General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsOK, just for those who have decided that speaking about Voter Suppression is a Joke. read below
Every General Election, Republicans engage in election fraud. Many of our states are governed by Republicans. They engage in the "strip and flip" method. First, they engage in "alerting" or matching a name to someone in jail (at least in FL), etc, and they remove the name from the registered list. This primarily effects persons of color or Hispanic decent. The flip comes when a person votes. Votes are NOT tabulated 1 to 1 vote, but rather with a % weight given to the voting tabulation. (I truly believe this is how we had Rick Scott elected two times by a margin of 0.5% and how medical marijuana lost by 2%).
Every two years, the reports our of FL, are in regards to minority voting problems in the Miami/ South FL area. At that point, one has to realize that the majority of south FL is actually minority persons. So, they are always getting fucked with. Remember in 2008 and 2012 seeing those 6 hr long lines to vote in FL, well, those lines were mostly in South FL. (this is another way to disenfranchise voters, by limiting voting locations).
It was accepted knowledge since 2000 and 2004 when the Democrats had the election stolen from their candidates by BushCo. Al Gore won the vote in FL. John Kerry won Oh. It is important that we have election integrity, and we absolutely DO NOT. Some of these machines are 20yrs old, have no paper trail, and can be hacked by a 6yr old. We are rated last in voting integrity in the Western democratic countries. Jimmy Carter refuses to monitor our elections because they are rife with fraud.
AND did you know that in both 2008 and 2012, the Obama campaign literally had people monitoring the "strip" on their registered voters so they could get them re-registered before the GE?
Please, take this seriously. Elections are important, especially at the local level when a couple of votes could literally make the difference. We absolutely need to be able to trust our elections. I can't understand how they aren't handled Federally and left up to each state and precinct to run elections in whatever haphazard manner they choose. AND yes, exit polls should be within the margin of error with the actual "computer" totals.
We are in GE mode, get your heads out of the primaries, and make sure the Republicans aren't stealing this one away, or stealing it at the state levels for congress and senate and Govs. Local levels. I'm not so sure the Republicans care to prop up Trump for the White House, but you bet your bippy, they sure as hell want to control congress.
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Gothmog
(146,009 posts)The GOP will engage in voter suppression tactics and will need to be prepared to fight these tactics. Marc Elias is Clinton's top election law attorney and he has filed lawsuits in a number of jurisdictions to fight GOP voter suppression efforts.
glowing
(12,233 posts)OnDoutside
(19,988 posts)lawsuits, they should be publicly calling/shouting out the names of those engaging in what is racism and electoral fraud.
OnDoutside
(19,988 posts)promises to do exactly as I suggested ! Great minds and all that....
Gothmog
(146,009 posts)The litigation being pursued is one of the more effective things that can be done right now. The CBC, the NC Moral Monday and other groups have been attempting to raise awareness of these activities
The next phase will be training poll watchers and manning a war room to answer voter complaints. I work with the Democratic party on voter protection because partisan voter protection is the more effective way to protect the vote. Protect the Vote and other non-partisan groups do non-partisan operations which are less effective in my opinion. Partisan voter protection operations are more effective in that these efforts (i) can appoint poll watchers, and (ii) have standing to go to court on behalf of candidates. Non-partisan voter protection operations can not appoint poll watchers and do not have automatic standing to bring lawsuits
OnDoutside
(19,988 posts)what the Republicans are doing should be shouted from the rooftops. Make it a National issue, put them on the backfoot. Call out names of those involved, and keep hammering away. If you think about it, look at how they drove Hillary's poll numbers down based on nothing that she did or didn't do during Benghazi, and the overblown reaction to the emails. Hit them back harder, and use what they are actually doing !
CrowCityDem
(2,348 posts)The issue was that everything that didn't line up with one group's belief that there should be no rules at all about voting was called suppression. Real voter suppression is absolutely a serious issue that we need to fight. But mixing that up with closed primaries, etc, dilutes the importance of the issue, because it comes across more flippant when we start equating trivial complaints with the true horrors of Republican suppression.
glowing
(12,233 posts)some Democrats in the admin agree with me, and re-instated the post... That was a small posting, so I thought I would actually create a real post for all those who think election fraud isn't real OR that its primary related. (Whatever my or many people's feelings on the primary irregularities were, they weren't fought for at the time, and time has slipped away)... Now, its the GE, and yes, these tactics are done country wide by Republicans.
Election Reform is still a topic that has passionate people, and I think many more people more aware of since 2000 and 2004. Dire consequences result from these frauds perpetrated on the American People. I highly doubt we would have a 9/11, let alone an Iraq War, a Libya, a ISIS, etc, if it weren't for the 2000 installment of a President. I'm pretty darned passionate about the subject. AL Gore was/ is an environmental champion. That was my field graduating the year he was "elected", we could have gone so far in the positive direction for the environment and science.... Nope, now we have fracking. (Thanks Cheney)
annabanana
(52,791 posts)Our Verified Voter Paper Trail Hero
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=203x513573
Hekate
(91,055 posts)Andy. 
RobertEarl
(13,685 posts)But mostly everyone has decided to accept private companies remain in charge of counting votes.
Oh, there are a few radicals insisting that our votes are counted cleanly, but they get laughed at.
maindawg
(1,151 posts)Of the story featuring a pot and a kettle.
Hekate
(91,055 posts)fasttense
(17,301 posts)To think Dems are being honest brokers when they do absolutely nothing about rigged election until now? WTF, if they had done something before now maybe it woud be easier for Dems to win, or at least we would Not have lost the house.
The Democratic politicians who are in office now all won on our current rigged system. They don't want honest elections because it means they might not win.
I don't think Dems do it as often and most of what they do is enable the rigging and look the other way when it happens. Gore and Kerry both enabled RepubliCONS with stealing elections by failing to fight back, they made it acceptable.
Loki
(3,825 posts)If you don't think that many of us have been in the trenches fighting this since Bush vs Gore, you are the one who is not paying attention.
fasttense
(17,301 posts)When a former KKK leader won the TN Democratic nomination, all sorts of excuses were given. I was an active member of a local Dem party and I started asking questions. The party establishment laughed at my concerns.
They actually thought it was funny that a no name nothing KKK member won over a former very popular well known liberal actress. When I asked what they were going to do to keep the rigging from happening again they acted as if liberals actually voted in the fool.
The same thing happened in North Carolina. It's the RepubliCONS rubbing it in our faces, so obviously rigging even Democratic Primaries and the powers that be do nothing. And that was 2 to 4 years ago. Now it is even worse. I saw the voting results for my district, which is shaped like a snake that swallowed a rabbit, it showed no one voted for Bernie. But I and 2 of my friends voted for him. It did not show up in our very small district's results.
Do you think anything is going to change? Once Hillary wins, the knowledge about rigged elections goes down the rabbit hole. You have to start fighting this again and spreading the word, while the powers that be ignore you until the next big election.
I have been where you are. Thinking things were changing. Hell we had a paper ballot law passed in TN but it was delayed then rescinded. And we are back to KKK members winning Democratic elections. No progress just more rigging.
Loki
(3,825 posts)You think that republicans play by the rules? Oh I have to laugh at that one. They threw away the rule book years ago. We had Democrats running in Texas that would change their registration after they won their elections. They were never Democrats anyway. You have to elect people that will work for change, not just whine about how things never change. There are a lot of good people out there working in the state and local level for change, but unless you change the ladders up to the top state levels of legislatures and their control and I mean redrawing the gerrymandered districts to have representation equal to the demographics, you are just wasting your breath. Get to work, run for election, (but you will find that one really isn't that easy and it cost a lot of money and it demands a lot of time) most people are too lazy to work that hard for it, so we get what we get. Election reform is on everyone's mind, it's been on mine since McGovern. Yeah, that long.
ananda
(28,920 posts)... in WAY too many states.
Igel
(35,392 posts)It's not always what it seems.
A lot of minority areas are heavily (D) and have (D) voting boards that make the decisions that lead to long lines. Is this voter suppression? No, they're doing the best they can. They have limited budgets and experience or are constrained to follow historical trends. Then polls are swamped by an influx of new voters and we see lines. It's called a "fundamental attribution error" and is a minor kind of fallacy--we assume that what a person does or did reflects something essential to their personality and being instead of being forced by circumstances or lack of time.
A lot of low education areas have always had increased numbers of spoiled ballots. I used to live in such an area and twice in 4 years followed some voter who couldn't figure out how to cast their ballots. I'd go to the voting machine that was next empty and find that choices had been made but no vote cast. Once the woman had gotten to the confirmation or review page, and in the other the person had gotten through about 10 races and walked away. We don't have paper ballots, so these weren't "spoiled".
There's also another correlation between some of the "suppression" and education. You can intelligently vote for just the races that interest you. Or you can vote for all the races, because they all interest you and you know things about them or you can vote unintelligently. A lot of low-ed voters will vote almost randomly (they're mocked by the the "I like to vote" option you see in some DU polls). A lot will vote just for some races. Both sets of data have been claimed to be supression--ignoring votes that "must" have been cast or "flipping" votes that were randomly cast. Then there *are* the cases of actually flipped votes or missed votes and you can't tell the difference. Except that these kinds of things happened with paper ballots under close supervision, so we know that this happens.
Voter turnout was suppressed in Houston by the new voter ID laws. Except that the one published, peer reviewed paper that checked into this found that most of those voters "suppressed" by the laws actually did have the ID necessary to vote. They'd been told that it was highly unlikely they had the ID because the nasty (R) were out to get them, and didn't try to vote. Their vote was suppressed more by progressive claims and voter ignorance about the law than the law itself.
My high school has a reasonably high student turnover rate, kids who transfer in and out during the school year--some transfer in and then out during the same year. Map that against demographics and you see the wealthier or whiter populations are more stable. Many have lived in the same house for their entire lives, or at least many years. In some cases their great-grandfather owned the land and it's been lived on by that family since the 1880s. Look at poor or minority students and they have a much higher turnover rate. When a black kid transfers in in October there's a decent chance he'll transfer out in March. I lost as many black kids as white kids during the last school year, but blacks were 15% of my class. People who move a lot are those that are targeted for being purged, because when they move from jurisdiction to jurisdiction they may not re-register, and they certainly don't unregister in their old voting place (seriously, who does?). That's going to mostly hit poor, meaning disproportionately minority, areas. And given a finite error rate, the poor and minorities will have greater numbers affected.
I almost had my vote "suppressed" once. I was a new voter in California and we used punch cards. Paper trail and all that. Except that the machines had been cleaned out in the morning, voter turnout preferred a few candidates, and some wells that would catch the chads were full. You had to push really hard to produce a readable hole. If you didn't catch this fact, you'd fake vote but not actually vote.
While working polls in NY state I saw people go into voting machine booths (the lever kind of machine) and leave without casting their vote. Somebody else could have come along and changed the settings and cast their own vote or vote twice. One way would leave a mismatch between voter count and votes cast and raised a red flag. The other would have been voter fraud.
I saw poll workers give instructions that voided ballots. I saw poll workers have voters sign in the wrong places so that others would show up and see that they already signed in and presumably voted. I've seen poll workers challenge voters and require that they get ID before voting. I've seen poll workers create a disruption that caused people who had signed the poll book to leave without voting--and having no option to vote later--and people go and vote without having signed in, so they could, in principle, vote twice. I've seen poll workers put out the polling place sign too close to the station in order to leave their party's publicity materials outside the zone and poll workers try to put the polling place sign too far from the station to make sure that their opponent party's publicity materials were inside the zone. This was (almost) always fixed.
The only serious problems that involved ideology were the (most of) the voided ballots, where the (D) precinct chair carefully (mis)instructed (D) voters how to fill out provisional ballots. He'd been local party chair, so it wasn't a false-flag thing. Just arrogance. And the disruption(s) were also (D)-led because we were in a mostly (R) area and the workers either started to argue with (R) voters about their choices out of frustration or just get up and yell that she couldn't believe how stupid Republicans were.
Challenging voters also involved ideology, but it was spread evenly. A (R) might challenge a voter, and the (D) poll worker or observer would balance it. Some voters left and returned. Some never returned. Why was it clearly ideology? Because in a case or two the poll worker *knew* the person he was challenging, and that he was in the opposite party. "Dan, I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask you to show appropriate ID." "But you've known me for 20 years." (Grin.) "Sorry. Get along, now."
In other words, there are lots of "suppression" that are just built in. Poll worker stupidity or emotion, voter stupidity or impatience, BOE limits on funding or equipment or experience, error rates in purging records, public advocates who want to stress the injustice of laws and who accidentally convince some voters that there's point in trying to vote against such injustice. Many of these have partisan skews, but they're neither new nor surprising. They can be fixed, though, but as long as we need to focus on a mis-generalized understanding of the causes for outrage purposes we won't see the problems we can fix.
drm604
(16,230 posts)Has it been proven and is anything being done about it?
glowing
(12,233 posts)software... There is a hearing that happened in OH regarding this information in creating the programs that weight votes as a %, rather than a 1 to 1 type of system.
We need to have paper ballots, with people sitting there hand-counting with officials from parties on the ballots to watch the results. I think we can wait a day or two to make sure we know who actually won an election. (And normally the flip won't be more than 5% of the actual totals; that's why you must "strip" the voter of being able to place a vote, and any question, they go to a provisional, and for the most part, provisional's are tossed in the garbage.)
drm604
(16,230 posts)I find it hard to believe that this is normal procedure. It sounds very illegal to me.
glowing
(12,233 posts)Because Diebold had such horrific problems, they are banned from elections in EU, but we still have states using them. Y'all don't remember Michigan college kids hacking into voting boxes and getting them to play the fight song? So that's 2 ways this occurs.
There's an entire section of DU that has election integrity info and means to actions. There are groups dedicated to this. And any large enough operational campaign now hires lawyers to try and minimize any damage with their voters and the numbers they need.
Yes, it sucks to realize that your vote may not actually count for anything and that there is massive rigging of elections occurring.
drm604
(16,230 posts)If it's hidden and proprietary then how do you know about it? Don't get me wrong, I don't like voting on computers. I have a degree in computer science and I think we should be using paper ballots. I think voting on computers should be illegal.
But you're making specific claims that they're "weighting the votes". If it's hidden in the code they wouldn't need to weight the votes (I'm not even certain what you mean by that). They could simply outright forge the results to be whatever they wanted, no "weighting" is necessary. If you have specific proof that this is going on, by weighting or any other method, then you need to post that proof in order to convince people. We won't win this fight through vague accusations.
Bernardo de La Paz
(49,088 posts)
pnwmom
(109,026 posts)of those we might otherwise have taken seriously in the General election.
Like Greg Palast's false claims about California, based on obviously false assumptions. For example, that none of the provisional votes would be counted. They are being counted, and included in the totals, and will be part of the final results in the next couple weeks.
http://elections.cdn.sos.ca.gov/statewide-elections/2016-primary/unprocessed-ballots-report.pdf
glowing
(12,233 posts)software code was written out to read for the machines? The exit polls were cancelled, so we don't have a narrative to place on the totals. It's really sucky. There is a huge cloud over the primaries due to the many "issues" that occurred during the primaries. AND no, I don't think Clinton had her hands on a directive to say, "steal this election". There are so many different hands on the process of an election. Different rules for every state, different precincts dealing with election. Election workers who have, many times, very little training. Machines breaking down and corporately owned. It's a mess. AND it need addressing BIG time.
pnwmom
(109,026 posts)So much for Greg Palast, and for anyone who trusts his judgment anymore.
Why is CA taking so long? Because there were so many provisional ballots, and the registration of each of those voters has to be validated. In some states they wouldn't bother to count provisional ballots if the margin is big enough. But in CA they do.
Hekate
(91,055 posts)I so etimes wonder if certain folks were in kindergarten when the US had its coup d'etat in Florida, ratified by the SCOTUS -- they seem so oblivious.
sulphurdunn
(6,891 posts)is that people who readily concede that American politics has been compromised and corrupted by big money still believe their elections haven't been.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)... they passed.
snot
(10,549 posts)in confirming my worst fears about the Dem establishment.
That, and their acquiescence in the consolidation of media ownership.
Loki
(3,825 posts)You have republican held legislatures, senates, governorships and SOS that control absolutely everything about that states elections locally and state wide. You make it sound like someone could just wave their magic wand and everything would be fine. Have you ever even worked an election? I have, many times, and in fucking Texas. Try that one on.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)Loki
(3,825 posts)It takes hard work to change things, not just speeches.
Scuba
(53,475 posts)n/t
Loki
(3,825 posts)when in fact we only at best probably 58 consistent votes in the congress at that time. Not filibuster proof, not the magic number of 60. You prefer your own version of history, yea Dems shoulda, coulda, woulda therefor they are always to blame. so who you going to work to defeat this year Scuba? I'm working to defeat Trump.
