Has voter fraud been a problem in the ATL?

[arjay57]

modcut

The article is Hood, M. V., & Gillespie, W. (2012). They just do not vote like they used to: A methodology to empirically assess election fraud*. Social Science Quarterly, 93(1), 76-94. doi:10.1111/j.1540-6237.2011.00837.

It's a crackerjack piece of work. For anyone who wants to understand the issues in Georgia I'd recommend reading the entire article, not just the abstract.

[BR Valentine]

North Carolina looked at all of the possible ways that fraud might occur including manipulating vote totals for the 2016 elections. They found 508 ineleiglble votes out of 4.8 million votes cast. The vast majority (441) were votes cast by felons on probation and they didn't find credible evidence of any votes by illegal immigrants or of manipulating vote counts.

The key takeaway from their audit: "Even assuming all ineligible ballots identified in this report were cast for the prevailing candidate, no races -- statewide or local -- would have had a different outcome than the one already certified by the state."
https://s3.amazonaws.com/dl.ncsbe.go...dit_Report.pdf

Kobach's Commission is simply a fishing expedition designed to reaffirm for true believers the myth that voter fraud is a reasonably common threat. They don't need to conclusively prove that voter fraud is actually occurring with any meaningful regularity to achieve their political goals and they're well aware of that fact.

The outcome this time is going to be no different than the multiple times the GOP has claimed to have evidence of fraud in Philadelphia. I've already mentioned one of the disproved claims of voter fraud. They also went with the good old dead people voting canard.

A Republican City Commissioner investigated and found a whopping 20 irregular votes total and all involved clerical errors. He found people who were indeed alive but mistakenly listed on the death roll. He found people who had the same or similar names to people on the death roll who erroneously signed in the wrong space at the polling station. He found a few instances where polling workers scanned the wrong bar code. What he didn't find evidence of were people voting multiple times, ineligible votes or manipulation of vote totals. In other words he found no fraud.

Despite repeated efforts to find voter fraud there have all of ten prosecutable cases of voter fraud in Philadelphia this decade. If you can't find voter fraud after multiple investigatons in notoriously corrupt single-party dominated Phialdelphia, where is it going to be found? The obvious answer is that it's not going to be found by Kobach, but that fact isn't really germane to Kobach's goals.

[bu2]

Originally Posted by fourthwarden

25 out of 49,300, on the low end. That's a whopping 0.051% of voters registered as being fraudulent. Using NGP's numbers, it's down to 0.029%.

That's easily within error of review and application. So, yeah, actually, it's disputable as to how many of those were purposefully fraudulent, given that no vote for Georgia Governor is going to be decided on a 25 vote margin.

If that's really your definition of a problem, then I've got some ghosts that I could use some help exorcising.

First-that is only the ones they were able to identify as fraudulent. That doesn't mean they didn't miss some. And one article said there were "at least" 26 others they had questions about, but it was hard to find out what the final resolution was. As I said there were a bunch of partisan articles making opposite claims.
Second-that is only out of 50k voters and it is only one voter drive.
Some people will try to mess with our voter system. We need to maintain the integrity. Its something all of us should be concerned about.

[arjay57]

Originally Posted by bu2

Some people will try to mess with our voter system. We need to maintain the integrity. Its something all of us should be concerned about.

They should be going after the Russians, who we know tried to mess with our system, rather than alleged voter fraud, which research has shown to be extremely minimal.

[testa50]

Originally Posted by arjay57

They should be going after the Russians, who we know tried to mess with our system, rather than alleged voter fraud, which research has shown to be extremely minimal.

Amen.

It's an invented non-problem meant more rationally to suppress minority voting and less rationally to help conjure up credence to the laughable idea that millions of people voted illegally in 2016.

Of course, the fact that these initiatives to root out very dubious voter fraud have been used to very clearly anti-democratic ends is of little consequence to the derp-derp-voter-fraud crowd. Nor is the fact that Russia was clearly meddling in our voting system, and running a mass-scale propaganda campaign to influence the American public. These aren't important things because very sincere reason.

But no, a whole 26 people ("maybe even more!") possibly voting illegally in a state of 10 million is great cause to put the entire government into hysterics over voter fraud.

[fourthwarden]

Originally Posted by bu2

First-that is only the ones they were able to identify as fraudulent. That doesn't mean they didn't miss some. And one article said there were "at least" 26 others they had questions about, but it was hard to find out what the final resolution was. As I said there were a bunch of partisan articles making opposite claims.
Second-that is only out of 50k voters and it is only one voter drive.
Some people will try to mess with our voter system. We need to maintain the integrity. Its something all of us should be concerned about.

And it's been what, 2 years since the investigation was started? Don't you think that if there was anything indicating purposeful, active voter fraud on the Democrats' part, the Republican state government would do everything they could to play that up?

I mean, hell, don't you think they'd be using it as Exhibit A in all this? Don't you think they'd have plastered that all over everything?

I mean, it would be hard proof that what has been shown to be a non existent problem is actually a problem. Seeing as that hasn't happened, even given the current political climate, I highly doubt there's anything truly there.

Originally Posted by arjay57

They should be going after the Russians, who we know tried to mess with our system, rather than alleged voter fraud, which research has shown to be extremely minimal.

Here, here. Unlike voter fraud (by Americans), there's real trouble with the Ruskies and the rather Anti-democratic regime in power here right this moment.