[EL] Vote fraud -- evidence vs. belief

Tue Jul 24 11:37:57 PDT 2012

And so I am curious about this vote fraud thing

Now I am a social liberal but a personally very conservative. I believe in feeding the hungry, caring for the aged and most vulnerable, curing the sick and teaching the children. Oh yes providing legal services. It is the vision of the three great branches. And I believe in police and fire protection. But only if carrying out these visions is efficient and reasonably priced.. All government functions ought to be. If we are to provide homes for the poor, the homes do not need swimming pools. If we feed the hungry it does not need to be NY Strip Stakes or truffles. If we cure the sick it does not need to be with brand name Rx as long as generics work as effectively. And so on. 

So I ask how efficient will the photo id voting be. How many illegal votes are we protecting against. There are six or eight instances in Texas. Those that all of the Department of Public Safety and all of the Texas Rangers and most of the assistant attorney generals can find. Not in just one election mind you but in all of the elections that have taken place since Lyndon Johnson was elected to the US Senate for the first time. Now you might say– those DPS and Rangers are not that good at investigating. But we have a larger percentage of our population locked up that any other state. And we are number one in executions by a long way.  So these investigator guys must be whizz kids.

The implementation of the id voting statute involves a significant financial cost. Additional poll workers will be needed and because checking Ids translates in to time.  Additional machines will also be needed.   Oh yes don’t forget the 4 or so million that the state will pay in fees for defending the process. 

For the poor the state will provide an identity card gratis. But that costs the state. For example lets say that there will be 50,000 to 100,000 free cards given out. And the ultimate cost of those cards was 2$ we are talking about in excess of $100,000. And so on and so on. Elementary standards will require education efforts to let the people know about the need for identification. Lets pick a round million dollar 

So we got an investment of about 10 million dollars to prevent 6 people from voting. Now I do not think that is an efficient investment. 

And there is a cost to the process of voting also. That is time.  For example, when I vote I usually have lost my poll tax (we old coots still refer to a voter registration certificate as a poll tax). This causes the poll Judges to check my id. It takes about 2.5 minutes for a poll official to check in some one with a voter registration card. Because I have to have my id checked, it takes 4.5 minutes and sometimes longer. Lets say that 500 people vote in my polling place. An additional 2 minutes for each in the check in process would add 1,000 minutes of waiting in line to vote. And when I get off work the lines are especially long. In order for the voter to be served at the same level as he or she is being served now one would have to probably double the staff at the polling place. Lets say there are 500 polling places in San Antonio. Again remember this is for 6 or 8 illegal votes. Just saying.... 

And     is there an election where the result has been changed because of voters voting multiple times. How could the multiple voting thing work to fraud an election.  I look at this through the eyes of someone who has experience in the election process. In order to fraud an election one has to first of all determine how many votes are needed. Recall that in Texas President Obama lost by 900,000 votes. So something in that neighborhood.

Could multiple votes change that result. Well I wonder that too. In the last general election I voted early but on election day I drove to multiple polling places. I found that it would be possible for me to cast 20 or so votes by driving to 20 polling places. We would need to have 50,000 voters voting 20 times each to win that election. Just saying that would be a pretty big conspiracy.. 

Oh yes for me to vote those 20 votes I would need 20 voter registrations for people who have not voted early. I could also vote if I did not have the voter registration card by using my driver’s license for identification. But again that would require fake drivers licenses. 

just saying that six or eight votes over a 60 year period is not that scary to me in a state like Texas where snakes and scorpions out number humans. And then there are the fire ants.

> From: douglasrhess at gmail.com
> Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2012 15:15:15 -0400
> To: law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
> Subject: [EL] Vote fraud -- evidence vs. belief
> 
> The 40-page essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics" by
> Hofstadter may be informative on the topic of conspiracy theories in
> US politics (which, of course, are central to several political wings
> and, I find, are sometimes, in a milder expression, not too far from
> the surface of those with very middle-of-the-road political beliefs,
> too).
> 
> http://studyplace.ccnmtl.columbia.edu/files/courses/reserve/Hofstadter-1996-Paranoid-Style-American-Politics-1-to-40.pdf
> 
> Doug
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> Law-election mailing list
> Law-election at department-lists.uci.edu
> http://department-lists.uci.edu/mailman/listinfo/law-election

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