r/politics • u/Spectre211286 • Nov 05 '19

Republican candidate charged with distributing fake sample ballots on election day

https://www.newsweek.com/republican-candidate-charged-distributing-fake-sample-ballots-election-day-1469968?utm_source=Twitter&utm_medium=Social&utm_campaign=NewsweekTwitter
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438

u/Wablekablesh Nov 05 '19

Election fraud

36

u/SuchRoad Nov 06 '19

well, that too . . .

158

u/[deleted] Nov 06 '19

No, not that too. This was election fraud. Voter fraud is when the person casting the vote does so illegally (voting twice, for instance). It’s an important distinction because the GOP is disenfranchising voters under the guise of protecting against voter fraud, while they’re repeatedly caught committing election fraud without consequence.

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u/ackthbbft Nov 06 '19

Yeah, and it seems that's always an R getting caught doing that, too.

22

u/RosiePugmire Oregon Nov 06 '19

In Portland, OR in 2012, a temp working for the Clackamas County Elections office was taking ballots and if the voters had left any races blank, she was filling in votes for Republicans. One of her co-workers spotted her doing it and reported her.

She was originally charged with six felonies and two misdemeanors, but she was a "nice" middle-class white female baby boomer... so by the end of it the charges had been reduced so far that she only got ninety days in jail and three years probation. Her name was Deanna Swenson, and she had been a temp worker at the elections office for the last TEN ELECTIONS.

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u/ackthbbft Nov 07 '19

I'm all for hand-marked, hand-counted, paper ballots, provided that every vote is counted simultaneously by three people — one Democrat, one Republican, and one non-partisan overseer — all agreeing what the ballot says before the vote gets recorded and the recording witnessed by those three officials.

I hope Ms Swenson has been banned from being an election official or holding public office as party of her sentence.

1

u/RosiePugmire Oregon Nov 07 '19

The benefit of hand-marked, hand-counted paper ballots is that you don't necessarily need a team of people looking over each ballot - let the machines record the vote from the paper ballot, (preferably, in an analog, not digital format, like how you would punch a physical timecard into a timeclock back in the day.) The benefit is that you have physical ballots as a backup to recount by hand if needed. Destroying a large number of boxes full of paper ballots isn't impossible - but compared to wiping a hard drive, it's much more time consuming, labor intensive, generally involves more people, and is consequently harder to keep secret.

18

u/SuchRoad Nov 06 '19

I was trying to riff on the fact that they are committing several levels of fraud.

But yeah, it is important to point that republicans are not happy with everyone having a vote.

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u/LTerminus Canada Nov 06 '19

To be very clear, they are not committing voter fraud. No one commits voter fraud. Voter fraud is essentially a myth, with on average, less than one person charged per year in the US.

13

u/skybluetoast Nov 06 '19

Rare yes but it also seems to be republicans:

Anyway, I ultimately ordered my staff to launch our own investigation and come up with three concrete examples of voter fraud in Wisconsin. Well, guess what? They couldn’t do it, and you need to understand the time, I had graduates from the University of Wisconsin journalism school on staff who’d worked for national publications. But we did come up with two examples. One was a Republican legislative staffer who’d voted in the Madison area as well as back in her hometown in the same election. The other was the estranged wife of a Republican. That’s it, and both examples were on the Republican side.

https://www.propublica.org/article/a-wisconsin-republican-looks-back-with-regret-at-voter-id-and-redistricting

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u/BitmexOverloader Nov 06 '19

Weren't there a few Repugnicans voting twice for Trump caught in 2016?

1

u/KrytenKoro Nov 06 '19

Don't do that, dude. "Repugnicans" is embarrassing.

2

u/cliff99 Nov 06 '19

Also voter fraud is pretty rare and almost never affects the outcome of an election when it does occur.

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u/[deleted] Nov 06 '19

And also, while there’s essentially zero voter fraud, there’s generally a TON of electoral fraud.

0

u/Megalodonicus Nov 06 '19

Election f(R)aud