The state house passed the Washington Voting Rights Act (second section). If passed it would allow minority groups that could prove discrimination at the local level some relief. The example in the piece, that’s the most common example I’ve heard relating to the act is Yakima:
His bill would give minority communities that can prove they’ve been disenfranchised at the polls (say, in Yakima, whose at-large city council lacks a single Latino member despite the city’s large Latino population) to move to districted elections.
Great. Now we can look forward to it dying in the state senate.
Republicans don’t want people to vote. They’ve said it outright. If everyone voted, even the folks they’ve made sure are run into the prison system at their earliest convenience such as the kids caught with a little weed and happened to be of African decent, they’d never stand a chance.
It’s one of the main reasons why they insist on prosecuting even small-time dealers Federally, especially if they have darker skin than could come from anywhere but south of Scandinavia.
@1 Republicans know how to fuck over people, but they have no conception of how to fuck people (pun intended), so they’re becoming an ever-smaller minority. (Republicans are made, not born, know what I mean? wink-wink) The only way they can hang onto power is by keeping “others” from voting; and if they lose power, they can’t keep their more-than-fair-share slice of the economic pie, too. For them the stakes couldn’t be higher. So they’ll do whatever they can to skew elections in their favor to maintain the status quo as long as possible.
Everyone eligible should vote in an election. But they should only vote once.
Republicans admit they don’t want everyone to vote (by redefining any vote against them as “election fraud”), but then turn around and claim they want everyone to be able to own assault weapons. Somehow, it doesn’t seem they’ve thought this through very well.
@3 A nationwide survey of 3,000+ county auditors turned up exactly 10 cases of voter impersonation. So where’s the issue here? There isn’t one. The GOP is waging a campaign of lies that dead people vote, illegals vote, and people vote multiple times to justify their legislative proposals that are designed to prevent legitimate voters from voting. It’s all bullshit. When you post something like “they should vote only once,” you’re playing into that bullshit, you’re helping them promote that manufactured myth. So my question to you is, are you a troll?
That survey did reveal an actual case of a voter impersonating a dead person. I forget which state, maybe New Jersey, but it involved a son casting his deceased father’s ballot in addition to his own. He was caught and prosecuted, as I recall. I’ll bet he was a Republican.
@5 So what exactly is the difference between a “troll” and a non-troll participant here who just happens to be a conservative? Perhaps that the latter type actually believes what he or she is posting?
From 5,
No, I’m just recalling something my grandfather said about elections in Chicago. The joke around town was that Mayor Richard Daily’s motto was, “Vote early and often!” As you know, he was the mayor for a very long time in Chicago.
@ 8
Yeah, but everyone pretty much agrees that Daly was a right, rotten rat bastard son of a bitch.
Requiring ID laws at the polls is not unique. Besides 10 to me sounds like the number of cases those county auditors FOUND OUT ABOUT. Its not surprising the number is that low. It would be very hard to find out someone impersonated someone else because they were IMPERSONATING THEM. That is what impersonation MEANS.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/....._blog.html
@5 I believe a “troll” is generally understood to be a provocateur. “Trolling” is a fishing term, e.g. you troll for salmon by throwing a baited hook in the water and dragging it behind the boat, and wait to see if you catch something.
@8 Undoubtedly there has been flagrant ballot-box stuffing in machine-controlled cities in the past. So this has worked its way into American election lore. But it’s also true that the GOP is (a) pursuing a deliberate strategy of voter suppression, and (b) exploits this lore by creating a “voting fraud” mythology to justify “solutions” to voting “problems” that don’t exist.
@9 … with the “police riot” against peaceful anti-war protesters at the 1968 Democratic Convention constituting Exhibit A of Daly’s rightwing police-state mentality.
@10 So now Republicans use Libya to justify voting-suppression legislation in the U.S.? Why am I not surprised … it shows the lengths GOPers will go to, to justify their bullshit.
Requiring ID to vote is not, per se, a bad idea — although one may reasonably ask why it’s necessary to solve a problem that doesn’t exist.
The problem with ID is how Republicans manipulate it to suppress legitimate voting. In Washington, it’s not an issue because you can use various readily available documents to verify that you are who you say you are — a driver’s license, student ID card, utility bill, rent receipt, etc. In Wisconsin, Republicans sought to require highly specific ID and then closed driver’s license offices in Democratic counties (while opening more such offices in Republican counties) to make it as inconvenient as possible for certain classes of voters to obtain the necessary ID. For example Darryl, who is from Wisconsin, recounted in this blog how a relative of his was jerked around when she tried to get an ID for voting purposes. My sister in Milwaukee, who has a Hispanic surname because she married a Hispanic man, had a somewhat similar experience.
Democrats question voter ID laws because Republicans abuse them to suppress Democratic votes. In fact, Democrats do more than question them, they have sued — and won in some courts — to stop this abuse.
No one is against preventing voting fraud, or catching and prosecuting those who commit voting fraud. What is at issue here is the GOP’s deliberate and calculated strategy of exploiting myths about a problem that doesn’t exist to prevent hundreds of thousands or millions of legitimate voters from exercising their right to vote in order to swing elections in their favor.
One of the reasons Obama was re-elected in 2012 is because the Republican vote suppression campaign — and make no mistake, it’s a highly organized and richly funded and carefully coordinated nationwide campaign — generated a backlash among minority voters in states like Florida and Ohio that are specially targeted by the GOP for minority voter suppression. These voters were sufficiently angered by the GOP tactics to bear the inconveniences artificially created by GOP election manipulators and stand in line for as many hours as it took to cast their votes. It’s encouraging to see that the GOP’s multimillion-dollar efforts to keep American citizens from voting in their own country are backfiring on them. But that’s not a long-term solution to the GOP vote suppression campaign. These tactics ultimately require a response that includes preventing vote-suppression legislation from being passed in the first place, and where it passes, suing to get it struck down by the courts. Such lawsuits were widely successful in the runup to the 2012 election, which is another reason why the GOP failed in its efforts to steal that election.
I thought “troll” referred to a mythological beast from Scandinavian lore.
@14 The fact you chose the worst country on that list says something about your motives. I’m opposed to purposely manipulating things to get the desired demographics in an election, but how do these people function without ID’s? I bet MSNBC themselves require some form of ID to get hired there. They should allow other forms of ID too, but anyone can show up and say they are anyone and vote, especially if its a different precinct.
If people really believed that these laws were draconian, the sole GOP winner in our state would not have been the person in charge of our election system, and no momentum of Republican secretaries of state from the 60’s is not the reason she won.
http://www.rasmussenreports.co.....ter_id_law
Sorry, I don’t understand the coding enough to post multiple links without it being all fucked up so here is another interesting link
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....14963.html
From 15,
I did a little looking at several online dictionaries. “Troll” is a method of fishing, as was stated earlier. Someone engaged in this activity would technically be a “troller,” not a “troll.” “Troll,” as a noun, refers to the mythical Scandinavian monster I spoke of in 15.
@16 Chris,
I missed that part of the US Constitution granting the right to employment at MSNBC.
A word about the cost & benefits of minority voter suppression
Ugly numbers for state GOP
Nobody.Could.Have.Predicted.
From 20,
I don’t know if the CA Democrats should be too happy. After all, California is in one heck of a mess, financially. Not as bad as Illinois, perhaps, but certainly not exactly solvent and financially healthy by any stretch of the imagination.
Stay tuned….
@19
Did you really miss the point of my post?
The point is that requiring photo id is not some conservative evil plot. Unless all the right wingers at MSNBC are part of this photo ID plot, because we all know how conservative everyone there is.
@22 Chris,
I didn’t miss anything pal. Looks like you’ve missed out on a lot.
The intention, “plot” if you want, of restrictive requirements for citizens attempting to exercise their constitutional right to vote is to unlawfully intimidate prospective voters.
Sorry you don’t want to understand that, but there is no equivalence of privilege to employment and right to vote.
As Roger pointed out to you up @14, there’s a slew of adjudicated court cases which show that we’re not making this shit up.
Just wondering, have you ever worked at a polling place?
Chris @10
I can’t phantom your point, so I’ll infer it and respond accordingly, assuming you’ve previously been soundly rebutted, but still stubbornly wield your talking points partisan bludgeon.
NO ONE is against voter ID. I’ve served as a poll inspector. With poll site voting, the risk of impersonation is minuscule. The system we have is just fine.
What progressives opposed was requiring a driver’s license, passport or any other form of ID which was not freely provided. Firstly, that’s called a poll tax, and that’s illegal. Secondly, it’s not needed or helpful.
I apologize if I’ve interrupted your strawman argument.
Please. Continue.
Chris @17
Right you are. I’m glad that you agree that the correct solution is universal voter registration, where everyone and their eligibility to vote is recorded. That would prevent those clerical errors.
Hi Carl. Hoorah for Rep. Luis Moscoso. (sic, good to see Erica still can’t spellcheck. Good grief.)
I’ll read this bill and respond. Real quick, additionally, requiring all districts to be maximally competitive (no gerrymandered safe seats) would definitely guarantee fair representation.
Every illegal vote cancels a legally casted vote. Someone voting illegally, on every part of the ballot that they did not vote the way I did, my right to vote has been lost by their illegally casted vote cancelling out my vote. What is to stop me from going to a different precinct with the only changes being a few very small races that many people don’t even vote on and giving a fake name that I have registered or of a dead person who hasn’t been taken off the voting rolls. The law doesn’t stop criminals, that’s what makes them criminals-they break the law. Saying that illegal votes don’t change elections is a very stupid thing to say, especially in this state. While most people here don’t feel that Gregoire stole the 2004 election, it is undeniable that the number of illegal votes exceeded the victory margin. No one will ever be able to know with full certainty who the true winner of that election was.
But also, I truly want to know this: how do all these people function in society with no ID? There are so many things you can’t do without one.
Some of the stuff mentioned like closing places to get ID in Democratic areas and opening in Republican strongeholds, fine that should be stopped. But remember every illegal vote cancels a legal vote.
But if illegal votes vote the same way as you, your vote counts twice!!
In many cases they have ID.. Like students – a group targed by right wing vote suppressors.. So right wingers across the country have invalidated student ID through their draconian vote-supression legislation and have arranged arduous hoops for students to jump through to get valid id for voting.
In many cases they have old or expired ID – this is often the case with Seniors who are often frail and can’t easily navigate arduous right wing vote suppression hoops.
Again right wing vote suppressors make old id invalid for voting..
Yikes Chris? Dude you were wrong back then when we were all arguing about Christine Gregoire and little surprise you’re wrong today.
This is a stupid thing to say (the part about “this state”) because you don’t back it up with any facts about illegal voting patterns here.
Hey Chris,
Here’s one who DOUBLED your vote:
http://seattletimes.com/html/l.....rs06m.html
I bet that made you FEEL REAL GOOD!
Republican should just go all in and advocate that only land owners can vote, or maybe only those with 20K in the bank, or maybe to be really honest, the only people who can vote are the ones who contributed 50K to the republican party each year. That would exclude Serial Conn, he doesn’t pay.
@29-31 I’m not trying to start a “Rossi got robbed” argument here, that is a pointless and meaningless argument here especially since Gregoire isn’t even governor anymore. I’m saying nothing but facts here. 1)2004 was a close governor’s election, that’s something you would have to have serious mental deficiencies to not agree with and 2) the number of illegal votes exceeded the margin of victory (by about 13 times in fact), which John Bridges stated in his decision. Those are both indisputable facts. Therefore, it is possible that Rossi was the real winner. It is also possible that Gregoire won by more than 129 votes. That’s ALL I’m saying. Therefore it is possible that illegal votes changed the election.
Hey it’s a Fraggy sighting
And DUMMOCRAPTS who tell illegals they can vote doesn’t bother you Fraggy.
Sheesh… still a moronic twit!
Chris @27
What is to stop me from going to a different precinct with the only changes being a few very small races that many people don’t even vote on and giving a fake name that I have registered or of a dead person who hasn’t been taken off the voting rolls.
What state are you talking about? For that matter, what year?
When WA state had poll sites, the risk of people voting at the wrong poll site (illegally or otherwise) was miniscule. Guess why. No, really, I want you to guess.
The reason is because we required all voters to present ID. And each poll site had a list of eligible voters.
As stated above, which you willfully ignored or can’t understand, progressives opposed requiring voter ID which was not freely provided.
Please, if you’re going to repeat the right wing blather, at least tag your comments with {mindlesslyrepeatingdisprovendumbshitandsimplyunabletolearnbetter}.
The law doesn’t stop criminals, that’s what makes them criminals-they break the law.
Guns don’t kill people, people kill people. Rocks are hard. Water is wet.
Saying that illegal votes don’t change elections is a very stupid thing to say, especially in this state.
What you’re doing is projecting. Making up shit people didn’t assert.
There are plenty of legitimate, real problems with election administration in our country. The repeatedly disproven dumb shit you anonymous right wing cowards keep repeating isn’t helpful.
(This is like having a “debate” with Pudge.)
Therefore, it is possible that Rossi was the real winner. It is also possible that Gregoire won by more than 129 votes.
It’s not merely possible; Judge Bridges ruled that four felons had cast illegal votes for Rossi, making her margin of victory 133 votes.
Interesting how you missed that, despite holding up Judge Bridges ruling as proof of whatever voter-suppression scam you’re trying to sell. Try harder next time, troll.
Since not a single illegal vote was ever shown as going to Gregoire, while we found five for Rossi without even trying very hard, I’m going to say she would have won by a larger number of votes if the illegal ones had not been counted. And, unlike you, I have actual evidence to support my claim. Later, loser.
@31
The funnier part of the story was that even when found guilty of forging his wife’s signature on the ballot, the man asked the judge to invalidate his vote and allow hers to be counted. What part of “dead people don’t vote” did this guy not understand?
@31 Ha! They finally found a dead voter! Our Republican friends always knew if they turned over every rock they’d eventually find one of these centipedes. And they did! Bring on James O’Keefe! Bring on You Tube!
@33 I know what happened in 2004. I’m not going to say how I know, because that might identify my real name, so let’s just say I was in a real good position to know.
Rossi won that election and his lawyers threw it away because they insisted that certain Rossi votes not be counted. IHowever, this statement is only valid if the illegal votes are counted; see below.) I’m not talking about the lawsuit in Chelan County; that came later. I’m talking about what happened in the court cases preceding the Chelan lawsuit. Rossi had stupid lawyers; it’s that simple.
It shouldn’t shock you that the law firm which represented Rossi is no longer in business. It used to be one of largest corporate law firms in the Pacific Northwest; then it went poof! and was no more.
Now let’s talk about the illegal votes. We’ll call these 1,100 or so votes “illegal” because everyone agrees they were cast by ineligible voters. Almost none of them, however, were illegal in the sense that people knowingly cast ineligible ballots. Virtually all of them thought they were entitled to vote, and even the state didn’t know they were ineligible.
That was a bureaucratic screwup by the state, pure and simple, and it was fixed after the election. It’s impossible to know for sure which candidate benefited from it, but anecdotal evidence strongly suggests that Rossi got up to 90% of those illegal votes, because most of them were cast by Caucasian male ex-felons, a demographic that was known to be overwhelmingly pro-Republican at the time.
And if this is the case, these illegal votes more than canceled out the legitimate votes that Rossi’s stupid lawyer threw away, in which case Gregoire did win the election after all, in the sense of receiving more legitimate votes than Rossi received.
Let me define my terms. By “legitimate” votes I mean votes that were actually cast by people who were entitled to vote, regardless of whether they were counted. (A small, but potentially crucial, number of legitimate votes were not counted.) By “illegal” votes I mean votes that were actually cast by people who were not entitled to vote, and which were counted. Am I being clear?
Now, as for what happened with the illegal votes and why there were so many of them, the answer is Washington had a very confusing law about when, and under what conditions, a felon’s voting rights are restored. The general belief among ex-convicts, their parole officers, and county and state elections officials was that a person who had been released from prison to community supervision could vote. This seems not to have been correct, or at least it was argued after the fact by some that this was not a correct interpretation of the statute regarding restoration of voting rights as it existed at the time, but nearly everyone in the system made the same mistake and consequently a lot of paroled felons were allowed to re-register and voted in the 2004 election, and they were allowed to do this by election officials. It was a mistake, apparently, but it was an “honest” (is “sincere” a better word?) mistake by all those involved. Virtually none of those 1,100 votes were cast by ex-felons who knew they weren’t eligible to vote. In short, the fact those ballots were cast and counted was an accident, not cheating or election-stealing.
I’ve told this story before, and I know it doesn’t do any good to tell it again, because the Sore Loser Party will insist on believe their myths about the “theft” of the 2004 governor’s election until Kingdom Come simply because they have an emotional need to believe it and would suffer mental breakdowns if the truth ever seeped into their thick heads. The Wingnut Noise Machine told them the election was “stolen,” therefore in their minds it was “stolen,” and that’s the end of it. These are the same people who believe there’s no human-caused global warming and Obama wasn’t born in Hawaii. What can I say?
To clarify my comment @39, Gregoire officially won by 129 votes after the King County Canvassing Board finished counting the disputed ballots in King County, which were the last votes to be counted in the hand recount. (At the conclusion of the hand recount, but before the ballots referred to the King County Canvassing Board were decided, Gregoire had a statewide lead of 8 votes. The King County Canvassing Board process added votes to both Rossi’s and Gregoire’s totals, but Gregoire got 121 more of those than Rossi, which brought her certified victory margin to 129 votes.)
In the Chelan lawsuit, Judge Bridges ruled that 4 of Rossi’s votes shouldn’t be counted, which raised Gregoire’s final official victory margin — for legal purposes — to 133 votes.
It’s hard to know exactly how many Rossi votes were thrown away by Rossi’s stupid lawyers. Based on the highly accurate information I had at the time, I estimated that counting these votes — and they were legal, legitimate, valid votes — would have put Rossi approximately 85 votes ahead of Gregoire after the final recount.
Then, the only way Rossi would not have been governor would have been if Gregoire (instead of Rossi) filed an election contest lawsuit. Let’s assume she would have done so. In that case, the lawsuit wouldn’t have been tried in Chelan County before a Republican judge. Instead, it would have been the Democrats who went forum shopping, which means the case would have been tried in either Thurston County or King County, most likely in King County. So, if Gregoire instead of Rossi had contested the final recount in court, it is certain that Judge Bridges wouldn’t have heard the case in Chelan County, it would have been heard by a Democratic-leaning judge in King or Thurston county.
In this lawsuit, Gregoire’s only chance to win would have been to get the illegal votes thrown out. This is exactly what Rossi’s lawyers tried to get Judge Bridges to do in Chelan County, and they failed. Judge Bridges didn’t buy it. The problem was nobody knew who the approximately 1,100 ineligible felons voted for, and there was no way to identify these ballots once they were removed from the ballot envelopes with the voters’ names and signatures on them, so you’d have to GUESS who they voted for and judges don’t like to do that.
It’s possible the Democratic lawyers could have come up with a scheme for guessing how many of the illegal votes Gregoire got and how many Rossi got, and sold it to a Democratic-leaning judge in a Democratic county’s trial court; and it’s even possible that the state Supreme Court would have bought it, too. They had much smarter lawyers than the bumblers working for Rossi, and Rossi’s lawyers floated a scheme that was so clumsy they couldn’t even sell it to their handpicked Republican judge in a forum-shopped Republican county. Basically they ginned up a statistical profile of felon party preferences using date from other states’ prison systems because it wouldn’t fly with the demographic data from Washington’s prison system, or something like that. This was too much even for a Republican judge, and Bridges decided there was no way to uncount the illegal felon votes, therefore they would have to stay counted.
As I said, Gregoire’s lawyers might have been able to overcome this problem with a better legal argument and better data than Rossi’s stupid lawyers concocted. It would have been a real challenge, though, and I wouldn’t have bet my own money on her and her lawyers being able to pull it off in a manner that would not only win in Superior Court but also in the state Supreme Court. An awful lot here would depend on who the trial judge was, and they probably could have controlled that. (Even that slipped from the Republicans’ grasp; they went to a tiny two-judge county, picked their judge, and ended up with the other judge because their handpicked judge had to disqualify himself for reasons I now forget. Do you get a sense here that the Republicans were so inept they couldn’t do a damn thing right? Well, you’d be right, so be grateful these clowns didn’t end up running our state government!) Getting back to Gregoire, she would have had to overcome a roughly 85-vote Rossi lead by convincing the courts that Rossi got at least 54% of the illegal votes. That’s probably not too hard, with any decent prison population data and a halfway-convincing statistician (maybe they would have hired Darryl?), they maybe could have sold that to a handpicked Democratic trial judge in a Democratic county and at least 5 of the state Supreme Court justices (only 2 of whom were conservatives). But I wouldn’t have bet money on it, if it were my money.
27, 35 – “The law doesn’t stop criminals, that’s what makes them criminals-they break the law.”
Even this part of Chris’s drivel is incorrect. White male felons are the biggest law-and-order types around. When they watch crime shows on the dayroom TV they cheer for the cops. If you’re a child molester or wife beater, you don’t want to be in a cafeteria or gym with those guys. Most of the ex-felon voters interviewed by reporters after the 2004 election were mortified by suggestions they cheated at the polls and vehemently protested their innocence.
banned @38-41
Nice recap. Thanks.
While everyone argued about the dozen mail ballots, what caught my attention were the weird voting machine results in Snohomish County.
http://bit.ly/YUuj6V
TL;DR: poll ballots favored Gregoire, touchscreen “ballots” favored Rossi.
I believe, but could now never prove, that Gregoire won Snohomish County 2004 by 6,000+ votes (vs losing) so would have comfortably carried WA State.
I also believe, but can not prove, the parties looked at the problems with touchscreens in both Yakima County and Snohomish County, and decided to just not go there.
The republicans will start to be in trouble in Eastern Washington soon. The Yakima valley is over 50% hispanic and despite the right wing culture on the east side – the democgraphics are trending towards the democrats.