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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dale Baker who wrote (186348)	3/30/2012 3:01:38 PM
From: Dale Baker	Respond to of 542861

Another item from the voter fraud evidence locker: Significant Voter Fraud Simply Doesn’t Exist Posted: Tuesday, March 27, 2012 7:15 am Editor: As a current election officer and a former voter advocate, I wish to respond to the letter-writer Lou Trimorco, who supports a voter-ID requirement. He asked what happens when people sign the affirmation of identity and are then found to have voted fraudulently. The answer is that it never happens. In fact, in my research on the issue, I was unable to come up with a single documented instance of fraud by a voter in Virginia within the past 50 years. The voter ID requirement has rightly been called “a solution in search of a problem.” When a voter shows up at the polls without an ID, his or her name still has to appear in the pollbook, which also lists the voter’s year of birth and address. This makes it difficult to impersonate another voter; to avoid being caught, you would have to be of the same gender, close in age, and know the address of the voter you are impersonating. You’d have to be sure that person wasn’t going to show up, and you’d have to be equally sure no one at the polling place that day knows either you or the real voter. To top it off, you’d have to be willing to run the risk of a perjury conviction by signing the affidavit of identity. And all that to cast one vote? “Better to err on the safe side, just in case,” say the advocates of stringent ID laws. But the laws that prevent an imaginary fraud also prevent real voters from casting ballots. Surely that’s the bigger threat to the integrity of our elections. Ivy Main, McLean

To: Dale Baker who wrote (186348)	3/31/2012 12:47:52 PM
From: Cogito	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542861

>>Why Won’t They Listen? By WILLIAM SALETAN THE RIGHTEOUS MIND Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion By Jonathan Haidt<< Wow. That's a great review. Great in the way it explains, examines, and questions the ideas the book presents, I mean. It makes me want to read the book, and to recommend it to others, as a place to begin a broader dialogue. I have some quibbles with some of Haidt's ideas. For example, the idea that open primaries would allow Democrats to help get more moderate Republican candidates nominated and vice versa. In practice, open primaries seem to be used mainly as a tool for people to sabotage the nominating process by voting for the opposition candidate least likely to win in the general election. I question, too, the more basic premise that the fact that people vote for certain policies because it's in their nature to do so validates the policies somehow. Still, I think I'm going to have to get that book and devote some time to reading and thinking about it.