I don’t mean to pick on Heather Ginsberg at TownHall.com specifically, or suggest that she is any more stupid than all the others to repeat this story; her article “BREAKING: Massive Voter Fraud in St. Lucie County, Florida,” was just the first of many that came up when I searched the web for the story. Here’s the “story” that’s all over right-wing web sites across the country:
On Tuesday only one precinct had less than 113% turnout. “The Unofficial vote count is 175,554 registered voters 247,713 vote cards cast (141.10% ). The National SEAL Museum, a St. Lucie county polling place, had 158.85% voter turn out, the highest in the county.”
The Supervisor of Elections, Gertrude Walker, had this to say concerning the 141% voter turnout: “They may have had something like that in Palm Beach County, but we’ve never seen that here.
Of course, if there were any truth to that headline, the national press would be all over it, and they are not. The reason that there is “no story here” is that Florida had a very long ballot this year, and it took two voter cards to hold all of the ballot selections. So rather than a massive over vote, the actual voter turnout was about 70% which is very high and why the Supervisor of Elections said that the turnout was unprecedented.
Despite the utter implausibility of the conclusion, lots of people cite this as evidence that the 2012 Presidential Election was rife with fraud. To my knowledge, only one case of voter fraud has been uncovered in the 2012 election so fare and that was a Republican arrested trying to prove how easy it is to get away with voting twice—that was stupid too.
This is the Punchmaster General, reminding all of you to have your birthers spayed or neutered.
Heather is probably out on a date with a ‘French Model’ that she met on the internet.
“To my knowledge, only one case of voter fraud has been uncovered in the 2012 election so fare and that was a Republican arrested trying to prove how easy it is to get away with voting twice—that was stupid too.”
Don’t forget the dog:
Man registers dog to vote to test system
An Albuquerque, N.M., resident has successfully registered his dog to vote in Bernalillo County, he told KOB-TV.
The dog’s owner said he used fake information to sign Buddy up at a voter registration booth at the University of New Mexico.
“I made up a birthdate and I made up a Social Security number, and I had a voter registration card in my hand for Buddy two weeks later,” he told the TV station after receiving the card in the mail on Wednesday.
According to Bernalillo County clerk Maggie Toulouse Oliver, Buddy’s owner committed voter fraud.
“I would warn those individuals who think this type of activity is a joke or a ‘gotcha’ that, regardless of their intentions, they have broken the law and will therefore have to be subject to due process of law,” she told KOB-TV.
http://articles.nydailynews.com/2012-03-01/news/31114969_1_voter-registration-registration-system-voting-process
I should like to see the dog try to vote.
Don’t be too hard on Heather Ginsberg. She’s just earning her keep as a cog in the wingnut welfare system.
Speaking of voter fraud, have you seen this news item in which Anonymous claims that it stopped Karl Rove from infiltrating the computer system that tabulates the vote count for Ohio? It seems a bit preposterous.
http://crooksandliars.com/susie-madrak/did-anonymous-stop-rove-stealing-elec
These people are not very smart and are gullible enough to be manipulated by misunderstandings and ignorance. When I heard about the number, it was clear to me that there must be a reasonable explanation. But to the ignorant, all this becomes evidence of a conspiracy.
So sad.
There was an election official ,Republican, who filled in unmarked offices on ballots in Clackamos County. She was reported and initiated a state response and charges.This was in Oregon where citizens vote by mail.
I see that West finally conceded this morning.
What puzzles me is what kind of a world view these people must have to believe that such a thing is possible, that election officials would see massive over voting and just shrug it off.
… let alone report the “real” numbers if any voter fraud was planned. Everybody knows it doesn’t work by changing your 60-40 lead to 120-40 but to 90-10.
I’m just waiting for another round of the old “they are rubbing it in our faces” meme to explain how “voter fraud” was done by openly reporting obviously “impossible” numbers.
One reads these stories, and is amazed. If there was evidence, it would be cited. Fraud happens at times, we know that, but what we have here is a vain attempt to claim that Obama stole the vote. As I have pointed out to friends, the numbers that are reported might make sense in a banana republic, where corrupt officials are also incompetent, but if there was a vast conspiracy in the US to steal the vote it would be well-nigh invisible.
The basic assumption that They are All In On It, of course.
Much to my detriment, I’m right with you, constantly underestimating the stupid, lazy, and the crazy. Oh, the profits I could make. Silly concerns about ‘ethics’ I have.
Yep. Same here. *sigh*
I could see them going through North Philly trying to find someone willing to sign an affidavit stating that they voted for Romney.
On second thought, I don’t believe any true winger would walk through North Philly. It’s more likely that they will get an affidavit from some random person with the promise that it will never be presented in court or to any authorities.
What you Shurrif Joe and Zullo are going to talk to real black people without the ability to violate their legal rights……. 😎
They will post the affidavit on the internet resulting in Orly submitting it in an Emergency Request for rehearing on her Reeko with expedited discovery.
And a pony (per Bad Fiction).
Perhaps the great mother of all 2012 election fraud allegation pages is this one at The American Dream.
They have 22 allegations of fraud set amidst advertisements for survivalist gear and doomsday books.
Some deeply paranoid style comments there too.
Thanks, Doc, for another great laugh! I especially liked:
It’s as if they literally can’t believe that many people disagree with them. Or, of oucrse, have any understanding of data collection, what goes into make an average, probabiulity, etc.
Could counter with a count of the “improbably” high # of precincts in rural areas in which Mr. Obama rec’d near-zero/zero votes … but I suspect they wouldn’t find that so distressing.
I went through OK’s precinct level data, and found the same number of 0’s for both… and 2/3rds of the zeroes in which votes for neither candidate were cast. Inactive precincts, placeholders, could be anything. In precincts with low turnout, there were indeed 0’s for one or the other.
The nutters need to understand how many precincts there are (1970 in Okieland …. 1687 in Philadelphia (county) alone), and the HUGE dispararities among precincts. In Okieland, some precincts reported <5 votes, some reported 5,000. I am guessing those extremes represent election boards. Obama carried Philadelphia w/85% of the vote. with 1687 precincts, there's bound to be a lot of 0's for rMoney. Only 59 (~3.5% of the precincts)? Not surprising a'tall.
In ’08, Obama got 80% of the Philly vote.
How I knew Obama would be re-elected: Three days before voting began, I walked out of my building with Angel, at 10 AM. Walking toward us, were a white couple, mid-twenties, stunningly dressed. Each was holding a Starbucks cup.
Each had an ‘Obama’ button on their lapels.
But the right wing has such a good outreach and campaign in urban areas. After the right wing called them lazy freeloaders we should be shocked that none of them will vote for Romney. It must be because of fraud and Obama is black because there could not possibly be another reason why they won’t vote for Romney.
Belittling the electorate is apparently not a great campaign strategy. Who knew.
well surprise surprise: after two weeks of a perfunctory and bitter tantrum, looks like wingnuts are drying their eyes and gearing themselves up to ignore the lessons of 2012. rinse and repeat …
via freeper gulch: whither (wither?) the white vote?
I’m only waiting for some RWNJ to make the argument that Obama can’t have won because 80% of the area on the map is red…
speaking of fraud
Rebirth of Unskewed Poll Movement?
It seems the soul-searching phase lasted about two weeks for Dean Chambers, founder of the Unskewed Poll Movement and creator of unskewedpolls.com. Dean has just launched BarackoFraudo.com, a new site dedicated to explaining how President Obama won the 2012 election by fraud
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/11/rebirth_of_unskewed_poll_movement.php?ref=fpblg
Wow, aaaargh! That is one heck of a spin cycle. Thanks for posting that.The tin foil is thick on that one … guilty over too many white voters? LOL! No, out of touch as evidenced by getting nearly only white votes. If his take catches on (and it will), it will carry the wingnuts far …. ther down the drain. I hope the RNC lets them go. Go make a 3rd fluffer-nutter party. See if anyone cares.
From the sidebar on his new site:
Looks like his “Post Comments” link has been hacked …. it redirects to Monty Python’s “Spam” skit at Youtube! 😀
http://www.barackofraudo.com/fl.cfm
So, I went to check on the Broward County web site how Barack Obama gets 4000% of the total vote in some precincts without any national newspaper noticing this and claiming massive fraud. Oh, I do remember you have to check at the precinct level, because you cannot manipulate anything above those. That was why the computer tabulations could not be wrong in Ohio, was it not?
Surprise, surprise, the results at precinct level seem to have been manipulated. Wherever Unskewer Dean Chambers found Obama to have got more than 100%, the Broward County site has a different total number of votes than Chambers (A004 1310 instead of 310, A006 1133 for 133, A007 has 1211 instead of 211, A009 1184 for 184, and so on)
You can download the excel sheet from Broward at
http://results.enr.clarityelections.com/FL/Broward/42272/112723/en/reports.html
So, we are left with two possiblities:
1) to prove massive fraud in Florida, Dean Chambers has unskewed the results by reducing all vote totals higher than 1,000 by … 1,000 (leading to absurdly high percentages for Obama). Come on, no Democratic voting precinct can have more than 1,000 people in it, right?
2) with a Republican governor looking on, and with Allen West running all over the place throwing away dollar bills and shouting “Infamy, infamy!” the mobsters of Broward County have somehow been able to deliver Florida’s electoral votes to the Kenyan Usurper.
Gee, I wonder which of the two would be closer to reality?
Maybe his calculator is limited to 3 digits. It could happen to anyone 😉
That may be an explanation, but it does not explain everything in Dean’s numbers for the total number of votes. If it was done automatically, like using an import PICTURE command “999” instead of the correct “9999”, one would expect it is always the same digital (the one for the thousands or the one for the units) to disappear, but this is not always the case here. And in any case, the numbers for Obama and Romney (yes, even here Romney wins a few precincts and gets more than 1,000 votes and thus scores a few times over 1000%) are always the correct number of digits.
R023 is line 443 on page 2 in the excel sheet. The total number of votes is 2,423. But Dean Chambers has a total number of votes of 243.
Yes, when I was suggesting Dean Chambers was unskewing the ballot results, I was joking, but it definitely looks like he was unskewing R023 to get rid of … Romney voters.
Of course, it may still be a glitch caused by export or import, perhaps he did it in two rounds, AND my version of MS Excel even said there was something funny about Browards’s detail.xls when I opened it (the same message I get when opening multi-page .xls files that I made in Open Office). But Shirley, how can you trust the work of a guy who does not notice his total number of digits in one column is wrong?
I saved a copy of Dean Chambers’ page on Florida. Funnily, it did not use a database somewhere else on his server. All the figures were in the HTML code. Nice one for posterity.
The fun part is when you click on the dirty black states to show how the Ebil Demoncrats won, all you get is a bald statement that Ebil Demoncrats must cheat to win with zero demonstrable proof of course…..
Basic logic steps……. 😎
Ebil Demoncrats won, therefore Ebil Demoncrats must have cheated, since Ebil Demoncrats won that is the proof that Ebil Demoncrats cheated……
His apologies along the lines of “I’ll never base an argument on hand-waving again” are the only thing he has proven fake so far.
Actually, the black states on that map used to have a link to pages about problems, like Broward’s percentages and Philadelphia precincts without a single Romney vote (solidly black areas, oops naughty color).
He has deleted those links now, but not the files as the link in my first comment still works, pa.cfm also still exists.
OOPS! I must have been looking at TPM … where they had a good reason to delete the links on that page (one of them goes to a gay porn site). On his own site, the map links are still working. Against him.
The states where the fraud is alleged (Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania) all have Republican governors and Republican legislatures. So how did they allow this fraud? In fact, of the swing states, only North Carolina, which Romney won, and Colorado, which Obama won by a large, seemingly fraud-proof margin, have Democratic governors. So, it seems the Republicans are in on the fraud.
Oh Scientist you know, if you have ever read owt by Mad Ole Orly, Freeperville, Waltie Fitzie, Dr K(H)ate etc that THEY ARE ALL IN ON IT !!!!!!!!!
Well apart of course from the doughty band of “consitutionalist” birfoons
Which was the common crank “explanation” until they discovered their new “Court agreement legally bars GOP from investigating voter fraud” meme.
Which is more appealing from the propaganda perspective since you don’t have to convince people of some grand conspiracy.
As I said, their inventiveness never ceases to amaze me. Oh, if only all that mental power were used for the good of the country, what an amazing (and unrealistic) prospect!