Democrats have already started using state data bases to print ID's! This is what they are doing as we speak! They are already trying to get ahead of 2022! History and the polls show they should lose in a historic blow out and there is no way in hell Nancy Pelosi would be in congress as the minority so there is most certainly some fishy shit going on!
"I'm debating you on election integrity, but I don't have the chops make sense of that Federalist article you sent me." Pleading ignorance is an automatic fail. Try again. Great read though.
That federalist paper is a bunch of BS. Rigged elections means fraudulent votes (or destruction of votes). IE people voting who shouldn't. voting more than once, etc
The fact that elite institutions such as the MSM, big tech are on the side of the Dems doesn't make it fraudulent or rigged
What can I say. It is exchanges like this that keep me coming back to Glenn's discussions. As a secondary High School educator for 36 years in New York, these type of exchanges became increasingly more difficult and alarmingly more partisan toward the end of my career. Our Democratic-Republic needs an educated electorate to forge or encourage better policy , when details of concern (on both sides) arise to be addressed. This quote from Mark , "I’m less concerned about the specific issues we raise here than I am by the tendency of people to identify with complexes of political interests that truly do not give a fuck about them." , most likely sums up the dilemma of parsing out relevant information and acting on it as opposed to " I'm busy and don't have the time , so I'll just go with what fires me up". Addressing the money issue is not to be ignored. Here, unfortunately the devil is in the details. I do believe that the vast majority of State's do a good job with vote tallies. To turn this over to the federal government, with the temptation to lean partisan and valueless rhetoric, no thanks! How do we get from these exchanges to vehicles of change is the problem I grapple with. It isn't more government and certainly not big tech. Gentlemen, thank you for the discussions. Please don't stop.
We may be able to find an answer with ancient law. We have a lot of people that are unidentified. If you found a religious educator and historian, maybe they could decipher an answer. I am sure there were a large amount of identified people thousands of years ago.
The problem is we have a government to, first and foremost, make us safe. We are not even safe when people have driver’s license. It is a very deep problem. Your colleague Cornel West, may be able to help you come to a solution. If people are not identified, we are even less safe and believe me, we are not safe in this moment of time.
It's great that Clifton and Mark are able to discuss so amiably, and respectfully, with some agreement and disagreement.
John is probably lying to himself about Republicans wanting to suppress Black votes; he claims this is what Rep changes are all about, which is why he opposes them. No elected Rep talks about reducing Black votes. John, like so many Dems for so many years, is demonizing Republicans by claiming their intentions are different from what the Reps claim, themselves.*
John is also being quite a bit disrespectful to Black Republicans like Ben Carson, Herman Cain, and Clarence Thomas, among others.
Reps don't want: dead people to vote; illegal aliens or non-citizens to vote; voters who've already voted to vote; Mickey Mouse to vote. They oppose voters who don't follow the rules from voting.
Reps want to suppress all illegal votes. "Illegal" votes are those against the rules. Picture Voter ID, like signatures, are reasonable rules to stop illegal voting. Neither John nor other Dem opponents of Voter ID have identified any actual legal voters who are unable to gain Voter ID - tho we all assume there are many potential voters who haven't bothered to register.
Georgia seems, at about 60% turnout in both 2016 & 2020 to be stable - but an overall turnout of 67% in the nation seems suspiciously high, rather than 60% or less, as in the prior 12 elections (record ~61% in 1960, including the Dead of Chicago which helped JFK win).
I suspect voter fraud thru mail-in ballots. Elections should not allow mail-in votes.
849k mail-in votes for Biden vs. 451k for Trump. Weak signature verification, frequent missing of handling certificates of custody as they move thru collection to counting. Once fraudulent ballots are included in those counted, any "counting audit" merely confirms the fraud.
The COVID-19 pandemic rules were excessive - BLM riots and fires and killing in hundreds of protests were "OK" (see how few were arrested or prosecuted, versus damage). Such rules were an excuse by Dems and Dem officials to change the rules. Like in PA, where the law says only the lawmakers can change the election rules, yet non-elected officials did change the rules. Only recently was one of those changes found against the PA constitution - tho the PA Supreme Court can still overrule it.
[* John wouldn't like the following argument, which follows his form but with AA:
The ONLY reason racist White Democrats, the Jim Crow party, support Black Affirmative Action is to have the elite colleges include Blacks. At the bottom. In almost every integrated academic class, most Blacks in that class will be in the bottom third - so the racist Whites will learn to NEVER say the n-word, but they can see their own secret superiority. Of course the racist Dems deny this is the reason, but the results should speak for themselves. Wordlessly.]
There was speculation in the last couple of weeks that some of President Biden's comments about, I think it was re-districting?, would throw questions about the Fall 2021 election results.
Do any readers remember this and any thoughts you can add...thank you.
Republicans can point to myriad instances of voter fraud and questionable election practices, while progressives can only make accusations of motivation regarding suppression of the black vote. I find this no different than the accusation of systemic racism in CRT to win the political argument. That said, I agree with Mark on the biased approaches of the political parties and follow Glenn in the hopes of finding something more productive to do regarding the causes of our discontent instead of squabbling over the symptoms. I think the better approach to voting rights would be to address the cause of the community dysfunction that makes voting difficult rather than imply blacks face unusual difficulty in getting ID. I know I've gone full Howard Beall over the Moynihan Report, but I don't see any better answer than funding vouchers in the inner city through the black church. And the level of services offered would of necessity have to address a lack of community capacity in health, employment, and civic participation as well as the standard educational services. I'm open to alternatives, but I hope this could be that productive common ground that the non-dogmatic can agree on.
It's not just Republicans doubting the election system.
Please read Molly Ball's Time article about the "fortified" election critically. The belief that Trump would steal the election is the genesis of the article's protagonists. These Democrats-in 2019-distrusted the integrity of the American voting system. Let that sink in-an organization that ultimately spent hundreds of millions of dollars in 2020 was predicated on the belief that the American voting system could be rigged. By Trump, of course-they would never consider any such idea.
The leaders of the organization also believed that Trump was building an army to flood the streets if he lost. In response to another phantom of their fevered imaginations, this organization did build an army. As Molly Ball puts it:
"The group’s now defunct website had a map listing 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets."
Again, from the article, the expectation was that these protests would become violent. Had Trump won, these riots would have caused much more damage to the fabric of the nation than what occurred on Jan 6th.
These disbelievers in the integrity of the American election system are the activist base of the Democratic Party. They aren't random poll respondents. These are real people driving actual Democratic Party strategy.
Again, I invite you to read Molly Ball's article as critically as you do Mollie Hemingway's. Molly Ball even tells you upfront to not believe your lying eyes. Instead, don't blink as you read it.
This was fantastic. Somehow I agreed with all four comments/responses. Clifton's reference to the Atlanta student testing scandal was right on the money. I say that because, on election night, when Atlanta became the story, that's the first thing I thought of. According to Wiki, 178 educators were implicated in that scandal. Knowing so many were involved with the testing scandal, a corrupt election didn't seem far-fetched. That, together with sending the reporters home before re-starting the counting, well, that's a bad look. (Me, I assume things were reasonably aboveboard. Why would I be shocked Trump lost after Covid and his stepping on his own foot about fifty times when discussing it?)
Mark said, as I interpreted it, "voter suppression" and "corrupt elections" are really just get-out-the-vote strategies for the Democrats and Republicans. No argument there from me.
Clifton wrote, "[...] but the bottom line is that concerns about voter suppression in Georgia are driven by false narratives." I think "concerns about ________ are driven by false narratives" is the law of the land these days.
Only tangentially related, but something I've felt for a long time... Is not the Republican tough talk about China all about countering the Democrats' Russia-Russia-Russia nonsense? The GOP badly needed their own foreign bette noir. In the way that "election fraud" offsets "voter suppression, "evil China" offsets "evil Russia." Just a thought.
A great exchange, and now I will check out the Mollie Hemingway interview podcast Clifton mentioned.
Allow me to cut to the chase. If the Koch brothers had "donated" 90% of $419,000,000 to public officials to get out the vote in Republican leaning areas, is there any doubt that the New York Times and the Bezo screed in DC would have demanded a prosecution? And that it would have happened? A measurable effect or not, this is corruption of the highest order.
I'm glad people have the brains and time to think through stuff like this. I have neither!
Democrats have already started using state data bases to print ID's! This is what they are doing as we speak! They are already trying to get ahead of 2022! History and the polls show they should lose in a historic blow out and there is no way in hell Nancy Pelosi would be in congress as the minority so there is most certainly some fishy shit going on!
"I'm debating you on election integrity, but I don't have the chops make sense of that Federalist article you sent me." Pleading ignorance is an automatic fail. Try again. Great read though.
That federalist paper is a bunch of BS. Rigged elections means fraudulent votes (or destruction of votes). IE people voting who shouldn't. voting more than once, etc
The fact that elite institutions such as the MSM, big tech are on the side of the Dems doesn't make it fraudulent or rigged
Words matter
Thank you! Excellent debate
What can I say. It is exchanges like this that keep me coming back to Glenn's discussions. As a secondary High School educator for 36 years in New York, these type of exchanges became increasingly more difficult and alarmingly more partisan toward the end of my career. Our Democratic-Republic needs an educated electorate to forge or encourage better policy , when details of concern (on both sides) arise to be addressed. This quote from Mark , "I’m less concerned about the specific issues we raise here than I am by the tendency of people to identify with complexes of political interests that truly do not give a fuck about them." , most likely sums up the dilemma of parsing out relevant information and acting on it as opposed to " I'm busy and don't have the time , so I'll just go with what fires me up". Addressing the money issue is not to be ignored. Here, unfortunately the devil is in the details. I do believe that the vast majority of State's do a good job with vote tallies. To turn this over to the federal government, with the temptation to lean partisan and valueless rhetoric, no thanks! How do we get from these exchanges to vehicles of change is the problem I grapple with. It isn't more government and certainly not big tech. Gentlemen, thank you for the discussions. Please don't stop.
They won’t post what I say.
We may be able to find an answer with ancient law. We have a lot of people that are unidentified. If you found a religious educator and historian, maybe they could decipher an answer. I am sure there were a large amount of identified people thousands of years ago.
The problem is we have a government to, first and foremost, make us safe. We are not even safe when people have driver’s license. It is a very deep problem. Your colleague Cornel West, may be able to help you come to a solution. If people are not identified, we are even less safe and believe me, we are not safe in this moment of time.
It's great that Clifton and Mark are able to discuss so amiably, and respectfully, with some agreement and disagreement.
John is probably lying to himself about Republicans wanting to suppress Black votes; he claims this is what Rep changes are all about, which is why he opposes them. No elected Rep talks about reducing Black votes. John, like so many Dems for so many years, is demonizing Republicans by claiming their intentions are different from what the Reps claim, themselves.*
John is also being quite a bit disrespectful to Black Republicans like Ben Carson, Herman Cain, and Clarence Thomas, among others.
Reps don't want: dead people to vote; illegal aliens or non-citizens to vote; voters who've already voted to vote; Mickey Mouse to vote. They oppose voters who don't follow the rules from voting.
Reps want to suppress all illegal votes. "Illegal" votes are those against the rules. Picture Voter ID, like signatures, are reasonable rules to stop illegal voting. Neither John nor other Dem opponents of Voter ID have identified any actual legal voters who are unable to gain Voter ID - tho we all assume there are many potential voters who haven't bothered to register.
Georgia seems, at about 60% turnout in both 2016 & 2020 to be stable - but an overall turnout of 67% in the nation seems suspiciously high, rather than 60% or less, as in the prior 12 elections (record ~61% in 1960, including the Dead of Chicago which helped JFK win).
I suspect voter fraud thru mail-in ballots. Elections should not allow mail-in votes.
https://thedatacorner.com/the-us-presidential-elections-results-and-voter-turnout-in-the-state-of-georgia-2016-and-2020/
849k mail-in votes for Biden vs. 451k for Trump. Weak signature verification, frequent missing of handling certificates of custody as they move thru collection to counting. Once fraudulent ballots are included in those counted, any "counting audit" merely confirms the fraud.
The COVID-19 pandemic rules were excessive - BLM riots and fires and killing in hundreds of protests were "OK" (see how few were arrested or prosecuted, versus damage). Such rules were an excuse by Dems and Dem officials to change the rules. Like in PA, where the law says only the lawmakers can change the election rules, yet non-elected officials did change the rules. Only recently was one of those changes found against the PA constitution - tho the PA Supreme Court can still overrule it.
https://www.thenewneo.com/2022/01/28/too-little-too-late-and-not-over-yet-pennsylvania-voting-law-change-found-unconstitutional/
[* John wouldn't like the following argument, which follows his form but with AA:
The ONLY reason racist White Democrats, the Jim Crow party, support Black Affirmative Action is to have the elite colleges include Blacks. At the bottom. In almost every integrated academic class, most Blacks in that class will be in the bottom third - so the racist Whites will learn to NEVER say the n-word, but they can see their own secret superiority. Of course the racist Dems deny this is the reason, but the results should speak for themselves. Wordlessly.]
What a worthwhile exchange to read. Thanks
There was speculation in the last couple of weeks that some of President Biden's comments about, I think it was re-districting?, would throw questions about the Fall 2021 election results.
Do any readers remember this and any thoughts you can add...thank you.
I’m just happy to see two people disagree with each other respectfully. It’s a rare thing these days. Insights on both sides. Thank you.
Republicans can point to myriad instances of voter fraud and questionable election practices, while progressives can only make accusations of motivation regarding suppression of the black vote. I find this no different than the accusation of systemic racism in CRT to win the political argument. That said, I agree with Mark on the biased approaches of the political parties and follow Glenn in the hopes of finding something more productive to do regarding the causes of our discontent instead of squabbling over the symptoms. I think the better approach to voting rights would be to address the cause of the community dysfunction that makes voting difficult rather than imply blacks face unusual difficulty in getting ID. I know I've gone full Howard Beall over the Moynihan Report, but I don't see any better answer than funding vouchers in the inner city through the black church. And the level of services offered would of necessity have to address a lack of community capacity in health, employment, and civic participation as well as the standard educational services. I'm open to alternatives, but I hope this could be that productive common ground that the non-dogmatic can agree on.
Mark-
It's not just Republicans doubting the election system.
Please read Molly Ball's Time article about the "fortified" election critically. The belief that Trump would steal the election is the genesis of the article's protagonists. These Democrats-in 2019-distrusted the integrity of the American voting system. Let that sink in-an organization that ultimately spent hundreds of millions of dollars in 2020 was predicated on the belief that the American voting system could be rigged. By Trump, of course-they would never consider any such idea.
The leaders of the organization also believed that Trump was building an army to flood the streets if he lost. In response to another phantom of their fevered imaginations, this organization did build an army. As Molly Ball puts it:
"The group’s now defunct website had a map listing 400 planned postelection demonstrations, to be activated via text message as soon as Nov. 4. To stop the coup they feared, the left was ready to flood the streets."
Again, from the article, the expectation was that these protests would become violent. Had Trump won, these riots would have caused much more damage to the fabric of the nation than what occurred on Jan 6th.
These disbelievers in the integrity of the American election system are the activist base of the Democratic Party. They aren't random poll respondents. These are real people driving actual Democratic Party strategy.
Again, I invite you to read Molly Ball's article as critically as you do Mollie Hemingway's. Molly Ball even tells you upfront to not believe your lying eyes. Instead, don't blink as you read it.
This was fantastic. Somehow I agreed with all four comments/responses. Clifton's reference to the Atlanta student testing scandal was right on the money. I say that because, on election night, when Atlanta became the story, that's the first thing I thought of. According to Wiki, 178 educators were implicated in that scandal. Knowing so many were involved with the testing scandal, a corrupt election didn't seem far-fetched. That, together with sending the reporters home before re-starting the counting, well, that's a bad look. (Me, I assume things were reasonably aboveboard. Why would I be shocked Trump lost after Covid and his stepping on his own foot about fifty times when discussing it?)
Mark said, as I interpreted it, "voter suppression" and "corrupt elections" are really just get-out-the-vote strategies for the Democrats and Republicans. No argument there from me.
Clifton wrote, "[...] but the bottom line is that concerns about voter suppression in Georgia are driven by false narratives." I think "concerns about ________ are driven by false narratives" is the law of the land these days.
Only tangentially related, but something I've felt for a long time... Is not the Republican tough talk about China all about countering the Democrats' Russia-Russia-Russia nonsense? The GOP badly needed their own foreign bette noir. In the way that "election fraud" offsets "voter suppression, "evil China" offsets "evil Russia." Just a thought.
A great exchange, and now I will check out the Mollie Hemingway interview podcast Clifton mentioned.
Allow me to cut to the chase. If the Koch brothers had "donated" 90% of $419,000,000 to public officials to get out the vote in Republican leaning areas, is there any doubt that the New York Times and the Bezo screed in DC would have demanded a prosecution? And that it would have happened? A measurable effect or not, this is corruption of the highest order.