Election Fraud

[deoxys]

Put on those tin-foil hats, UPNers, because it's time to discuss election fraud!

We're in full swing here in primary and caucus season, so I'm going to punch the white elephant room in the face and make it go on a rampage.

First, watch this (which funnily enough was from a news report in my city, and I actually have met that anchor a few times)(also, don't take this as being about Ron Paul, take this as a general topic):




Next... discuss.

[Talon87]

It is so rare to see a local news station report about another state's affairs outside the scope of major national or international headlines. To see one in Kentucky do so for six minutes is very impressive. (I guess you could call the Maine caucuses "major" but I wouldn't. I'm thinking O.J. Simpson kind of stuff.) Good for that reporter (who I am assuming is hoping he gets discovered by investigative journalism avenues at the national level) and good for his manager (who I am assuming realizes his little pup has the potential to go far and is trying his best to help him get there). And good for the people in your area for supporting a news station such that it feels comfortable to dedicate six minutes of straight airtime to a news story that has nothing at all to do with local affairs. Very cool. We get this in Indiana on occasion too, don't get me wrong, but ... it's very rare. I'd say most of our local news is local crimes, local school children's accomplishments, local jobs growth stories, etc. In other words, ... our local news is local.

Now, as for the story. NOT SURPRISED. The sad thing is, Belfast will probably be told that their votes don't get to count now not because the numbers are going to be kept 9 Romney, 5 Santorum, 2 Paul (instead of 8 Paul, 7 Santorum, 5 Romney) but because they deliberately went against what they were instructed to do by Augusta officials when they decided to publically read off the voting results instead of just putting the results in a sealed envelope and shipping it off to Augusta for processing. "You broke the rules, therefore your votes don't count." ('Cause if they count the real votes, then, compared with the fake votes, Romney's numbers will drop by 4 while Paul's will rise by 6, for a net change between the two men of 10 votes damaging the Romney campaign; whereas if they just throw all the votes out, then Romney will lose 9 votes but Paul will also lose 2 votes, meaning that the net damage to Romney's campaign relative to Paul's is now only 7 votes instead of 10.) But never even minding the Belfast story, what about the two precincts who ahead of time let officials know that they were going to be delaying their votes, and officials didn't object, but then once and only after the February 11th deadline had passed did they raise holy hell and say "NOPE! TOO LATE! YOU MISSED THE DEADLINE!" That's just plain fraud. (Or whatever the proper legal term here is.) And like your reporter guy said -- sure, this is only a straw poll, but if you're going to have that kind of attitude about it, then why even hold a straw poll in the first place? Everyone knows that it works just like the Electoral College does: sure, the delegates don't have to vote the way their constituents indicated that they want the delegates to vote, but they'd better damn well do so if they value their honor and their status in the community! By declaring Maine as a Romney victory, you more or less swing ~all of the Maine delegates towards voting for Romney at the GOP national convention. By declaring it a Paul victory, there would have at least been the chance for them to have voted Paul, even in the face of stiff opposition from the rest of the nation's delegates.

Voter fraud will always be a real and present problem so long as we value voting privately. The ways to stamp out voter fraud fundamentally require public access to the list of all people who voted and who they voted for. But you do this, and people worry about the ramifications for them and their families when their neighbors, bosses, etc find out who and what they voted for or against. So ... yeah. So long as we value the right to vote without the whole world knowing how we voted, we make it possible for the higher-ups to fuck the system so badly it needs a new asshole.