Commenter “Cornhead” writes”
For the life of me I don’t understand why America in 2020 – and after the Florida 2000 disaster – can tolerate all of this clear election fraud. Wasn’t a bunch of federal money spent after 2000?
Why can’t we fix this? I know the Dems are opposed to it because they benefit from it, but really. The Dems planned this whole fraud scheme for months.
DOJ should have been on this case for years. There’s an entire voting rights division in DOJ and it is only concerned with Blacks voting in the South. What about the rest of the country? We are getting scewed.
I think I understand it, although back in 2000 I would not have understood it. I recall being shocked by that election and its multiple opportunities for confusion in voting (hanging chads, anyone?). And although I don’t recall many allegations of outright fraud in 2000 (I could be wrong; it was a long time ago), I do recall thinking it was a disaster and that of course both parties would be eager to correct the problems before the next major election cycle.
Well, ha ha on me.
What I realized some years later was that there are two competing principles at work now, and one of them seems to occupy the legal high ground, which is that all voting policies not be discriminatory. And by “discriminatory” we now mean anything that might have even a whisper of a chance of preventing a single minority person from voting.
One would think that such a thing should be balanced against the obvious plus of discouraging voter fraud. But if so, then one would be wrong. Only the right seems to care about voter fraud, perhaps because the history of such things is that it occurs mainly in blue cities with huge voter bases and a large Democratic “machine” (in the olden days it was Tammany Hall et al, which were notorious for voter fraud and patronage, but there are modern heirs).
The left sees fraud as potentially very useful. It also knows that voting inclusion – extending the vote to as many people as possible and making it easier and easier for them to vote – has the air of sanctity. Anything that tends to make voting more difficult – for example, requiring most voters to come to the polls on voting day, or requiring IDs – is frowned on as discriminatory. So making sure that a vote is a valid one falls way to the bottom of the list of priorities, far below inclusion.
It used to be – long ago, when I was young – that both parties agreed that discouraging fraud was something greatly to be desired. But at some point (and it was probably the point at which the left began to really take over the Democratic Party) it became clear that wasn’t the goal.
Of course, one of the arguments the left uses is that voter fraud almost never happens, and definitely never on a large scale. That rests on the idea that the voter fraud that has been proven is the only fraud there is. But there’s plenty of reason to strongly doubt that it’s so. I don’t think that it should matter, anyway, to the courts, because even the opportunity for any sort of significant fraud represents a gap that must be closed. Increasingly, however, that argument doesn’t wash.
I also recently learned about this consent decree, and only because it was lifted almost three years ago after over thirty-five years of being in operation. Here’s how it worked, and still works to a certain extent despite having been lifted :
After more than three decades, Republicans are free of a federal court consent decree that sharply limited the Republican National Committee’s ability to challenge voters’ qualifications and target the kind of fraud President Donald Trump has alleged affected the 2016 presidential race…
The decree, which dated to 1982, arose from a Democratic National Committee lawsuit charging the RNC with seeking to discourage African-Americans from voting through targeted mailings warning about penalties for violating election laws and by posting armed, off-duty law enforcement officers at the polls in minority neighborhoods.
To extend the decree, the DNC needed to show that the RNC violated the terms of the pact. Democrats pointed to a series of incidents during the 2016 election in which they alleged people who claimed or appeared to be working for the RNC were engaged in poll watching. A November 2016 POLITICO report describing RNC spokesman Sean Spicer’s Election Day activities led the judge to order Spicer to submit to a deposition.
Did you know this? I certainly didn’t know that for over three decades the DNC and the courts had been stopping the RNC from targeting fraud on the grounds that the RNC’s actions were racially discriminatory. Not only did this stop certain efforts to stop certain types of fraud, but it may have discouraged other efforts from even being made in the first place, because they might be thought discriminatory.
And that seems to have been the case [my emphasis]:
While the end of the decree means the RNC is now free to step up its efforts on voter fraud and to take a role in coordinating Election Day poll monitoring, it is unclear whether the national party will resume such work, which has been left to individual campaigns and state parties in recent years.
Some GOP leaders have urged the national party to continue to avoid those activities to avoid alienating minority voters, who often view those efforts as discriminatory.
Having read the linked article, I can’t really tell how much the consent degree hampered RNC efforts to discourage voter fraud, other than limiting poll watching, which as far as I know only involves same-day voting rather than mail-in voters. And it’s mail-in votes and the possible fraud connected with them that are at issue this year.
So the problems that occurred in 2000 and beyond are not the same problems we face in 2020. The COVID pandemic had many uses for the left. One was being able, with the help of the MSM, to blame Trump for what he could not have helped. Still another was to amp up mail-in voting so much that it made fraud easier in swing states. Together these two may end up putting Joe Biden in the White House.
