The Democrats have it as an article of their faith that here is no voter fraud. Really? Here is an example of a man, an adult, who was hired by a voter registration organization and then invented voters, filled out the paperwork on them and submitted them to the government. He was caught doing this and is now arraigned on several felony charges. The group for which he worked has disavowed him, but, why would they not? The question remains – how many others were there or are there who have not been caught and who could get their "voters" in to vote with sympathetic election officials?
Then, there is the matter of Virginians in the far SW Mountain Kingdom whose livelihoods have been destroyed by people like HC who want to kill the coal mining industry to fulfill their ecological dreams. These people cannot pay or find basic medical and dental health care and the Republican controlled General Assembly in far away Richmond has refused to expand Medicaid to cover these people. IMO they have done that to spite Governor Terry McCauliffe, who is the worst kind of carpetbagger, but I do not understand how they could let their fellow Virginians live in squalor in the mountains without available care. pl
http://alextimes.com/2016/11/former-alexandrian-charged-with-voter-fraud/
NPR did have the first story, I believe, this morning on their broadcast. Did not see anything about it on any MSM channel, net or tv. They did not identify which party the fraud was benefiting.
With all due respect the coal industry is dead and it has nothing to do with HC. It’s chemistry – simple as that.
I agree we should not let those people go without care. It’s all of our’s obligation to help those in distress.
I am a living example of a Life that was saved and nurtured because of Government provided Health Care. In 1946 when I was 2 years old, I got polio. It was a time before the vaccine and polio was ravaging the nation. I spent 10 months in an Iron Lung and for the next 14 years, I went through 23 operations and a total of almost 3000 days in the hospital with the surgeries and physical therapy to overcome the ravages Polio did to my body.
The state of Minnesota, built and funded the entire cost, including the doctors and nurses, of the Gillette State Hospital for Crippled Children in St. Paul where I spent most of my childhood. In today’s world, the costs of such care would have run into the millions. My father was a bus driver and my mother was, what was called in those days, a homemaker. My larger family of relatives had arrived from Europe penniless and my parents had very little money with 4 kids and a bus driver’s salary. The largest charity at the time was the March of Dimes and they decided that helping me and my family would have been too big a drain on their resources.
Without the free medical care I would have died at age 2. Without the State of Minnesota providing the facilities and health care for free, I would have not led an almost normal life. While physically I was limited my brain was not. I was able to rise to become Senior Vice President of Prudential responsible for subsidiaries with $11 billion in revenues and 27,000 employees.
As a result of government funded health care I was able to lead a productive life. Do I object to paying high taxes – not really, it’s kind of paying it forward. It is important to remember that had I lived without Minnesota’s health care help, my life would have been a net drain on society. However, because of their help I was not only productive, but was able to contribute a couple million in taxes over my working life.
Voter registration fraud is a far cry from vote fraud. Virginia has voter ID, after all, and that’s not going to prevent anybody from submitting fake registrations.
To actually get away with it at any scale, even without the voter ID, you have to imagine somebody registering non-registered non-felon voters with accurate social security numbers at enough different real addresses — do you know what the registrar might be doing to cross check the name, felony record, social, and address? — to pass the registrar’s smell test while still allowing your nefarious crew to intercept their registrations in the mail, and then their mail-in ballots too, or are you foolishly carting around town physically showing up to cast multiple votes under different stolen identities? And now you’ve got a crew risking criminal conspiracy charges on top of their individual felonies for voter registration fraud, and in all likelihood a member of said conspiracy will be lazy like this guy or all those ACORN workers filling in forms with Disney characters or mix up a name and a social and once they get caught up on that how much pressure would it take to make them squeal?
In any case it’s a really strange non-sequitur to question the integrity of elections with a story that’s actually about the integrity of elections being protected.
But sure, vote fraud itself does actually happen, we know since its caught and prosecuted, because getting away with it is difficult: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2016/10/29/trump-supporter-charged-with-voting-twice-in-iowa/
And you can you really complain that the story is going untold when major national dailies cover them in detail, like your Virginian? https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/public-safety/former-alexandria-resident-charged-with-voter-registration-fraud/2016/10/28/1799319a-9d1c-11e6-9980-50913d68eacb_story.html
SOMEBODY elected Mcauliffe.
The people probably voted for Obama- per union instruction.
Colonel, Similar situation in Kentucky, although I think they have recently expanded
medicaid. It’ll be interesting to see what Georgia does in January when the General
Assembly convenes as many rural hospitals have closed.
A downside to expanded Medicaid is many doctors won’t accept it & the recipients
end up continuing to use the emergency rooms for basic care.
Personally I object to eligibility being based solely on annual income with no account of net worth.There has already been a lawsuit somewhere out west. I don’t know the results…This seems to effect more women, who
under expanded Medicaid would be kicked off Medicare & put on Medicaid & then upon
death their entire estate would be seized if the individual state chooses to do so.
The only exceptions are if a surviving spouse still lives in the house &/or a disabled child. Please note I’m not talking about long term care. The Obamacare
crazies once again displayed their natural inclination to “give” with one hand
& take with the other. Dems imo tend to govern by groups without regard to individuals or their circumstances.
Col. — If someone is on the voting rolls (even fraudulently as in your example), but does not vote…there is no voter fraud. That is why people who are dead (and have not yet been removed from the rolls) do not necessarily indicate voter fraud. A vote has to cast by someone who should not be voting before any fraud charges can be brought.
I’ve worked the polls in CA and have never run across a situation I considered fraud…lots of people think they should be able to vote but are not on the precinct roll and are allowed to vote provisionally. Each of those ballots must be verified individually for eligibility…they can take some time. First they cast the vote then it is verified but there is no guarantee their vote will be counted. They have to call in a week or so to find out.
The think I dislike the most about all of the “voter fraud” charges is that the assumption is that people are dishonest and what to commit fraud when they vote. Voting is a right of citizenship and fraud has proven to be rare. False registration is one thing…actually casting the vote is another.
You are so right about the defenseless who are shafted out of spite and ideology by their representatives. Is there anything more despicable than using someone’s poverty and ignorance to further grind them down in order to score ideological points and stay in office. This has been done for both parties and is always wrong.
your blog so you an say what you want – coal mining died 20 yrs ago look up the employmnt numbers. this was long after Clinton blurted out the truth that no matter what is done coal mining jobs will keep declining.
The fraudulent voter registration forms look more like a hustle of the organization than the State. The organization is by law not allowed to screen the forms; that is left up to the State. The hustler filled out the bogus forms and got paid his $15/hr. The organization forwarded the cards to the State. When the State bounced them the organization realized they had a problem. ACORN was shut down after a similar scam in 2008. Their mistake was paying a piece rate for registration forms.
People who want to get actual fraudulent votes are slicker than that, as the Project Veritas videos show.
As a former Virginian,but one who spent 20 years working as a ski patroller for the Southern Region of the NSPS, I spent a lot of time working in all of the mountain resorts of Virginia, West Virginia, and North Carolina. Working at resorts you become acquainted with a lot of hard working people who are residents of the depressed mountain regions. At the same time you see a lot of governmental types who volunteer their services as ski patrollers and many are in senior positions in government or simply policemen, firemen, paramedics, and a lot of military types like myself. Sprinkled in are Deputy Directirs of agencies, Assist. secretaries, judges, and all working more or less harmoniously. We even had a smattering of intelligence community types, who were always easy to identify as they have a complete lack of a sense of humor. Strange but in my observations very true they just can’t get jokes at all.
Anyway, From my experiences I was able to see very clearly there are two completely different regions in Virginia. There is Northern Virginia and the Virginia Beach regions which are basically identical with Washington DC being Clinton land and the rest of Virginia which is more or less Trump land to use an oversimplification. One big and key difference is regarding the Civil War. Being a native Californian and learning US history there I was a bit suprised at the fundamental differences between the 2 groups. One long crappy rainy day sitting up at the top shack waiting for a ski rotation to patrol the hill, I asked some friends (locals to the mountains) about what they felt about the Civial War. They looked confused at me and then asked me ” Do you mean the War of Northern Agression?” I think that encapsulates the difference in a single incident and clarified for me that I was definitely not in California any more.
Having gone to Cornell for my doctorate but. Moonlighting at the County Medical center, I saw a very similar situation in New York. I think basically there are 2 different New York’s, the city and all the rest of the state except Ithaca. Sadly, like in Virginia the population numbers make all the difference in an election such as this. The cities and suburban areas are predominant and overpower the hard working people living in the rest of the state usually at their disadvantage.
laura
“the assumption is that people are dishonest” It is true that I expect the worst of people and am pleased when people behave well. I suppose that this is what has been called a “professional deformation.” pl
GCP and Rakesh Wahi
If you look at the post again you will see that I sad “LIKE HC.” I stand by that. pl
OMB
I am continuously impressed with the variety and number of things you have done in life. As for your fellow Virginian skiers, they were surprised by your remarks because the WBS is seldom discussed in Virginia. The general silence on the subject covers a hurt that lies close to the bone. pl
PA et al
Yes, the local election officials caught this fellow but his impending trial on felony charges has done much to focus attention on the possibility of actual vote fraud. BTW, my wife was an election judge for ten years and in that time is aware of only one successful vote fraud. this occurred because of the inattention of an election official. OTOH she tells me that people frequently try to vote in precincts not their own. pl
Voter fraud: This is attempted registration of imaginary voters, not voting by imaginary voters, and as the Commonwealth’s Attorney pointed out, no fraudulent votes were actually cast. The fellow was defrauding his employer by turning in these fake registrations, and once he submitted these registration forms the organization he was working for was required to turn them into the board of elections – they are not allowed to filter them (which one might want to do for quality control, as in this case, but which one might also want to do for partisan reasons, which is why it is illegal for the organization to be selective.)
Coal country: I lived in southwestern Virginia, in a county abutting Kentucky and west of all of West Virginia, for four years, during the presidency of Bush the Elder, before the Clintons had any influence beyond Arkansas. The local newspaper was the Coalfield Progress. Never really prosperous, the area was already in economic decline when I was there – not because of ecological concerns, but because technological changes had changed the structure of employment – surface mining requires big machines, but few people. People who stay there are attached to their families, their ancestral way of life and the natural beauty of their homeland – all very understandable – but the jobs aren’t there.
mistah charly Ph. D.
Yeah, I see it now. The dumb bastards should move somewhere else, anywhere else. pl
“allowed to vote provisionally. Each of those ballots must be verified individually for eligibility.”
I find this a bit strange, how can you hold a vote “provisionally” and have it verified for eligibility separately later without compromising the anonymity of voting?
bit strange (jld)
The alternative is to disallow a challenged ballot. pl
GCP,
You mean when the Obama administration had the EPA issue new environmental regulations known as ” Final Carbon Pollution Standards for New, Modified and Reconstructed Power Plants” it was really just clarifying “chemistry”? That’s sure some science the politicians have there.
https://www.epa.gov/cleanpowerplan/carbon-pollution-standards-new-modified-and-reconstructed-power-plants
Many of the “Okies” did.
jdledell,
Obamacare is not government provided medical care it is a requirement to have insurance.
gowithit
Yes. They made southern California a different place than it had been. Many of the mountain people have moved from SW Virginia as well, and the rest of us are poorer for their going. pl
When I applied for a new library card the clerk in the library insisted on signing me up for voter registration even when I told him I was already registered. At no time did he ask if I were a citizen and did no more than look at my state drivers license to verify the address.
Mistah Charley,
“the jobs aren’t there”
They aren’t in Baltimore or East St. Louis or Ferguson either yet those people stay all the same. Of course we know which lives matter, but that’s a political decision for our elected officials and not a moral one.
Fred
Which state? pl
Michigan. (Ann Arbor). There has also been a big push for county id cards that was passed in late 2014. Any implication that one could use such an id and get benefits one is not entitled to is pure fantasy of course.
http://www.ewashtenaw.org/government/clerk_register/washtenaw-county-id-card-program
Coal mining jobs may have declined some, largely due to mining methods and automation. The amount of coal mined certainly didn’t till the current administrations badly misplaced aim to stop its use.
Coal is still the most viable means to provide the enormous and relatively cheap electrical power this nation and the rest of the world uses and needs.
My father always told the story that as boy his family responsibility during the depression was to follow the coal trucks after school and pick up the droppings so they would have heat at night. As boy I always enjoyed going to my grandfathers house as he would take me down to cellar to shovel coal into the furnace.Today many still use coal pellets to heat their homes and where I live the bulk of our electricity is generated from coal. In the 90’s our power company decided to invest in a coal fired circulating fluidized bed combustor as the technology of the future and were heralded by the EPA and other government entities who footed 10% of the bill. In this technology SOx, NOx and other pollutants are reduced to well below future standards. The only problem is it emits carbon dioxide well above Obamas standards so now they are looking to either add a catalytic converter or succumb to the tree huggers. Coal has a place in our future as all other natural resources do its just technology needs development to control the pollutants. When they talk about that the emissions cause cancer I pull my phone out of my back pocket and wonder what that battery is doing.
Voter Fraud concerns will only be brought under control when we are all allowed to go to whatever voting booth we want, then vote, and have to stick our thumbs into the ink well. That way if you don”t vote we all will know.
There are not two but THREE completely different regions in Virginia: there’s Charlottesville, Jefferson’s country which is God’s own country.
And don’t you forget it.
So far the comments read “no dirty hands here.” Interesting. I guess then I’ll be the first to admit to collecting names from several cemeteries as a Sigma Chi rush (didn’t join) at Fresno State in 1954. It was an election ritual at that time (collecting names.) it was the local Dems that put up the couple of kegs of beer for the names. Punt.
I have always tried to live life large. I had an enormous laundry list of things to do before I die, which is getting smaller every year.
Yes, I understand the nature of the hurt, and actually believe in States rights over Federalism. My buddies never quite knew how to take me. I liked to boast I was from the true South, Southern California. Lots of eye rolling ensued. Being a native Californian on the East coast and in particular Virginia always caused some extra grief. I got used to it in basic training and it never got better over the years so it is best to just own it. Upstate New Yorkers are very difficukt to break into. I patrolled at Greek Peak while doing my PhD at Cornell and even after 4 years working there I was still referred to as what’s his name…the new guy. You have to understand patrolling is very similar to squad/platoon comraderie with very intense, life threatening situations daily, but in NY it takes on a whole new level.
Fred,
“Obamacare is not government provided medical care it is a requirement to have [private] insurance.”
Yes, exactly, and using the governmental basis of coercion to do so. It seeks to maintain the artificially high health care costs, along with the oligopoly of “health care plans” and prescription drugs. The mergers and consolidation allowed of hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and health care plan companies (and others, including in banking, media, telecommunications, etc.) over the last 30-35 years has been constant and outrageous, leading to the oligopoly of which the public is finally becoming aware. There has been no real antitrust law enforcement during that time, except for some during Bill Clinton’s first term as president, when Anne Bingaman was chief of the antitrust division of the Justice Department —
http://www.modrall.com/AnneBingmanLuncheon
Ironically, during Ronald Reagan’s first term, when antitrust enforcement policy was changed to make mergers much easier, the Dept. of Justice did proceed with the government’s antitrust case against the AT&T telephone company, which resulted in a consent decree which basically broke AT&T up into seven “Baby Bell” phone companies and a separate long distance company–
http://scholarship.law.berkeley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1084&context=btlj
Human nature being what it is, in the orgy of mergers and consolidation that began in earnest in the 1980’s, AT&T has been putting itself back together, plus adding other types of existing media businesses, such as its purchase of Direct TV in 2014–
http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/usanow/2014/05/18/att-buys-directv/9247795/
http://about.att.com/story/att_to_acquire_directv.html
Notice that in the AT&T press release on the Direct TV merger, the “conditions” (ROFL) included that they will commit to Internet “Net Neutrality” for three years, starting in 2014. That means that next year….
Now it moves to buy Time Warner, as we speak–
http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-91751068/
http://time.com/4547740/att-time-warner-merger-deal-prices/
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/10/att-ceo-opponents-of-time-warner-merger-are-uninformed/
I apologize for drifting off topic, but it is useful to understand that the traditional basis of antitrust law was to preserve and promote competition between companies in the same or similar business, meaning many, independently owned companies, which would result in individual initiative in innovation, affordable prices, and quality. But a campaign changed that principle to a different, deceptive one, stated by Robert Bork in his 1978 book, The Antitrust Paradox: “the only legitimate goal of antitrust is the maximization of consumer welfare.” This allows arguments that reducing the number of competing businesses and promoting oligopoly and oligarchy “helps consumers”.
The ugly, unreported result of business mergers and consolidations is that usually employees are terminated, which also means that their benefits are terminated, including any health care, the progress of retirement plans, and so forth. The employees who remain can see their income cut.
It is not only the outsourcing of jobs and manufacturing overseas that hurts employment.
Fred…it is also a requirement to PROVIDE insurance to those who sign-up. It is a two-way street.
A contract with obligations…like no life-time cap and coverage of preexisting conditions.
The California County elections offices verify the registration and the precinct via the information and signature supplied on each provisional ballot. That is done before the ballot envelope is opened. Once it is verified, it goes into the “okay to vote” pile and counted. Believe me, there are so many that NO ONE has time to see how a particular person votes…
In reply to turcopolier 05 November 2016 at 08:29 AM
A “professional deformation”? Perhaps or perhaps your professional experiences have further confirmed for you that we are fallen creatures who God has nevertheless endowed with the capacity to rise above our nature and inclinations should we choose to exercise that capacity.
WRT CO2 emissions: did this turn out to promise more than it can deliver?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7EYQLOlwDM
Sorry for the mistyping, plugged in a new mouse and it seems to nudge the whole input once in a while, darn Microsoft crap, the worn out one worth $5 was better!
Lived in Ithaca for 10 years. The bumper sticker that captured it all was “Ithaca, 10 square miles surrounded by reality.”
My twin boys graduated from high school with the sons and daughters of farmers, school teachers, college professors and two of Carl Sagan’s daughters.
Hood Canal–Do you know if anyone ever showed up a the polls to vote under those names? If not, no fraud.
OMB
I went to VMI with an indeterminate news reader accent, a result of living all over the world and the USA. You can imagine what that was like in 1958. pl
I appreciate that cite as it proves all problems have a solution. Even today in that coal combustor I mentioned they inject limestone (calcium carbonate) into the flue gases which chemically changes it to gypsum which is then utilized in the making of wallboard. There is hope for the coal miners of America.
Fred – I am very much aware that Obamacare is not government provided healthcare. However, I believe the Government should play a major role in healthcare even to the point of ‘Medicare for All”. As the person responsible for much of Prudential Healthcare before it was sold to Aetna, I finally came to the conclusion that competition and the free enterprise economy will never get our insane healthcare costs under control. Healthcare companies have been trying for decades with approaches like PPOs, HMOs etc to bend the cost curve with very, very limited success.
If you look at other developed countries, their healthcare costs per capita are 50% to 60% of ours with better indicators of health. As a senior executive of a healthcare company, I finally came to the conclusion that a modified single payer system is the way to go. If you think there are loopholes in Tax compliance, the loopholes in healthcare billing dwarf the tax system.
I had to vote provisionally in CA once and it went as you described. I was informed very explicitly that I could vote if I chose but the ballot would have to go through the process of verification and there was no certainty that it would be counted at all.
I so agree with you. As a nurse I realized for years that single payer system is the only way.
Laura,
Does CRT have to pay extra for your mendacious hair splitting, or does that come standard?
Pacifica A
The anti coal rhetoric propounded by extremists for years with no real solutions.
What is truly bizarre about our healthcare system is the fact that on a percapita basis, the US government spends more on healthcare than nations such as Sweden which insure 100% of its population through government spending
The reason is simply that with our costs so high, even with government programs such as medicare and medicaid insuring a far smaller percentage of the population than the near 100% govt coverage elsewhere, our govt still spends more and achieves far less.
The problem with medicaid under those states that have accepted the expanded version is that for those 55-65 there is, as you say, no net asset test. There still is a means test for those under 55.
Now, the problem is this in a nutshell–by law, you are required to have health insurance. Someone 56 who goes on the exchanges and who earns too little is shunted into medicaid. If you earn a bit more you get a subsidy for private insurance.
The one shunted into medicaid may well have a house, but will still qualify.
But with the medicaid clawback provision, every cent spent on medicaid is subject to a clawback provision from the beneficiary’s estate. In other words, a poor person with little income will have that house seized and sold on their death. There have been cases where a state’s clawback team has argued with relatives on the amount spent on the deceased’s funeral.
But if that person had earned a bit more–they get private insurance with subsidies and, of course, that comes with no clawback.
It’s an insane system. Medicaid functions as a loan secured by your estate.
Colonel
Hope this post is a OK in this thread :
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/06/politics/comey-tells-congress-fbi-has-not-changed-conclusions/index.html?adkey=bn
Headline:
FBI: Review of new emails doesn’t change conclusion on Clinton
Laura–You’re obviously not from Illinois.
beaver
Thanks. This does not involve the Foundation investigation. pl
Laura,
The blog called Naked Capitalism has analyzed at length and in granular detail the quality of the various “metal levels” of Obamacare plans. The Na Cappers have also discussed at length the various implications of government power used to force captive citizen-targets to buy private plans.
Steve,
Most of this spending is private spending through the Insurance Industry conduit, not government spending.
A proper apples to apples comparison would be comparing the VA with pure government systems overseas, like the British National Health Service. How do they compare in health care delivered to their covered populations per dollar spent caring for those covered populations?
Depending on how similar Medicare in America is to CanadaCare in Canada, comparing the two might be an apples to apples comparison of systems of socialized coverage of private practice.
Steve,
It seems more like an evil system designed to keep the poors poor, rather than an insane system.