GOP says 5,000 non-citizens voting in Colorado a 'wake-up call' for states

[I B Hankering]

Originally Posted by charlestudor2005

I think the NYT investigation proved that Gore won FL.

Nope.

MEDIA RECOUNT: BUSH
WON THE 2000 ELECTION

April 3, 2001

In the first full study of Florida's ballots since the election ended, The Miami Herald and USA Today reported George W. Bush would have widened his 537-vote victory to a 1,665-vote margin if the recount ordered by the Florida Supreme Court would have been allowed to continue, using standards that would have allowed even faintly dimpled "undervotes" -- ballots the voter has noticeably indented but had not punched all the way through -- to be counted.http://www.pbs.org/newshour/media/me...count_4-3.html

[Rudyard K]

Originally Posted by discreetgent

In a strict legal sense, perhaps there is a small problem. But with a voting age population of about 3,000,000 the percentage being discussed is rather small and lets face it with most things .2 percent would rarely be discussed as a problem. And, would the cure be worse than the problem?

Originally Posted by I B Hankering

The United States presidential election of 1960 was the 44th American presidential election, held on November 8, 1960, for the term beginning January 20, 1961, and ending January 20, 1965. The Republican Party nominated Richard M. Nixon, Eisenhower's Vice-President, while the Democrats nominated John F. Kennedy, the junior Senator from Massachusetts. Eventually, Kennedy was elected with a lead of 112,827 votes, or 0.1% of the popular vote, giving him a victory of 303 to 219 in the Electoral College. One ward in one precinct in one city: Daley's Chicago.

Oops!!

[discreetgent]

If you want to go down the Bush/Gore path .... Everything is still Bush's fault. Now that we have that out of the way.

Back to the original discussion.

1. Do we have close elections? yes
2. Do we probably have non-citizens that vote? yes
3. In a close election is it possible that the number of non-citizen votes was more than the margin of victory/defeat? yes
4. (Leaving aside issues of possible fraud and ballot stuffing) If the non-citizens had not voted would the results of an election have changed? We have no way of knowing.

[discreetgent]

Originally Posted by charlestudor2005

I think the NYT investigation proved that Gore won FL.

The media counted the ballots from Florida in 2000 using 4 different criteria. Bush won under 2 of them, Gore won under the other 2. We will never definitively know who really won Florida in 2000.

In terms of intent? Much better chance to argue Gore might have won if the ballot had been designed is a way (and es, the ballot was designed by a Democrat) that Buchanan didn't get what seems to have been a rather unexpected number of votes in Dade county. But at the end those votes were counted for Buchanan .... and in fact had to be counted for him.

[charlestudor2005]

@IBH

This was the result I remembered (i.e. I didn't look it up). The excerpt is from Wikipedia:

The New York Times did its own analysis of how mistaken overvotes might have been caused by confusing ballot designs. It found that the butterfly ballot in heavily Democratic Palm Beach County may have cost Gore a net 6286 votes, and the two page ballot in similarly Democratic Duval County may have cost him a net 1999 votes, each of which would have made the difference by itself.[7] The rest of the media consortium did not consider these because there could be no clear determination of a voter's intent.

There were other analyses, Gore one some, Bush won others. The result is that Bush is the only President ever to serve by appointment by the Supreme Court.

Candidate outcomes based on potential recounts in Florida presidential election 2000
(outcome of one particular study)[8][clarification needed] Review method Winner Review of all ballots statewide (never undertaken) • Standard as set by each county canvassing board during their survey Gore by 171 • Fully punched chad and limited marks on optical ballots Gore by 115 • Any dimples or optical mark Gore by 107 • One corner of chad detached or optical mark Gore by 60 Review of limited sets of ballots (initiated but not completed) • Gore request for recounts of all ballots in Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, and Volusia counties Bush by 225 • Florida Supreme Court of all undervotes statewide Bush by 430 • Florida Supreme Court as being implemented by the counties, some of whom refused and some counted overvotes as well as undervotes Bush by 493 Unofficial recount totals • Incomplete result when the Supreme Court stayed the recount (December 9, 2000) Bush by 154 Certified Result (official final count) • Recounts included from Volusia and Broward only Bush by 537

[Rudyard K]

C'mon DG...you are dodging a bit here buddy. He made the post and asked the question

Originally Posted by Marshall

Would you agree that it is a problem and something needs to be done?

You responded with this...implying that it was really no big deal.

Originally Posted by discreetgent

Define problem? If I have a cut on my finger I could call that a problem, but how serious would it be?

In a strict legal sense, perhaps there is a small problem. But with a voting age population of about 3,000,000 the percentage being discussed is rather small and lets face it with most things .2 percent would rarely be discussed as a problem. And, would the cure be worse than the problem?

IBH, shows that maybe it was a bigger deal than you concluded.

Originally Posted by I B Hankering

The United States presidential election of 1960 was the 44th American presidential election, held on November 8, 1960, for the term beginning January 20, 1961, and ending January 20, 1965. The Republican Party nominated Richard M. Nixon, Eisenhower's Vice-President, while the Democrats nominated John F. Kennedy, the junior Senator from Massachusetts. Eventually, Kennedy was elected with a lead of 112,827 votes, or 0.1% of the popular vote, giving him a victory of 303 to 219 in the Electoral College. One ward in one precinct in one city: Daley's Chicago.

And you come back with this?

Originally Posted by discreetgent

Back to the original discussion.

1. Do we have close elections? yes
2. Do we probably have non-citizens that vote? yes
3. In a close election is it possible that the number of non-citizen votes was more than the margin of victory/defeat? yes
4. (Leaving aside issues of possible fraud and ballot stuffing) If the non-citizens had not voted would the results of an election have changed? We have no way of knowing.

We have no way of knowing? That's it? The question was "Is this a problem where you think something needs to be done?"

It's an easy enough thing to answer.

[discreetgent]

IMO - and I thought I had made this clear already, but I'll assume its Friday and folks are out partying early. It is a small problem but ultimately it seems to me we have far bigger things to worry about. So I would not spend a whole lot of time on it.

re: IBH: Kennedy won by .1%, but we ALL know by now that the margin of popular vote on a national basis in Presidential elections means nada, nothing, zippo ... See Gore-Bush 2000 if you need proof. Florida 2000, Minnesota Senate 2008 are much better examples.

He also ignored my second post that we really don't know how not allowing .2 percent not to vote might affect an election. Say we knew that those .2 percent voted in the same proportion as the rest of the electorate did, would it then be a problem???

[pjorourke]

Originally Posted by Marshall

Am I assuming correctly that you wouldn't require people to produce a birth certificate to vote?

Apparently, you dont even need one to run.

[discreetgent]

[ICU 812]

I don't have a Driver's License. I developed a condition that has forever prevented me from driving and let my DL expire. I do have a State ID and had to produce a Passport to get it. When I got my DL in 1967, I had to bring in a noterized birth certificate and a baptismal certificate to get it . . . whats the fuss about getting positive ID? If the DL or state ID isnt good enough to prove citizenship, we need to tighten up whatever mechanism is involved to make it right.

I have worked in foreign countries and always had to provide proper ID . . .even to cash a Travelers Check or just change money (a cash transaction).

Voting is the single most important civic duty that a citizen can perform. Why should we let just anybody who shows up vote? Our various state run elections are already too loose as far as fraud and ambiguous voter intent. " Who won Florida" is an example of this. At this point, I don't care who won Fla anymore . . .but whoever wins the next election in Forida, or anywhere else, should be beyond question. This could mean changes to ballot lay-out, different machines/computers, automatic run-offs and/or recounts when the result is close— and so on.

Why should we de-legitimize our elections even more by letting non-citizens vote?

[gnadfly]

If the state of Colorado only has 5000 votes cast by non-citizens then I'm thanking my lucky stars. Nevertheless I think that there should be a proof of citizenship and identification in order to vote. In Texas, I've watch people with no ID and not on "the list" vote. When I asked the election judge about this, he said "I was told to let anyone vote that insisted on it."

[Marcus Aurelius]

JFK won because organized crime got the union vote. What if tricky Dick had gotten in back then instead?

LBJ got in because JFK was assassinated. LBJ was the worst pres ever...Other than Jimmy C.

Gore, "GW", Obama, McCain.... Unbelievably horrible choices.

[Guest032213-02]

If Colorado is like Texas, and have the Motor Voter Bill, the Voter Registration and the DMV's are synced. So, you may be able to be a non-resident and get on the DMV database, and then be placed into the Voter's Registration database and receive what appears to be a legal right to vote.

[Doove]

Originally Posted by Iaintliein

Of course it could have been worse. Come on, Al Gore is an out and out lunatic, CO2 a pollutant??? WTF, you are smarter than that.

As opposed to listening to an imaginary voice from an imaginary invisible man in the sky? I mean, really.

[I B Hankering]

Originally Posted by discreetgent

Back to the original discussion.

1. Do we have close elections? yes

√

Originally Posted by discreetgent

2. Do we probably have non-citizens that vote? yes

Why do we allow this?

Originally Posted by discreetgent

3. In a close election is it possible that the number of non-citizen votes was more than the margin of victory/defeat? yes

Agents of a foreign government installing a president. Is this sound policy?

Originally Posted by discreetgent

4. (Leaving aside issues of possible fraud and ballot stuffing) If the non-citizens had not voted would the results of an election have changed? We have no way of knowing.

Why continue to risk it?

Originally Posted by discreetgent

re: IBH: Kennedy won by .1%, but we ALL know by now that the margin of popular vote on a national basis in Presidential elections means nada, nothing, zippo ... See Gore-Bush 2000 if you need proof. Florida 2000, Minnesota Senate 2008 are much better examples.

The 1960 election was closer than the 2000 election. In 1960, Kennedy carried 12 states by 3% points or less. Illinois [Daley and Sam Giancana: 27 electoral votes] and Texas [LBJ: 24 electoral votes] were swing states. Kennedy “won” those states' 51 electoral votes; thus, a majority in the Electoral College. Subsequently, voter fraud was discovered to be rampant in both states. However, Nixon did not formally question the returns. BTW, some 93% of Cook County’s “registered voters” managed to vote in the 1960 election when the national average was only 63% – which remains the highest percentage since 1952 – kinda makes you wonder.

In Chicago, where Kennedy won by more than 450,000 votes, local reporters uncovered so many stories of electoral shenanigans—including voting by the dead—that the Chicago Tribune concluded that “the election of November 8 was characterized by such gross and palpable fraud as to justify the conclusion that [Nixon] was deprived of victory.”

Some fraud clearly occurred in Cook County. At least three people were sent to jail for election-related crimes, and 677 others were indicted before being acquitted by Judge John M. Karns, a Daley crony. Many of the allegations involved practices that wouldn't be detected by a recount, leading the conservative Chicago Tribune, among others, to conclude that “once an election has been stolen in Cook County, it stays stolen.” What's more, according to journalist Seymour Hersh, a former Justice Department prosecutor who heard tapes of FBI wiretaps from the period believed that Illinois was rightfully Nixon's. Hersh also has written that J. Edgar Hoover believed Nixon actually won the presidency but in deciding to follow normal procedures and refer the FBI's findings to the attorney general—as of Jan. 20, 1961, Robert F. Kennedy—he effectively buried the case.

Before midnight [on election night 1960] back East, the New York Times went to press with a banner headline: KENNEDY ELECTED PRESIDENT. But Nixon kept gaining and soon the race was too close to call. Times Managing Editor Turner Catledge, fearful that he'd be embarrassed by his headline, began to hope, as he later recalled in his memoirs, that “a certain Midwestern mayor would steal enough votes to pull Kennedy through.”

He was referring, of course, to Daley, a pol believed to be so powerful that he could make the dead vote. But as election night dragged on, Nixon took a lead in Illinois.

That news stunned Sargent Shriver, who was the Illinois campaign manager for his brother-in-law Jack Kennedy. Shriver was watching TV at the Kennedy compound in Hyannis Port, Mass., when he saw returns that showed Nixon ahead in Illinois.

“I damn near collapsed,” he recalls. “I was devastated. I thought that the fact that I had lost my state, Illinois, would mean that Kennedy would lose the presidency.”

He sneaked out of the room. “I didn't have the [guts] to face those people,” says Shriver, now 85. “I went back to my bedroom and almost cried myself to death.”

Suddenly, somebody was rapping on his door, saying “Sarge, the votes in Illinois have changed completely.”

Shriver hustled back to the TV room. It was true: A late surge of votes from Chicago had put Kennedy back in the lead in Illinois.

Across the country, Nixon and his aides were watching the same returns.

“We were getting good reports out of Illinois but we noticed that a lot of precincts in Chicago weren't reporting,” says Herb Klein, who was Nixon's press secretary. “Then they reported en masse, and we were a little suspicious.”

Leonard Hall, Nixon's campaign manager, grumbled that the Chicago Democrats were up to their usual tricks.

In Texas, Kennedy's 46,000-vote margin was the closest statewide race there since 1948, when Kennedy's running mate, Lyndon B. Johnson, won a Senate seat by 87 votes (the origin of the nickname "Landslide Lyndon"). Morton's operatives, aided by local Republicans, uncovered plenty of political chicanery. For instance: In Fannin County, which had 4,895 registered voters, 6,138 votes were cast, three-quarters of them for Kennedy. In one precinct of Angelia County, 86 people voted and the final tally was 147 for Kennedy, 24 for Nixon.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer
http://www.slate.com/id/91350/
http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=124208&page=1
http://cstl-cla.semo.edu/renka/ui320...0_election.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_...election,_1960

Originally Posted by discreetgent

He also ignored my second post that we really don't know how not allowing .2 percent not to vote might affect an election. Say we knew that those .2 percent voted in the same proportion as the rest of the electorate did, would it then be a problem???

Excuse the late reply, I was indisposed: whips, chains and ostrich feathers.

*sniff – sniff* I smell equivocation. I say remove all doubt and do not let non-citizens vote. BTW, according to the 2000 Census, there were over 200,000 resident aliens (some 12.5% of the population) living in Broward County, Florida. How many, do you imagine, helped screw up the vote count down there in 2000? 1,000 – 10,000 – 100,00?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broward_County,_Florida

Originally Posted by charlestudor2005

The New York Times did its own analysis of how mistaken overvotes might have been caused by confusing ballot designs. It found that the butterfly ballot in heavily Democratic Palm Beach County may have cost Gore a net 6286 votes, and the two page ballot in similarly Democratic Duval County may have cost him a net 1999 votes, each of which would have made the difference by itself.[7] The rest of the media consortium did not consider these because there could be no clear determination of a voter's intent.

I hurriedly made my earlier post, and immediately recognized I hadn’t taken your post head on because my post didn’t deal with the NYT. When I double checked, I found the same Wiki article you are citing. I think that last line (now in bold) in the citation says it all.