Why Don’t You Blog About X, You … Um …. Dishonest Guy
Insty is getting grief from lefties for supposedly not covering the allegation of voter fraud in California even though he did. What Mr. Pundit likely does not understand is that without exception, anytime a reader purports to attack you for not blogging about X, his real beef is that you are blogging about Y, and the reader would really like you to shut up about Y.
UPDATE: Welcome, ‘Lanchers.
October 24th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
There are two kinds of registration fraud. When some contractor fills in a form for Mickey Mouse, that’s fraud against the people paying him. Mickey Mouse is not going to vote. ACORN’s defenders are right to dismiss this sort of fraud as of no concern to the rest of us. But they pretend that that’s the only sort of fraud going on. The other sort is registering people who are going to vote, but shouldn’t be, either because they’re ineligible to vote in that district, or because they’re already registered elsewhere and intend to vote twice. Closely related is registering people who are eligible to vote, and are not already registered, but who have no intention of voting themselves; instead, the person registering them intends to vote in their name. And ACORN specialises in this kind of fraud too (e.g. the homeless people whom they’ve been busing to the polls in Ohio, with no verification that a. they’re citizens, b. they live in the district, or c. they haven’t already voted).
October 24th, 2008 at 6:37 pm
Mickey Mouse isn’t going to vote. That said, when we’re not even checking ID, how much do you want to bet a little polite 70-year-old lady is going to stop the guy calling himself Mickey Mouse from voting?
October 24th, 2008 at 9:43 pm
Gattsuru, I don’t think anyone is going to show up to the polls claiming to be Mickey Mouse. If that particular registration had been intended as a setup to a genuine voter fraud by ACORN, rather than a fraud on ACORN itself, they’d have come up with a much more plausible name than “Mickey Mouse.” The question is how many of the fraudulent registrations with more plausible names, which are nevertheless fictitious (or which relate to real individuals who are dead, ineligible to vote, etc.) are frauds by vs. against ACORN. Like Milhouse, I think it’s pretty clear that both frauds exist, the question is by how much (and it doesn’t help that both frauds seem to be the most prevalent in presumptive swing states).
October 25th, 2008 at 10:26 am
“Mister Pundit” is surely what I’d have called the site, had I gotten the idea first.
October 25th, 2008 at 10:27 am
When one registration for Mickey Mouse is submitted, that’s trivial.
When 5000 registrations for such characters are submitted, it becomes an attack on the voting system – a paper-based ‘denial of service’ attack, if you will, that eats up the time of the people administering and policing the system.
Which makes vote fraud easier to get away with…
October 25th, 2008 at 10:34 am
I look at the fraud of registrations a bit differently. With numerous bogus registrations on the books, it makes fraud a lot easier to perpetrate in close races AFTER the pools close. Ever wonder why it takes so long to get the tally from places like Lake County? Cuyahoga County? Sections of Chicago? It allows unscrupulous election officials to stuff the ballot box and make it very difficult to verify – after the fact.
October 25th, 2008 at 10:54 am
ACORN doesn’t care about Mickey Mouse voting. They’re almost purpose-built to execute what academics call the Cloward-Piven strategy, in which groups overload government institutions and then try to spin the resulting failure/crisis as a reason we need more socialism. (If you read this description and thought “subprime!” you’re on the right track).
October 25th, 2008 at 10:59 am
Who says Mickey and friends will not vote absentee
October 25th, 2008 at 11:03 am
I’m wondering if Mickey can vote an absentee ballot. Also, what about his cohabitants Minnie, Donald and Goofy?
How likely is it that they won’t be able to get absentee ballots? And, if there’s more than one human at the address, how will they prove which one engaged in fraud?
October 25th, 2008 at 11:23 am
All of the “fraud lite” that is represented by the Mickey Mouse registrants sure does a good job of throwing up a smoke screen in front of the very real opportunity for actual fraudulent voting.
October 25th, 2008 at 11:24 am
Anyone who attempts to deny voter fraud in the form of persons voting under assumed names (probably multiple times), people voting from fraudulent addresses (possibly multiple times), or people voting for dead voters and so on is simply ignorant of the history of at least the Chicago voting situation (for more than a century, through both Republican and Democratic control or is willfully lying.
Voter fraud exists, it is a danger to democracy in general, and it is usually not that hard to figure out who is doing it the most by who is in control of the process and who gains the most.
October 25th, 2008 at 11:40 am
Who says Mickey Mouse, or my dead grandmother, can’t vote? They may not be able to show up at the polls in person, but they can and will send in an absentee ballot. And their vote must be counted because they are registered to vote.
Moneyrunner´s last blog post..Editing Their Way to Oblivion: Journalism Sacrificed For Power and Pensions
October 25th, 2008 at 12:12 pm
#3. What about Mick E. Ymouse? (He’s from eastern European stock).
The question is, can we detect reliably that we aren’t counting votes that WERE cast by Mickey Mouse and friends on a timely basis.
If we do detect such anomalies, can we reject them? What if the rejection changes the outcome of the election?
Will Mickey Mouses votes across the left side of the ballot be equally pursued by the justice department as Paul Bunyion’s absentee ballot from an A.P.O.?
These are real questions that many voters ask themselves. Our government hasn’t performed an adequate job in self policing and maintaining honesty within the system.
We all are depending on the vigilance of the 70 year old lady volunteering at the polls. She might be the only real safeguard in the system, willing to tell people NO.
Given the litigous nature of our current voting process, ask yourself if you would out and out deny voting privileges to Mick E. Ymouse, a minority member in a minority neighborhood in a crowded polling center with Democratic lawyers standing over your shoulder? Or would you ‘CYA’ and issue a provisional ballot to the voter? If you issue the provisional ballot, then we are back at my second paragraph quandry.
October 25th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
[...] links a post which gets at our critics attacking us for not blogging about certain things: “anytime a reader purports to attack you for not blogging about X, his real beef is that you are blog…“ Sounds about [...]
October 25th, 2008 at 12:54 pm
The chicago election system and machine politics is a huge cesspool which has polluted everything it has touched.
What do the thousands of patronage workers do before an election (patronage as in the sanitary district, snow plow drivers, gargage pickup folks, parks, etc)? They canvass neighborhoods to “get out the vote”
What do they do after the election? If you are in a ward that ‘didn’t vote the way you were supposed to’ – is nothing. Slow or no garbage pickup. Streets get plowed 2-3 days late, chuckholes never get filled, etc.
Democrat democracy in action. As Richard Daley Sr. said once “vote and vote often…”
October 25th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
The post might be accurate in some cases, but not all. For instance, Instapundit pretends to oppose BHO and pretends to oppose the MSM.
Yet, he isn’t pushing the highly effective plan at my name’s link that would help defeat BHO and that would show just how bad the MSM is. And, none of the other Pajamas Media bloggers I’ve contacted have pushed this (aside from a “rogue” guest blogger at one site).
For almost two years I’ve been trying to get people to go out and do a “Joe the Plumber”, but with prosecutorial-style questions. BHO wouldn’t know how to handle a really tough question, and video of that would be devastating to his chances.
It would also show just how weak the questions from the MSM are.
Given that, you’d expect Instapundit to push that plan. So, why hasn’t he?
How to defeat Barack Obama´s last blog post..How *you* can help Barack Obama finally win this thing
October 25th, 2008 at 1:57 pm
And God forbid that you actually showed any sign that you weren’t voting correctly beforehand. Yeah, your car just happened to get vandalized…. or a fire starts, and the unionized fire department is just a touch slow to respond… or there’s a group of homeboys hanging out at your door, and the unionized police won’t come….
October 25th, 2008 at 3:46 pm
Registration fraud provides a pool of voters that can then be stolen. A situation in which the number of votes cast exceeds the number of registered voters, screams fraud. Having a large number of “registrations” on hand, where you’re fairly sure that votes won’t be cast in those “names”, makes the theft simpler.
October 27th, 2008 at 9:15 am
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October 28th, 2008 at 4:55 am
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