Dirty Tricks
From this week’s Time magazine:
As Election Day nears, dirty tricks surface. Fliers are left on cars telling Democrats that they should vote on Wednesday, not Tuesday. Anonymous automated phone calls warn people that they will be arrested at the polls or that their poling places have moved… In an increasing number of states, such tricks are punishable by law.
Okay maybe I’m missing something here… but why is this being classified as mischief, rather than as voter fraud and interfering with people’s right to vote, and prosecuted as a federal crime?
October 29th, 2008 at 6:53 am
I believe that this is in fact a crime, and if the people involved can be identified they are in fact prosecuted.
October 29th, 2008 at 7:45 am
Bill
My personal opinion —
In the last two presidential elections we have seen efforts like this to encourage voters to stay away from pollls or simply prevent them from voting. It is a well known fact that a good voter turnout almost always favors the Democrats, so it is most often republicans puling these kinds of tricks. There was the phone jamming in New Hampshire, the purging of the purging of the voter rolls, voter intimidation and the list goes on.
Again — my personal opinion is that most of the people charged to prosecute these crimes are — well republicans. By turning a blind eye to this sort of thing, they are helping thier own cause.
And before anyone brings up ACORN — here are a few facts. ACORN does not register voters, they simply get voters to fill out cards, then submit the cards to the local election board. ACORN is required by law to submit ALL voter registration cards .. even if they say Mickey Mouse. What ACORN does do is seperate out the suspect cards label them as such and then send them to the election board. It is then up to the election board to approve or reject the name. However, even if they were to approve Mr. M Mouse, there would still be no voter fraud unless someone actually tried to vote using that name
Real voter fraud is almost non existant — this from an article in the NY times.
Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.
Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year
read the whole article here.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html
Bill is there a link to the whole article ?
October 29th, 2008 at 9:58 am
Election law is a state issue. Some states (like Virginia) have laws that make it a crime (misdemeanor, I think) to give a voter incorrect information about where/how/when to vote. Other states do more, some do less.
However, enforcement is a big problem. You have to catch the guys putting the flyers up, and law enforcement is usually uninterested in pursuing these cases.
October 29th, 2008 at 11:29 am
Yes, it IS a state issue. My point is that in a national election, it shouldn’t be.
October 29th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
Maybe I’m being harsh, but anyone who falls for the voting day prank fails on “I educated myself about the election and its candidates” and probably shouldn’t be voting anyway.
The phone calls about arrests and polling place moves are easier to believe and could be fraud, but I don’t think it’s a crime under FEDERAL law until you actually turn them away at the right place (or alter their vote once it’s been made). This is the states filling in the gaps in federal election law until Congress can make their own revisions.
October 29th, 2008 at 1:52 pm
This kind of crime is a lot harder to define. If I tell my neighbor the election is on “Tuesday November 5th”, am I deliberately misleading? Or just mixing day and date? It’s one thing to tell him the polling site moved even though I know it didn’t, another to tell him it moved because someone told me it moved and I believed it and passed it on. Go ahead, prove I didn’t believe it was true.
I absolutely agree that federal election law should require vote suppression laws the way it requires voter ID laws, but they’ll still be hard to define and prosecute. Especially since one major party rejects the idea that vote suppression is a problem.
October 29th, 2008 at 5:29 pm
Bill — you don’t understand how things work!
If the perpetrators are Republicans, then it’s mischief. If, however, the perps are Democrats, *then* it’s voter fraud and should be punished as a Federal crime.
-jp
October 30th, 2008 at 9:16 am
But Bill, it’s not a national election. There are no candidates on the ballot in every state. Not even the Presidential election is technically national, because we vote for state electors rather than President.
That’s why it’s up to the states — every state has a completely unique set of candidates.
October 30th, 2008 at 1:14 pm
Has anyone actually seen one of these fliers?
Enforcement would mean starting with Neal Boortz of an Atlanta radio station who has often repeated his announcement of Wednesday voting for Democrats.
November 3rd, 2008 at 2:24 pm
As far as I’m concerned, all these dirty tricks are really being pulled by Democrats. When Obama loses to McCain tomorrow (because I don’t believe there’s enough people in this country ready for a black President, even though I’d like to be proven wrong), the liberals need some basis to scream “We were robbed, again!”
I’m surprised there was nothing on your blog, Bill, about the skinheads who were going to kill a bunch of black people, winding up in an attempt to kill Obama. I mean, you just can’t buy propaganda like that. Or can you.
The timing is incredible. And the main question is, how’d they get caught? What stupid thing did they do that let a judge issue warrants?
Come to think of it, it may have been the patriot act that allowed them to be caught. Maybe this is Republican propaganda. “The Patriot Act allowed us to save the lives of 88 black students, and your candidate. It’s a good thing.” Only the liberal media is too stupid to make the connection in time for the election.
November 11th, 2008 at 4:12 pm
Well, I was proven wrong. However, he only won by six percent in the popular vote. Against McCain. (Of course, I don’t think Bush won by that much of a margin in ‘04, and lost the popular vote in 2000.)