This concerns me greatly. While we have a special counsel to try to find proof of Russian collusion in the 2016 election, we have our own internal voting problems right here at home that are not getting enough attention. How about your own state?
HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS ARE ILLEGALLY REGISTERED TO VOTE IN TEXAS
A coalition of conservative leaders is calling on Gov. Greg Abbott to take immediate action to ensure election integrity in November’s elections.
Well with the way things are going I wouldn’t be surprised if Texas, Idaho, and Florida go blue.
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If they do it won’t be because of voter fraud.
In Kansas our Secretary of State, Chris Kobach, unlike other Secretary’s of State’s has the power to investigate AND prosecute voter fraud - he doesn’t have to go through the Attorney General. As a result has spent his stint as Secretary of State pursuing illegal voters.
His count so far is EIGHT total. A legal immigrant, who voted before he attained citizenship, and seven other people who “double-voted” or were citizens who voted in Kansas and another state. IIRC most of them were Republicans.
The immigrant who voted was caught when [i]at his naturalization ceremony, the immigrant, Victor David Beek, was offered the chance to register to vote in Sedgwick County.
“This gentleman did so, and then when the Sedgwick County election office went back to the office to enter his information, they found that he had been on the voter rolls since 2011,” Kobach said.
Kobach said he did not know whether Bebek had been affiliated with any political party.
Bebek will be on unsupervised probation for up to three years and pay a fine of $5,000, according to a statement from Kobach’s office.
Kobach found that Bebek illegally voted three times: in a 2012 special election and the 2012 and 2014 general elections. He was a Peruvian national at the time who voted in Sedgwick County, according to Kobach.
Kansas has voter identification laws strongly supported by Kobach that have often been criticized by the American Civil Liberties Union and Democratic lawmakers in the state.
Rep. John Carmichael, a Democrat from Wichita, filed legislation this year to strip the secretary of the power to prosecute voter fraud and election crimes, but the bill has not moved forward in the Kansas Legislature.
“I’m not at all convinced that finding one non-citizen to prosecute after a two-year search justifies giving the secretary of state what is unprecedented authority held by no other secretary of state in the nation,” Carmichael said.
Read more here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article144256424.html#storylink=cpy[/i]
My opinion is that, yes, there is voter fraud. But it is not widespread. The folks who say otherwise, IMO, are doing so to keep the electorate agitated and suspicious of the opposition party, and for there own political gain. Here’s the way it that works:
Kobach promised cities help. It cost them millions — and powered his political rise
[i]
Kris Kobach likes to tout his work for Valley Park, Mo. He has boasted on cable TV about crafting and defending the town’s hard-line anti-immigration ordinance. He discussed his “victory” there at length on his old radio show. He still lists it on his resume.
But “victory” isn’t the word most Valley Park residents would use to describe the results of Kobach’s work. With his help, the town of 7,000 passed an ordinance in 2006 that punished employers for hiring illegal immigrants and landlords for renting to them.
After two years of litigation and nearly $300,000 in expenses, the ordinance was largely gutted. Now, it is illegal only to “knowingly” hire illegal immigrants there — something that was already illegal under federal law. The town’s attorney can’t recall a single case brought under the ordinance.
“Ambulance chasing” is how Grant Young, a former mayor of Valley Park, describes Kobach’s role. Young characterized Kobach’s attitude as, “Let’s find a town that’s got some issues or pretends to have some issues, let’s drum up an immigration problem and maybe I can advance my political position, my political thinking and maybe make some money at the same time.”
Kobach used his work in Valley Park to attract other clients, with sometimes disastrous effects on the municipalities. The towns — some with budgets in the single-digit-millions — ran up hefty legal costs after hiring him to defend similar ordinances.
Farmers Branch, Texas, wound up owing $7 million in legal bills. Hazleton, Pa., took on debt to pay $1.4 million and eventually had to file for a state bailout. Fremont, Neb., raised property taxes to pay for Kobach’s services. None of the towns is currently enforcing an ordinance he helped craft.
“This sounds a little bit to me like Harold Hill in ‘The Music Man,’ ” said Larry Dessem, a law professor at the University of Missouri who focuses on legal ethics. “Got a problem here in River City and we can solve it if you buy the band instruments from me. He is selling something that goes well beyond legal services.”
Kobach rode the attention the cases generated to political prominence, first as Kansas secretary of state and now as a candidate for governor in the Aug. 7 Republican primary. He also earned more than $800,000 for his immigration work, paid by both towns and an advocacy group, over 13 years.
Kobach’s recent legal struggles have been widely reported. In June, a federal judge handed him a sweeping courtroom defeat, overturning a Kansas law that required proof of citizenship to register to vote. The judge went so far as to order him to attend six hours of continuing legal education after he repeatedly botched basic courtroom procedure. Another recent Kobach endeavor, a federal commission aimed at combating voter fraud, which he co-chaired, shut down after a bevy of lawsuits challenged it.
But Kobach’s failures in the courtroom date back far longer. An investigation by The Kansas City Star and ProPublica shows that the towns Kobach represented — small, largely white municipalities overwhelmed by real or perceived demographic shifts — were swayed by Kobach’s message: An ordinance would solve their problem and could easily be defended in court. Based on public records requests, filed in June with the towns that Kobach represented, this article for the first time details the costs to municipalities and the payments to Kobach for his lengthy local legal campaigns.
When Kobach was hired by Farmers Branch in 2007, then-Mayor Bob Phelps said Kobach cited his anticipated victory in Valley Park as a selling point. The City Council, Phelps said, “bought it hook, line and sinker.”
In Hazleton, Valley Park’s results were cited as a reason for optimism. Both Kobach and Lou Barletta — then mayor of Hazleton and now the area’s congressman — used the town as a reason to press on with their costly litigation.
“Valley Park has a similar ordinance that was modeled after ours,” Barletta told a local reporter at the time. “They were also sued. They went to federal court and won.” Neither he nor Kobach mentioned in the interview that Valley Park’s ordinance, ultimately, looked very little like Hazleton’s.
Albertville, Ala., chose to do a bit of homework on Kobach, and it paid off. When Kobach arrived in the town in March 2010, he painted a bleak picture of its future: He said he’d been all over the country helping towns that were suffering from an influx of illegal immigrants. Albertville, he continued, was more afflicted than any he’d seen. He predicted it would collapse under the weight of the influx. Kobach said he could help them.
As he’d done in Valley Park, Kobach said, he would write an ordinance that would force the illegal immigrants to leave.
“There are certain things that cities can do to deal with the burden that illegal immigration imposes on the taxpayers,” Kobach told municipal officials at a public meeting, a local paper reported. He dismissed concerns over potential legal challenges and their high costs. The American Civil Liberties Union, he said, had a track record of losing cases like these.
Albertville’s government was poised to hire Kobach until a City Council member made a call to Valley Park. After hearing firsthand about the town’s experience, Albertville’s City Council voted against bringing him on.
“The advice I have gotten from towns which passed similar resolutions said they would not do it again,” Councilman Randy Amos said after the vote.
Kobach says he warned the towns what they were getting into. “The elected representatives of the people made a decision with full awareness that fighting the ACLU costs money, that yeah, it was worth it to fight the ACLU and worth it to get these ordinances in place,” he said. “I believe in these cities and these ordinances and what they’re doing. And so if there was some way I could help them, I did.”
Some of Kobach’s former clients — typically those most zealously opposed to immigration — speak highly of the work he did for them.
“It was honestly an honor to work with the guy,” said former Valley Park City Attorney Eric Martin. ”He knew his subject matter and was very driven to get something passed.”
That’s not how Phelps sees it.
“It was a sham,” Phelps said of Kobach’s pitch, which ultimately ended in a resounding defeat for Farmers Branch. He “kept telling us, ‘We can win this. We’ll just keep appealing it,’ which I felt was very misleading. It was just a sad situation that we had to go through, and everybody now regrets it.”[/i]
More to the story here: https://www.kansascity.com/news/politics-government/article215374130.html#storylink=cpy
So, here is a quote and a question from the OP’s link.
In a recent interview Starr County District Attorney Omar Escobar confirmed that non-U.S. citizens are on the voter lists in his county. He is quoted stating, ‘That non-citizens are registered to vote is beyond question. That non-citizens are voting in Starr County is also beyond question.’ They are registered and voting, the only remaining question is, how many.”
It sounds to me that DA Escobar has knowledge of criminal activity. In Kansas, District Attorneys are the Chief Law Enforcement Officer’s of the County - they can, if need be, arrest the Sheriff.
So it seems to me that Escobar, has a sworn duty to ensure that criminal acts that he is aware of are investigated and prosecuted as warranted.
Has he done so? Or is he only making such statements for political reasons, and in the process markedly exaggerating the problem?
Seems to me if the problem was as large as these folks say, Texas would have been blue long ago, since they claim more than 280,000 non-citizens in Texas are registered to vote, with another four million registered voters in question.
All them illegals voting Democrat, sheeeeetttt, Texas would have been as blue as Kalifornia.
Once again, not saying there is no voter fraud, just saying it is way, way, overstated.
Ol’ Chris Kobach, who in eight years only nabbed ONE non-citizen voter, and seven others who double voted was last year revealed as a source of President’s Trump’s unsubstantiated claim that millions of people illegally voted in the 2016 presidential election. Kobach has offered no evidence to back up Trump’s claim of such fraud in the 2016 election.
That is some badass math, based on the factual evidence that we have.
Judicial Watch has been keeping tabs in voter roles (which is the heart of voter fraud). It’s more common than people realize.
And SanFran is currently registering illegals to vote. While it’s local, the rationale isn’t.
https://www.westernjournal.com/san-francisco-signing-illegals-vote-local-election/
I read somewhere that if you subtract the amount of illegals that voted for Hillary, Trump won the popular vote. Someone estimated over 7 million illegal alien votes were cast and there’s now reports that there 3.5 million more registered voters than there are actual adult age voters in the country. Now that’s assuming that every single living adult is voting which is impossible, some might be disabled, so the actual difference is probably twice that number. Basically millions more are registered to vote than the actual number of people we should have here according to the census numbers. I’ve also seen estimates for the number of illegals living in the country is now estimated over 30 million and possibly as high as 40 million. That’s like a nation within a nation.
I think the people caught above prove the opposite of what you claim it does. Not ONE illegal voted in the whole State? Or our ability to identify anyone as illegal on voting rolls is close to ZERO?
Now I’m sceptical of the wild “millions” claims too, but no more than those who claim zero. I suspect the number is somewhere between, and large enough to swing the results in some places.
Areas of Texas with large populations are already vote majority blue by a large margin - Austin, Beaumont-Port Arthur, El Paso, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio, and the Rio Grand Valley: https://www.politico.com/2016-election/results/map/president/texas/
It is only a matter of time before the numerous smaller red counties can no longer put together a collective red majority, which is why voter fraud is a hot issue here.
Yep. It doesn’t have to be millions nationwide. It just needs to be targeted in specific, crucial areas. Voter fraud is most often thought of as illegals voting, but there is also the voter fraud like boxes full of “missing” ballots mysteriously showing up at the last minute (reference Al Franken’s dubious victory in MN). Felons, illegals, the dead, etc.
BINGO.
While I certainly believe the Founding Fathers has great wisdom in creating the Electoral College, it does make voter fraud “easier” if you will. No need for millions voting illegally across the country; that might be too “above the radar” for it to be poo-pooed and ignored. No, the Electoral College allows for the zeroing in on critical districts within a close state that can tip that state’s electoral votes one way or another. Since the majority of states have “winner take all” electoral policies it can be a ripe opportunity for tomfoolery.
Actually the opposite. It creates choke-points where you can carefully watch the process. Think of it this way. You either have to watch 10 districts closely, or every single ballot voted everywhere? One is controlling the Straights of Gibraltar and the other is trying to control the whole Med. The EC wasn’t meant to prevent fraud in voting, but it is an outcome of the process.
They are already rigging small elections, just that one here in Ohio had a bunch of people voting that were over the age of 115 still on the registry. Then they found a bunch of ballots that were of course 3 to 1 for the Democrat. Point being, they are going to pull out all the stops now.
I agree with all you posted except:and large enough to swing the results in some places.
Let’s think critically for a moment. If the numbers were true, and the belief was that most of those illegal voters were casting Republican votes, how many of you would be calling for action? I’d be willing to bet that Ol’ Omar, the DA of Starr County, Texas, for one, would be keeping his fvcking yap shut.
That is what is bullshit about this whole deal, at it’s heart it isn’t really about the rule of law, it is about gaining political advantage.
Onerous voter registration laws, such as Kobach pushes, are designed to make it more troublesome and difficult for lower income and minority folks to vote. In many places these are the folks who are likely to vote Democrat.
Ol’ Fatboy Republicans such as myself, are likely to have registered 20 or 30 years ago, and kept up with address changes as we bought new houses. I just show up, show them my DL (which pisses me off - they wont take my retired ID because it doesn’t have an address) and vote.
Now, my neighbor down the street who just moved into a nice rental, has to have her driver’s license (or state ID card), and birth certificate to register to vote. As noted if she doesn’t have a DL she has to get a state id card.
Personally, I don’t find that hard to do, largely because my wife is uber-organized and has packets for each of us containing birth certificates, social security cards, adoption papers, divorce decrees, marriage certificates, DD214’s, retirement papers, etc.
If I was on my own I’d be hosed, I’d have to plan enough ahead of time to get a copy of my birth certificate, because I had one once, but I lost it, then stand in line waiting to register. I’d be a lot less likely to register to vote.
The redundancy here is that to get the original DL or State ID you have to show the birth certificate and proof of your address - a utility bill or some other proof. Don’t make much sense to me.
Can you walk into a gun shop and buy a weapon with a non-official ID? How about buying beer? (in TN you have to show ID no matter how old you look, state law)
Would seem to me that if you wanted to vote bad enough you’d get an official ID, especially since IIRC most states issue them for free (not the driver’s licenses, they ding you for that, but just a state ID). Not to mention a good portion of these “downtrodden” and [I just LOVE this term] “disenfranchised” folks get bussed in on election day, but can’t seem to get a ride to obtain their free state-issued ID? Nah, ain’t buying it.
Sorry, you cannot have unfettered access to voting. It cannot be a circus. There has to be order in it. If you have to prove who you are officially to buy a gun (another Constitutional right I might add), or even buy a six-pack, then you sure as hell should have to show official ID to vote.
Let’s agree that it is a double-edged sword then. I see your point, but surely you see the other side of the blade in my post above yours.
How many of us are signed up to be poll watchers?
The Dems want to get rid of the EC and go to popular vote, that seems like the more dangerous ‘side’. I know what you mean. Something like a couple of hundred thousand votes (tenths of a percent of the popular vote) is what carried Trump in those swing states. So that would be a model for hundreds of votes per county would be enough to move enough states to shift elections.
I can only watch after my Mom’s shift is over…