With these 300 fraudulent votes created by one Republican candidate alone, that’s 300 more fraudulent votes than have ever been created by ACORN or anybody who has ever worked for them.
But, of course, you’re unlikely to hear that, or even this story itself, from the tenacious Fox “News” “voter fraud special investigative unit” or the GOP clowns who help them disinform American voters.
From Nick Wing at Huffington Post…
Earlier this week, Villamaino pleaded guilty to felony charges of stealing ballots and changing the party affiliation of 280 Democrats during his campaign for state representative. A judge sentenced him to a year in jail, only four months of which he’ll be forced to serve behind bars.
The remainder of that sentence will be suspended, and Villamaino will also be required to serve a year of probation.
According to the article, “Villamaino, a former East Longmeadow Board of Selectmen chairman who resigned last year amid the scandal, ultimately lost his Republican primary, and the GOP candidate subsequently lost to the Democrat in the race.”
Three very quick points of note here…
1) This case — just so you know, in the event that Fox “News” does end up running something on it — does not actually involve voter fraud at all. The voters here did nothing wrong. It’s election fraud. As usual, election fraud cases most often involve insiders manipulating votes, most frequently via absentee ballot. That type of fraud is not deterred in any way by the disenfranchising polling place Photo ID restriction laws that Republicans demand be enacted in order to deter “voter fraud”. Those GOP laws are not meant to deter voter fraud, they are meant to deter legal Democratic-leaning voters from casting their legal vote. (There are only 10 known cases of in-person, polling place impersonation — the only type of fraud that might be deterred by Photo ID laws — among thousands of cases of election-related fraud out of hundreds of millions of votes cast in all 50 states since 2000, according to this recent exhaustive report by a non-partisan news consortium.) Photo ID laws do nothing to prevent absentee ballot fraud, despite the fact that it is the most common type of election fraud.
2) It isn’t only Republicans who try to mess with absentee ballots. Democrats also try to mess with them, as seen, for example, in this recent case out of New York involving a Dutchess County Democratic election commissioner accused (though not yet convicted) of 94 criminal counts involved with absentee balloting. Of course, at the same time, buried in that same story, is the fact that Dutchess County’s “former Republican election commissioner, David Gamache, has pleaded not guilty in a separate indictment.” (Cases like these are just one of the reasons The BRAD BLOG has long argued that the move to more and more Vote-by-Mail is a terrible idea for democracy.)
3) Finally, go back and read the very first sentence of this article. Thanks.
Then there is this line from Brad’s original Aug. 20, 2012 examination of the allegations of Villamaino’s absentee ballot fraud.
Am I missing something? He filed absentee ballot requests for all these people, but how was he planning to get the ballots? Wouldn’t they be mailed to the voters?
Maybe his plot didn’t get that far because the county voting office workers caught this stupid plan and stopped it, which is how it’s supposed to work. But how did he think he could vote for these 300 people?
I expect that he had some clever plot for intercepting the vote-by-mail ballots.
Vote-by-mail has a number of security issues. For example, imagine a cult where everyone hands in their blank ballots, the cult leader’s minions fill in the ballot, hands it back to the cult member, and watches them complete it and mail it.
>[RepubAnon]Vote-by-mail has a number of security issues. For
>example, imagine a cult where everyone hands in
>their blank ballots, the cult leader’s minions
>fill in the ballot, hands it back to the cult
>member, and watches them complete it and mail it.
In the increasing era of ubiquitous photography such a situation can happen with voters going to ballot boxes too.
That same cult could demand that each member surreptitiously video tapes their whole voting session while at the ballot box.
(admittedly this is harder and a rebel cult member could use technology or props to fake their voting session, but, even so, technology is eroding at the effectiveness of the secret ballot for cases where the voter is willing to participate in making their vote not secret. (examples where this can matter include the cult example, spouses, bosses, unions, outright vote buying))
The practical differences between vote-by-mail and in-person voting with regards to violating the secret ballot are still significant but, IMO, will erode to be not very different within a few decades.
Check your talking points. This kind of demolishes your catechism that there is not widespread voter fraud.
Bruce Majors @#5–
If you could just please bother to read the fucking post which clearly explains how the events described have nothing to do with voter fraud before making an ignorant, uninformed comment and thereby avoiding making the ignorant, uninformed comment, it’d be much appreciated.
Bruce Majors @5 wrote:
Your use of the word “catechism” is altogether inappropriate. The BRAD BLOG is a secular site containing articles that are based on verifiable facts.
When it comes to “voter fraud” one has to distinguish the type of fraud at issue. This particular case entailed absentee ballot voter fraud, which is not the type of voter fraud that can be prevented by polling place Photo ID laws, which laws threaten to disenfranchise millions of otherwise eligible voters.
The only type of voter fraud that can be prevented by polling place Photo ID laws is in-person voter impersonation — a form of voter fraud that is virtually non-existent.
As Loyola Law Prof. Justin Levitt revealed in sworn written testimony that he presented to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Human Rights in September 2011, there were “nine allegations of votes [in general elections] that might have involved votes cast by individuals impersonating others,” but those nine may be the result of “poll worker error or voter confusion…During the same period, 400 million votes were cast…Even assuming that each of the nine votes were fraudulent, that amounts to a relevant fraud rate of 0.000002 percent. Americans are struck and killed by lightning more often.”
How might he pull it off? Well, why did he do the “change party affiliation” step to begin with? Because Democrats receiving a ballot to vote in the REPUBLICAN primary won’t use it. Then he pilfers 300 Absentee ballots and mails them in — he doesn’t need to intercept any.
Note how little we value the electoral process as a country. 300 counts of a FELONY and he gets less than 4 months in prison? A joke.
Detroit billboards advertise wrong date to vote
If an upcoming city election in Detroit sees slow voter turnout, blame it on the billboards. Some of the 14 that were rented to advertise the looming election and entice voters to participate, unfortunately gave the wrong date.
The election’s Nov. 5. The billboards put it at Sept. 2, The Detroit Free Press reported. Detroit City Clerk Janice Winfrey said the error was noted over the weekend, and will soon be fixed. Eleven of the billboards were bought at city expense.
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