I wonder what is the percentage of registered voters who don't have a photo ID...

In response to WingnutSteve's query, there are an estimated 178,000 SC voters who lack a state issued photo ID out of 2,495,806 registered voters (as of 04/07). That works out to slightly in excess of 7% of all SC voters.

For those who haven't seen the latest from Matthew Vadum over at TPM--
http://tpmmuckraker.talk...to_criminals.php?ref=fpb

He basically comes right out and says,"Fuck 'em, they shouldn't get to vote."

7% wnSteve is quite enough to put an unelected candidate ahead when registered voters can't even vote. Now, if the shoe was on the other foot what would you do?

Turn to those levers of government that are meant to protect us all perhaps?

Off topic but how about the Brad Blog doing an exposé on 9/11 for the tenth anniversary? How about laying out the numerous impossibilities and "coincidences" that show the official "nineteen hijackers" myth for what it is, a giant pack of lies? I realize that election fraud is the main focus of this blog but how about for the tenth anniversary of the most important issue of our time you guys do a story showing how it was clearly an inside job carried out to provide the pretext for a series of wars for energy resources, sold to the public as a "War on Terror"? What other issue comes close to it in importance? None, considering 9/11 is repeatedly used as the excuse for any foreign adventure and domestic repression since then. So how about it Brad?

re David Lasagna @3.

At the bottom of Matthew Vadum's assault on the right of the poor to vote lies an abhorrence of the billionaire class and their paid-for propagandists for democracy, itself.

That should surprise no one.

Consider the colloquy towards the end of Sicko Michael Moore asked former British MP Tony Benn how the UK developed its national health care system in 1947.

Benn's short answer was "democracy."

Later, Benn added:

Vadum's is typical of right-wing theology --- a blend of 19th Century social Darwinism and Calvinism where wealth accumulation is seen as a reflection of righteousness and the product of natural selection. It has led to what Kevin Phillips describes in Wealth & Democracy as a vice-into-virtue philosophy which suggests that greed forms the core basis for society and which rejects the very notion of a res publica --- a public interest apart from individual self-interest.

While the hard-right pays lip service to liberty and democracy, in reality, their goal is plutocracy in which the constitutional goal of government to promote the general welfare is perverted into government as a tool for keeping the common citizen in eternal subjugation.

I suppose ancient won't be explaining what the shoe on the other foot comment means.. or how he can come to ask that question by me asking Ernie how many voters will this law potentially effect.

I would never support a law which would take away from any citizen their right to vote.

David #3 Is this Vadum guy an American citizen? From what I could find he went the University of Toronto but I wasn't able to find out where he was born. If he is not an American citizen he wouldn't be allowed to be injecting himself into your elections would he?

Show us your birth certificate Matthew!

Re: Matthew Vadum. Here is an article from 1995 showing him to be one of five Ontario residents selected by the Fraser Institute to participate in the annual Student Leaders' Colloquium, May 12-15, 1995

http://oldfraser.lexi.ne...es/unformatted/PR23.html

Ernie @7,

Beautifully said.

I, for one, did not think that WingNutSteve was being rhetorical in asking what the percentage of voters was that could be adversely affected by photo ID laws. That is why I answered as I did.

I think one has to be careful not to judge a book by its cover --- in Steve's case, by his handle.

While there have been numerous occasions in which he and I disagree, we agree that the law should not deprive citizens of their right to vote. We've also agreed elsewhere that the franchise should be restored to felons once they've done their time.

While SC's photo ID law could potentially disenfranchise 178,000, a deprivation of the right of any citizen to vote is one too many.

I appreciate that Ernie. And I got a chuckle out of the irony of your post

Hey wnSteve, I'm glad to hear you would not support any law that takes away a citizen's right to vote. Am I right in concluding then, that you disagree with the photo ID law?
As for the shoe on the other foot, what if democrats enacted a law that by some circumstance of their life disenfranchised thousands of republican voters. Would that group not turn to the proper department in government whose function is to protect all peoples basic rights? I'm not trying to be smartass with you, just trying to clarify through a civil conversation.
If it takes me a while to get back to you its because I'm gushing out the basement after a growing season of food and crazy chewing lab pup. Gotta get ready for football season where the crowd that comes over ranges from retired teapartiers to grown up hippies with real jobs. Funny though, we all remain good friends despite our differences.

Not to be rude and I apologize if this comes off as rude but does anyone here realize that absolutely none of this issue or any other vote disenfranchisement and vote fraud issues amount to a pile of shit unless private money is removed from politics? That we could have the cleanest elections in the world complete with international monitors, every vote hand counted and duly recorded and we would still end up with the most unrepresentative government in the industrialized world?

Has it dawned on anyone here yet that it doesn't matter in the slightest which candidate wins because it is guaranteed to be a conservative anyway regardless of the meaningless "R" or "D" next to their name? Great example: Barack Hoover Obama. Anybody here decided to look past the minutia and focus on the real election issue, campaign finance? What the hell difference does it make if we have clean elections if there is no point in voting in the first place because the choices are so thoroughly controlled by the billionaire ruling elite?

Think About It -

Not to be rude and I apologize if this commes off as a rude, but do you realize that removing private money from politics amounts to a pile of shit if legal voters are kept from and/or their votes aren't counted accurately and/or transparently?

You are not "rude", other than in your naive presumption (and apparent disinterest in going back to find out) that we don't cover the bastardization of democracy due to the corporate financial control of elections and politicians.

Obviously, that's a fight we take on every day --- along with the systematic disenfranchisment of American voters and the need for transparent oversight of our voting systems/tabulators, etc.

(Toss in the media manipulation of who voters may vote for...if they're allowed to vote...and if their vote is counted accurately.)

All of those obstacles impede democracy. Correct any one of them without correcting the others, and democracy remains in peril.

While I'm certain that you believe that the obstacle to democracy you care most about is the most important one, I'm certain others feel similarly about their own concerns. They, like you, are right to be concerned though, frankly, ranking one obstacle in favor of another doesn't seem particular productive, since each obstacle results in a bastardization of true democracy.

I believe that if the private money from all sources were taken out of elections the rest of the problems would correct themselves. Just my $.02

WingnutSteve @17 wrote:

I believe that if the private money from all sources were taken out of elections the rest of the problems would correct themselves.

Do you also support a Constitutional amendment that would overturn Citizens United by eliminating corporate personhood?

Of course. I believe elections should be 100% publicly funded.

My goodness, WingnutSteve. That makes three in a row we agree on.

Brad, if you DON'T take private money out of politics then the rest clearly doesn't amount to anything. You're spinning your wheels, pissing in the wind, or any other good cliche. On a transparency scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being 100% transparent elections with no chicanery I would rate the actual transparency of American elections as about a 7 or 8. Know why? Because there simply is no fucking need to rig them very much at all because the outcomes don't matter! The only idiots who even bother to rig any of it would have to be very much lower level operatives who are as blind as you are about America's political process and think that it actually matters who wins. Barack Obama's election and governance since being elected proves 2 important things:
1. There is not really a lot of vote-rigging going on in American elections otherwise McCain would have "won".
2. Obama is a puppet of the elite or else we would have never heard of him and some other puppet of the elite would have been substituted for example Deval Patrick.

Obama's election does absolutely nothing to illustrate the dangers of vote tampering. Obama's election does everything to prove what I'm saying about the paramount issue being to remove private money from campaigns or else we will only be able to choose pseudo-progressives like Obama or obvious conservatives like McCain/Palin/Romney et al.

But by all means, continue with your little election tampering circle jerk festival as if it matters but whether you believe me or not all you're doing is arguing for more honest referees in professional wrestling, completely oblivious to the fact that pro wrestling is completely fake.
So when you have your internationally-monitored elections with hand counted paper ballots you can do cartwheels and throw a party before you go down to the firehouse or schoolhouse and cast your completely transparent, guaranteed-to-be-counted vote for whichever conservative marionette of the billionaires that you trust more than the other one. Without 100% publicly-funded elections you're just wasting your time. Might be fun to pretend otherwise but pretense is all it is.

Repeating the same point, Think About It, after it had been thoroughly demolished does not make it more persuasive the second time around.

Your comments reflect an inability to deal with multiple issues. First, you say we should write about 9/11, as if the problems created by predatory, global capitalism, the military-industrial complex and Empire began on that date. Next, you insist that we should limit our focus to private money in public elections, as if that were the only issue.

Setting aside the numerous articles that you could find on this site that deal with such issues, the plain and simple fact is that you could remove every paid-for political ad, and you would still be faced with a corporate-owned media which polices the range of discourse and controls 95% of what the American people see, hear and read.

The fact that you may be incapable of doing so, Think About It, does not mean that the rest of us are incapable of walking and chewing gum at the same time.

WingnutSteve @17 said:

I believe that if the private money from all sources were taken out of elections the rest of the problems would correct themselves.

I agree with you in the general substance of what you are suggesting. Most of our nation's political and policy problems and failures would likely correct themselves quite quickly if private money was removed entirely from elections.

I don't believe our democracy problem, however, would necessarily be cleaned up in the bargain. Where the electorate could be restricted from casting their legal vote, bad guys would still work hard (perhaps even harder!) to do so. And where results of elections could be changed with a flip of a switch, the incentive to do so would be that much more. We might get to transparency in election tabulation without the existing corporate influences on them (eg. It was the software industry, led by Microsoft, which fought so hard, and successfully, to gut what had previously been very good source code and hardware disclosure requirements in a previous version of Rep. Holt's election reform bill --- DISCLOSURE: I was asked to review some of those requirements before the bill was filed, and offered a number of suggestions that were included in the bill as filed...before they were then gutted by the House Admin Comm. at the demand of the software industry lobby.)

ThinkAboutIt @ 21:

Ya know, your comments are so obnoxious --- not the substance of them, but the obnoxiously condescending tone and proclivity for insults in lieu of argument --- that I'm disinclined to even bother responding at all.

Feel free to disagree with me on any point you like. Feel free to argue in favor of your own beliefs. But when you find it necessary to be obnoxiously insulting in support of those points, rather than simply support them, I'm somewhat less to give a damn about your opinions.

That said, I'll respond one more time in hopes that, in exchange, you'll suddenly grow up and offer a substantive reply without all the pathetic personal shots. (NOTE: You are allowed to make personal attacks on me, as per our very few rules for commenting, though not at other commenters. Still, it doesn't tend to make your argument any more persuasive in the bargain.)

Brad, if you DON'T take private money out of politics then the rest clearly doesn't amount to anything. You're spinning your wheels, pissing in the wind, or any other good cliche.

And if you don't assure that all legal voters who wish to vote actually get to vote, you are similarly pissing in the wind. The same is true when it comes to assuring that votes are accurately recorded, recorded accurately, and in a way that the citizenry knows that they have been.

I realize you disagree. You are welcome to. Just as many in the civil rights community did with me when I began discussing concerns about e-voting and tabulation transparency years ago. Many of them, as I have long ago, eventually came to see that it is all the same fight. The same is true for campaign finance. If you, however, prefer to imagine that the one leg of the stool that you are most interested in is the only one that needs to be solved, that's up to you. But it might be nice, and more persuasive, if you learned how to not be an asshole about it in the bargain. Good luck there.

The only idiots who even bother to rig any of it would have to be very much lower level operatives who are as blind as you are about America's political process and think that it actually matters who wins.

I may be "blind" as you see it, but I have the courage to put my name and my identity behind everything I do here. Sorry you seem to be lacking in the courage to do same and need to hurl feces in lieu of arguments.

Barack Obama's election and governance since being elected proves 2 important things:
1. There is not really a lot of vote-rigging going on in American elections otherwise McCain would have "won".

Speaking of "blind"ness.

But by all means, continue with your little election tampering circle jerk festival as if it matters

Your permission is greatly appreciated. Thanks!

So when you have your internationally-monitored elections with hand counted paper ballots you can do cartwheels and throw a party before you go down to the firehouse or schoolhouse and cast your completely transparent, guaranteed-to-be-counted vote for whichever conservative marionette of the billionaires that you trust more than the other one.

Will do! Because, as you know, I've often argued that only transparent elections matter and no other reform does. (That would be sarcasm --- noting that for safety because you don't strike me as incredibly bright.) If my arguments were as weak as yours, I'd probably want to use a pseudonym when hurling them too.

Without 100% publicly-funded elections you're just wasting your time. Might be fun to pretend otherwise but pretense is all it is.

Your opinion is neato! Thanks for sharing it!

@Ernest Canning:
"First, you say we should write about 9/11, as if the problems created by predatory, global capitalism, the military-industrial complex and Empire began on that date."

No, they certainly didn't begin on that date but they got a hell of a lot worse on that date and ever since then as 9/11 is used as the standard pretext for basically all of America's foreign policy and domestic repression since then. Do you disagree with that? Taking one day to write one article exposing the truth about the 9/11 inside job seems like a worthwhile effort. Among the mountain of election fraud/disenfranchisement articles I don't think one little article laying out how ridiculous the official 9/11 myth's details are is too much to ask especially considering the issue's importance.

"Next, you insist that we should limit our focus to private money in public elections, as if that were the only issue.
Nope, I never said limit the Brad Blog to that one issue. I was saying how about putting more emphasis on campaign finance because unless private money is removed from campaigns all the election transparency in the world won't mean shit and we will have exactly as unrepresentative a government as we do now. We would just be sure that our utterly meaningless votes on a slate restricted to conservative whores of big business would definitely be counted. Woop-de-fucking-doo.

"Setting aside the numerous articles that you could find on this site that deal with such issues..."

OK I was curious yesterday so I took a look at the three latest pages on this blog to see just how many recent articles I could find on the issue of campaign finance. Here's a tally of the number of articles I found and their subject:

Brad Blog facebook plugs: 1
choking the judge: 2
Hurricane Irene: 3
Glenn Beck goes to Zionist apartheid state: 1
media ignores popular nutbag Ron Paul: 1
Social Security solvency: 1
FCC Fairness Doctrine: 1
environmental issues: 6
campaign finance: possibly 2 articles neither of which say what needs to be said, that private money has to be removed from political campaigns
voter disenfranchisement: 6
election fraud: 6 or 7

So 12 or 13 articles about voter disenfranchisement/election fraud which really amount to the same thing, keeping people from either voting at all or having their vote correctly counted, same end result. 1 or at the most 2 articles dealing with campaign finance issues, neither of which even hint that private money has to be removed from politics or else our elections will remain meaningless dog & pony shows. Not really all that well-rounded but quite skewed in the direction of an issue that comparatively doesn't amount to a mouse fart next to the underlying falsity of American elections in the first place. Maybe a whole lot of walking but not a lot of gum-chewing.

@Brad

Just how much vote-rigging do you think really is going on in the U.S.? Don't you think if it was some massive Republican conspiracy instead of low-level idiots who don't realize how the system actually works that we would have a Pres. McCain now? Not that it really makes a damn bit of difference anyway, which is my point. You act as if without the Brad Blog focusing so much effort on exposing vote fraud/disenfranchisement measures that most people's votes wouldn't be counted which is pretty far from reality. The real question is why does anyone in this rotten country even bother to vote when it couldn't be more obvious that it is a sham designed to make us think we have some kind of a say in what governs us. I seriously don't think that anything short of a massive, peaceful social revolution using civil disobedience along the lines of what happened in Egypt and Tunisia and Yemen is going to change anything in this country. Voting sure as fuck won't do it, not as long as the choices are controlled. The only reason to go to the polling place is if there are issues up for a referendum. But candidates? Why bother? The end result is always the same, anyone who thinks otherwise is lying to themselves.

P.S.-- I forgot that you mentioned the corporate-owned media. The reason why the media is able to do what it does is largely because of privately-funded election campaigns anyway. When I say I want publicly-funded election campaigns I don't mean on the lavish scale to which American politicians have grown accustomed but rather a much smaller amount of funding, say $500,000 for a presidential candidate. This would necessitate drastically shorter election campaigns, lasting a couple of months instead of a couple of years. That would greatly reduce the amount of events that the media would be able to cover because there would be much fewer events.

Yes, the media would still be able to have its talking heads influence people to vote for this candidate or the other but without candidates that are just bought-and-sold commodities owned by the bourgeois elite, how much favor could be curried with them and how much of a reason would they have to curry favor with them? It isn't like the board of directors of CNN or Fox would be able to donate any money to their favorite candidate anymore and expect something in return.

Taking private money out of politics would cull out all the greedy self-serving shitbags who populate American politics and the only ones who would run for any office would be candidates that truly want to be public servants, to make this country a decent place, not prostitutes for corporations and the wealthy. And those with big egos who want power but that can't be avoided and they couldn't really be that corrupt anyway if there is no quid pro quo with private financiers.

I'm all for transparent elections but they aren't really that opaque as it is now. I get what you're saying about the importance of everyone having their vote counted but what small amount of vote tampering that exists doesn't seem to present much of a threat to election results. An infinitely greater threat is privately financed campaigns.

The U.S. has the most unrepresentative government in the industrialized world, by far. The reason for this is most certainly not because of any vote tampering but is because politicians in this country are owned properties of the billionaires and corporations, period. The Dems had a supermajority in the Senate, a sizeable majority in the House and an allegedly Democratic president from January 2009 until November 2010 (or Jan. 2011 really when the new majority was seated.) Any Republican vote-rigging conspiracy apparently must have fallen quite short of making any real impact because it didn't prevent the Dems from getting a Senate supermajority, a House majority and a Dem president. So, in that time span between Jan. 2009 and Jan. 2011 what in the hell do progressives have to show for it? I hear crickets chirping. Where is the party that has given us single-payer universal health care? Where is the party that has raised the minimum wage to make it approximate a living wage? Where is the party that has given us the Employee Free Choice Act? Where is the president who is going to end the wars instead of following the Bush plan on Iraq to the letter and escalating the war in Afghanistan? Obama and the Senate- and House Democrats are exhibits A, B and C that show clearly what is wrong with American politics. Vote rigging and disenfranchisement? Gimme a fucking break. Candidates that are exclusively marionettes of the bourgeoisie, now that is the real problem.