premature announcement on the part of the media, that the mis-understanding arose. Not sure where that post was, possibly in the "bloodbath" thread over in CE."

VulcanRider made that comment earlier in this thread (IIRC). VR is also a resident of Florida, so he has more intimate knowledge of exactly what happened there in 2000 (along with Ziroc. Even so, that just confirms the point I've been making. The comment was in reference to the Presidential election and did not state Republicans had never tampered with votes. Why do I keep repeating myself? Because the message doesn't seem to be getting through to some.