Why that is whacky talk, we’ve evolved past blatant racism to the point where the conservatives and reactionaries have to at least come up with something that fails the giggle test in their efforts to disenfranchise the “wrong” types of voters.
Al Jazeera America looks into the cross-state database being used by quite a few Republican led states to detect “voter” fraud, and as a data professional, much less a liberal, I want to cry:
The Crosscheck list of suspected double voters has been compiled by matching names from roughly 110 million voter records from participating states. Interstate Crosscheck is the pet project of Kansas’ controversial Republican secretary of state, Kris Kobach, known for his crusade against voter fraud.
The three states’ lists are heavily weighted with names such as Jackson, Garcia, Patel and Kim — ones common among minorities, who vote overwhelmingly Democratic. Indeed, fully 1 in 7 African-Americans in those 27 states, plus the state of Washington (which enrolled in Crosscheck but has decided not to utilize the results), are listed as under suspicion of having voted twice. This also applies to 1 in 8 Asian-Americans and 1 in 8 Hispanic voters. White voters too — 1 in 11…
The sample matches he showed his audience included the following criteria: first, last and middle name or initial; date of birth; suffixes; and Social Security number, or at least its last four digits…
In practice, all it takes to become a suspect is sharing a first and last name with a voter in another state. Typical “matches” identifying those who may have voted in both Georgia and Virginia include…. [emphasis mine at points of WTFedness]
I’ve spent a good chunk of my career making sure different data systems can talk to each other correctly. One of the first things that I learned as a young minion to an old data scrubber was that names suck donkey dick as matching criteria. There are numerous issues with names. The easiest one is that a name is not a unique identifier. If you google Richard Mayhew, there is me, a professor of literature and an English football player on the first page of results. We are seperate people as you can easily verify by my spelling adventures and the fact that I am a referee and not a player. As AJA points out, Democratic leaning ethnic groups tend to have a higher concentration of people with common names.
More importantly names change. My wife Jane Mary Mayhew nee Doe can be found in a variety of databases under Jane Mary Mayhew, Jane M. Mayhew, Jane Doe, Jane Mary Doe, Jane M. Doe-Mayhew, J. Doe Mayhew. Her sister Joan Maria can be found in several database as J. M. Doe. My cousin Judy is in several databsae as J. Mayhew. You try and figure out whether J. Mayhew is a unique individual in multiple location of unique individuals in multiple, unique locations? You can’t with names.
Secondly, the next point of failure is that people move. Democrats and Democratic leaning voters tend to be more transient within a metro area as they are more likely to be either young or renters rather than middle age or old homeowners. So actual matches of someone voting in Precinct 1 in 2009 and Precinct 77 in 2011 is explained by natural movement. It is not a crime to move and vote at a new home.
It could be done with a reasonable degree of confidence (reasonable for say marketing purposes) on a match of first name, middle indicator, last name, gender (although that is fuzzy) date of birth, SSN or credit card numbers, but even that methodology will spit out some percentage of screwed up results that need expensive manual intervention to clean the list. The screw ups will happen because the source data list is seldom pristine. People will enter Richard Mayhew once and then Dick Mayhew another time or they could transcribe a number on their SSN, or Joe Smith, Joe Smith Jr, and Joe Smith III all live at the same house and you’re not sure which one owns which birthday or SSN. Informed guesses can be made, but they are precisely that, guesses. Cleaning up the residuals seldom is cost effective for basic marketing as it could easily be a $10 to $20 per name to validate cost for a $1 piece of mail. However, for voting purposes, cleaning up the list should be worth $10 per residual individual.
If we wanted to have a solid national voter verification project, then that would mean federalizing elections where all citizens receive a biometric secured national identification card free of charge, and swiping that card at a precinct would bring up a custom ballot for the races that an individual is eligible to vote in. And once a person swipes the card at a single location and submits a ballot, they would be locked out from voting for the rest of the relevant electoral cycle. It would eliminate the right church, wrong pew problem, it would eliminate the three voting machines at a precinct with 1,500 urban voters compared to the 9 machines at the suburban precinct with 500 registered voters problem, it would eliminate any illusion of legitimate concerns about voter impersonation fraud, and it would eliminate fears of double voting. It would actually solve a problem. It would be costly, but it would work.
But since voter identification and caging is not about actually solving a problem, we can’t have that… it is just proof that there is absolutley no fucking need whatsoever for preclearance or aggressive federal supervision of elections as only the Elected should elect the elected.
Suffern ACE
So how much time and effort and lawyers are we going to have to spend to prove that Dick Mayhew in North Carolina is not Richard Mayhew in Florida? Are you going to have to prove that you are who you are every time the republicans get in charge of your state?
CONGRATULATIONS!
I have a last name that is overwhelmingly common – among Southern blacks. The first name is reasonably common for both blacks and whites as well.
I’m white back to the 1400s.
I don’t live in any of these shithole states indulging in this ridiculousness, and it’s too bad I don’t for the purposes of voting, because I would bet every last cent of my net worth that I wouldn’t be challenged at any of their polling locations in spite of my name being on every one of these insane lists. Easy money.
Because I’m white.
Incidentally, motherfuckers, that’s what they call “white privilege”.
Another Holocene Human
Does anybody on the internet know who in the world is Mychal Massie, Project 21 (exposed as a front group and dissolved), World Nut Daily columnist, “Why I Do Not Like The Obamas” scribe?
His “ministry” is a PO box in Harvey, NY.
He says his father’s name was Howard and is deceased. There was a Howard Massie, listed as Black, living for many years with other family members in Miami, Florida, including a son(?) named Antwone.
There is no info about his background prior to 2007 when he was part of Project 21 and appeared at CPAC and living in the NY area, except for the “bio” on his own personal website.
He comes out of nowhere. No trace.
Isn’t that odd?
Did he change his name? Who is this guy? When and where was he born? Is he hiding a criminal record? His ministry sounds like “The Human Project”. There’s another name associated with it now but no other address than a PO box. Now how weird is that?
There is another church with a very similar name in Jacksonville, FL. It seems to still be around but his name isn’t associated with it. (Or any name, apparently it’s one of those rare Southern churches without a personality cult around the pastors.)
There don’t seem to be any interviews about his background. To be honest, he mostly appears in RW news sources but he is real and there’s video of his shtick, which is to attack prominent liberal African Americans.
Project 21 probably was doomed because after being presented as an organization of conservative African-American business leaders or whatever, Mychal Massie had car trouble and missed a radio interview and his white boss showed up in his place for the interview. Yeah, you read that right….
Calouste
You proposal would solve a problem, but that’s not the problem that Kris Kobach wants to solve. The problem Kris Kobach wants to solve is that too many people are voting for the party that is not his.
Emily68
Speaking of two people with the same name, once there was a bank error in my favor and a bank was trying to give me $15,000 for a roll-over IRA that should have gone to another woman with the same name as me. And it’s not a very common last name. Lucky for the other Emily68, I kept turning the $ down and finally had to sleuth out the problem myself. The other lady was VERY happy when her missing $15,000 was found.
RaflW
At this point I don’t think we try and reason our way out, or appeal to other people’s sense of fairness.
We have to retaliate. We have to come up with ways of trying to strike likely GOP voters from the rolls. We have to find ways to make things shitty and difficult for conservatives. Its the only thing they’ll understand: the countervailing exercise of raw power.
Suffern ACE
@Calouste: You give him too much credit. He thinks Hispanics are criminals and if you don’t believe, he’ll pass laws to make it so. There is actual animus and malice towards the groups he does not like. Its an emotional crusade he’s running. If Hispanics all switch party affiliations and became republicans tomorrow, Kobach would leave the party.
Another Holocene Human
It would but at the same time it would catch a lot of upper middle class and wealthy white people who are voting twice at their main house and the vacation house or at their home and at their deceased parent’s home, it’s what Mom would have wanted, right?
This is part of the reason they argue that property should vote–that way they get more than one.
It may in some cases be legal for them to vote in more than one local election because local rules are different. But it’s massive projection when they talk about “bussed in” voters since they’re the ones sending off absentee ballots to another state and not bothering to inform state B when they get a DL that they were already licensed in state A.
A lot of pale faced and self-righteous felons out there. Beware.
Another Holocene Human
@Another Holocene Human: And if you don’t believe me, witness all the RW conservatives with questionable voting records such as none other than Mitt Robme himself and also shrillbeast Ann Coulter, who almost certainly committed a crime and wasn’t prosecuted. (Romney was upholding a fictitious Massachusetts residency by listing his address as his son’s basement or something of that nature, but at least he only voted once.)
Culture of Truth
George Bush
George Bush
George Bush
Criminals, GOP?
Another Holocene Human
Also, too, I found out that establishing residency in Massachusetts is in fact a LOLworthy exercise. Oops, white privilege again.
It’s sort of the intersection of English common law (it was a different time), affiliation fraud, misplaced trust … oh, and that the state isn’t that fucking worried about it, unlike some other states that think that people moving in from other states are trying to suck out their precious bodily fluids.
Funny story, my uncle flip-flopped on majors when he was in college and ended up having to change schools. He was born and lived his whole life in OK but went to some other school, I think in Kansas, for a year. When he came back to OK to go to one of the state colleges they tried to charge him, well, actually Grandma, out of state tuition. But fortunately she was able to raise some hell and get them to change that decision. Isn’t it funny how college students’ state residency is always a matter of heads I win tails you lose for the states? Somebody is always trying to rip them off something something.
Arclite
Wait, wait, wait. You actually married a Jane Doe???
Another Holocene Human
@Another Holocene Human: Theoretically I was supposed to present some sort of documents backing my claims but the clerk recognized me on sight, whipped up a letter and stamped it.
Damn, it feels good to be a gangster.
Arclite
Here’s the frustrating thing. No one wakes up in the morning and thinks, “I’m gonna vote a bunch of times today!” It Just. Doesn’t. Happen. It’s hard enough to get people to vote once, never mind several times. It’s so frustrating that the lamestream media doesn’t call this out for what it is: voter suppression.
Another Holocene Human
@RaflW: You can’t. YOU’ll get prosecuted.
IOKIYAR
It’s not just an aphorism. It’s the law.
Woodrowfan
the Virginia voting rolls are a mess. they take forever to take people off the list. My next door neighbors, who moved to Indiana a decade ago, are still on the rolls as living in their old house, as are the mother and daughter who lived in the house on the other side of mine. But none of them have even shown up to vote since they moved. It’s not fraud, it’s poor database management. but hey, the righties will make any excuse to deny the right to vote to anybody who is not a white RW xtian.
Amir Khalid
So, if I understand correctly, in America you register to vote with just your name and address?
Late in the last millennium,as part of its Operation Desert Shield coverage, 60 Minutes decided to interview Saddam Hussein. So they went to the home of a nine-year old American boy of that name, and asked him about school, family, friends, hobbies etc. Which must have had their viewers thinking, WTF?
mai naem mobile
I’m guessing David Koch and Charles Koch are not on this spethal list even though I’m betting theres 20 David Kochs and Charles Kochs in the US.
lgerard
This has nothing to do with voter fraud (of course!) and everything to do with local election board mismanagement, largely due to a lack of funding. It is no crime to be registered at more then one address, and no surprise it happens.
The city of Boston has the best voter role management system I have ever seen in my 30 years of election work, and it is utterly simple.
Every year the city sends a letter to every address listing the registered voters at that address. Citizens are prompted to look at the list, note any corrections and either return the letter with the SASE, go online and confirm, or call the election department. If there is no response, the city makes several attempts by phone and in person to verify the information.
If this fails, the voters are then marked as “inactive voters”, After every Presidential election, inactive voters who have been inactive for more then 2 years are then purged.
Any inactive voter who is still on the election roll who shows up at a polling place to vote can be reinstated by signing a simple affidavit and showing proof of address.
It is simple, and it works.
wmd
I’m going to post OT.
I’ve volunteered to make GoTV calls. In the past I used the PCCC call out the vote web site. This year I’ve signed up there 3 times and never had a follow up email or a chance to choose shifts.
So when Move On offered me a chance to make calls I signed up. Started calls for the KY senate (long shot, but hey it could happen). In the course of 30 minutes I made 23 calls, 15 of which were to wrong numbers. The software was defective too – call would connect, then I’d wait 3 seconds to have the voter’s name show up along with the script. It may be that the 3 seconds of silence made the recipient of the call hostile and the list used isn’t as bad as it seemed (8 out of 23 hits is pretty bad, by this time the lists should be fairly clean).
Of the people I spoke with Lundergan-Grimes is getting some votes though. One undecided a 70 something woman that was concerned that LG supports gays, i said it’s more that she’s against discrimination hoping to get her to vote. She said she is against discrimination, just doesn’t like the things gays do… so maybe I was onto something.
C.V. Danes
However, one of the things you learn as a young minion to an old republican data manipulator is that names are awesome for establishing links where none exist for the purpose of firing up your white, minimally educated base.
delk
Kris Kobach. Just checked Google and his middle initial is “W” . At least he got that going for him.
gene108
What happens, if people lose their ID?
People lose credit cards all the time and the criminals can make fake purchases with someone else credit card.
A national ID is a call for stricter ID requirements, as he national ID can be stolen, a fake ID can be issued or someone can deliberately give their ID to someone else, who is not eligible to vote.
Amir Khalid
Off topic:
When you’ve lost Michael Jordan …
Epicurus
Which is precisely why it will never happen. Not before 2017, anyhow. Great idea(s), nonetheless. I’ll chip in a dollar….
The Dangerman
@C.V. Danes:
Who excel at sucking elephant dick.
japa21
@gene108: So let’s go with a scannable implanted microchip. It gets implanted either at birth or when one becomes a naturalized citizen.
Calouste
@gene108: And those things can’t happen with a state ID? State IDs can’t be stolen? Must be a miraculous state where you live.
Amir Khalid
@japa21:
It’s been proven to work with pet animals.
SatanicPanic
National ID. We need to aggressively push for a national ID, with your photo on it, delivered to your door if you can’t leave your house. In fact, have the census people collect them. If Joe Blow Prepper doesn’t want gubmint with a photo of his face, then too bad.
SatanicPanic
@japa21: even better.
boatboy_srq
According to GOTea orthodoxy, Teahadists vote at least twice (primary and general) in two years; All Those Other People™ can only vote twice (one primary and one general) per lifetime. So your example is flawed because there are two votes recorded (one in 2009 and one in 2011) which means the same person voted more than once.
/snark
Speaking as somebody with a name wingnuts insist ain’t Ahmurrrcan (it’s Norman English, and goes back to 10th Century Normandy, and my family’s last immigration wave was in the late 19th century so it’s been in the US for about 125 years now) and continue to try to make something vaguely Middle Eastern out of it, the idea that there’s any use of names as search criteria for this effort is at once scandalous and horrifying.
@RaflW: In the current climate, spreading the rumour that the ebola virus can survive on (untreated) ballot stock for several weeks might just do the trick. It doesn’t physically impede them nor threaten them physically or monetarily – but EEEEBOOLA scares those volk so badly that it might just keep them from the polls for a cycle or two.
Lee
@RaflW:
I’ve had the same thought, but I can’t come up with a way for it to work other than just straight up challenging each and every registration.
Warren Terra
Any word on whether this software has enabled them to catch that notorious fraudster John Smith?
RaflW
@Another Holocene Human:
Oh, well then.
People were murdered in the 1960s for the right to vote. A lot of others endured fire hoses, attack dogs and police batons. Folks took time off work to travel to the south and risked everything (and some paid the ultimate price) to register black folks and get them to the polls.
It’s that f*@& serious once again. Worrying about avoiding arrest is a privilege we probably can’t afford any longer.
Another Holocene Human
@Amir Khalid: Nope, usually need something else like a social security number. They take your application and check against other government records. Sometimes you have to present ID at initial signup, sometimes not. Reregistering at a new address is more routine than first time registration.
You are supposed to be able to sign up to vote when you move to a new state and apply for your new state ID (for many, this is a driver’s license, but if you can’t get a DL you can still get an ID at the same office). You voluntarily disclose where you were last registered (note, some people will fail to do this right off the bat, entitled people, see?) and then your new state sends a note to your old state to scrub you off their rolls. Either state A or state B can fuck this up and fail to scrub you. Which is like gold to voter cagers. (Vote caging used to be, like, illegal, but thanks to John Roberts, ya know, anything goes I guess.)
“Motor voter” is actually a federal law but New Mexico’s Republican SoS decided just not to process any of the voter registration applications received in the last year after a court order required her to implement it, like over a decade after the rest of the US. Maybe that is the key to her reelection.
Now how about that for election fraud? Btw, election fraud used to be the only felony that would cause you to permanently lose your civil rights, but then Jim Crow happened.
Another Holocene Human
White supremacy is more important than democracy. So much for “the American way of life.” I guess they meant segregation and racial violence.
Another Holocene Human
@wmd: Man, that really sucks.
I ran into technical difficulties trying to use an AFL predictive dialer. At least I know they didn’t spend really big bucks on it but damn. OFA let me use a paper list, making calls sucks but that was way better than predictive dialer.
SatanicPanic
@Another Holocene Human: When did they mean anything different?
Bill Arnold
@Another Holocene Human:
I’ve mentioned it here before: My mom, as a Democratic poll worker, once witnessed a group of Satmar hasids (mostly yeshiva students, both pale and bearded) voting. This was in the lower Hudson valley, near a now-defunct yeshiva. One young man told her that they had been in Brooklyn in the morning, and were heading upstate (I assume to the early Kiryas Joel ). Their leader told them which row (Republican; this was with old NYS lever voting machines) to vote.
wmd
@Another Holocene Human:
I had a working relationship with someone at PCCC, contacted him… he’s now working for DSCC (hopefully trying to stop crap like what they did in South Dakota). He suggested I contact the PCCC contact us email. So far I’m still in the black hole.
I’ll be calling some on Friday, maybe on Saturday and Monday as well. Even if I have to use the Move On dialer and deal with them not having responsive software.
Another Holocene Human
@gene108: A Cuban I work with said that back in the day at church on the Sunday before election day the old people would hand their voter registration cards to people who would vote for them. He called it “fraud” although it seems like the people who were pulling the in-person fraud were voting the way the owner of the card wanted, so it’s not like someone pulling in-person fraud on an innocent, unaware mark.
It seems like you could accomplish the same goal by filling out absentee ballots and just giving them to somebody to run them down to the Board of Elections, especially as Florida doesn’t make you go through any hoops to get an absentee ballot. So this is more laziness and knowing that whoever was running that polling station was letting this garbage go on.
Inking voters might not be such a bad idea.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Woodrowfan: I wouldn’t be surprised if voter lists were about the lowest possible priority in a normal Secretary of State’s office. I recall being on the list 3 times in Chicago when I was in college. In the vast majority of cases, that happening isn’t “fraud”, it’s moving and the people keeping track of registrations not removing your old address.
Who knows, I may still be on the rolls there, and I haven’t lived there in 30 years and I know one of the places we used to live was torn down, …
Isn’t it disgusting that tiny little problems like these (“OMG!!11 10 people out of 100M voted twice!!11) end up sucking all the air out of the room? Millions are needlessly unemployed, too many people can’t afford healthcare even after the PPACA, infrastructure continues to crumble, we’re not doing enough to protect the climate, drought is decimating the west, we’re not doing enough on renewables and energy efficiency, etc., etc., but we (the national media) spend so much time talking about what Republicans want to talk about rather than real problems. And, of course, Republicans creating problems where there were none (like removing citizens from the voting rolls), so we can’t just sit back and tut-tut.
It’s infuriating, but we need to keep our eyes on the prize.
Cheers,
Scott.
RaflW
@Another Holocene Human:
Yes.
What we are seeing is that white supremacy will not give up without a hell of a fight. It may tear the nation apart (again). Certainly, we risk the rise of facism as those with the most do all they can to defend their station.
It doesn’t have to be that way, and it doesn’t have to mean a violent shift, but power concedes nothing without a fight – at least a political one.
Another Holocene Human
@SatanicPanic: It always sounded like fascist bullshit to me, but they always mentioned DEMOCRACY because we warn’t no stinking commies.
Another Holocene Human
@Bill Arnold: Some Haredi teens got caught at a polling station trying to vote either this year or last year in NYS. Obviously they got stopped but it isn’t clear if some slipped through at a time of day with different personnel at the polling station.
But if you want all-out Haredi election stealing allegations, check out Israel. Ouch.
I would hope that NYS doesn’t have the same person listed multiple times in the same state. It’s more likely that they were voting names that weren’t coming to the polls. It’s not too hard to identify who’s not voting (dead, out of country, out of state) in a community like that and offer a substitute.
But why worry about the pale ginger menace when there were some New Black Panthers opening doors at the polling station in Philly for white grandmas?
Bill Arnold
@japa21:
The “invisible laser tattoo” was freaking out some of the the loopier members of the christian right, in maybe the 1980s.
(The fear being that people were being surreptitiously marked with an invisible tattoo that encoded the number of the beast.)
joel hanes
@RaflW:
We have to retaliate. We have to come up with ways of trying to strike likely GOP voters from the rolls.
When you become like your enemy, your enemy has won.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Another Holocene Human: Intelius.com is your friend. He appears to have come out of Pennsylvania. Lived in quite a few different places.
He also seems to have used the same name with two different birthdates, or his dad had him at 17.
He exists.
Villago Delenda Est
Shorter Richard Mayhew: The stupid, it burns.
TriassicSands
Unfortunately, it wouldn’t address our biggest problem — it wouldn’t eliminate Republicans. (Or stated differently — it wouldn’t eliminate greedy, racist, science-denying, reality avoiding gun-worshipping people. In other words — Republicans.)
CarolDuhart2
@Emily68: And that’s a bank which presumably has more in its database than most governments. Even then, when I go, they have to look me up because my real name is so common. I’ve googled it, and I’ve found a few that are more successful than I have been (sigh). And even on a credit report, I have been given addresses I have never lived at. And I’ve lived here all my life and never married, so there’s none of those name changes to consider.
What’s more, these entities have a business reason and the resources to do research. Your often part-time, understaffed elections boards don’t have either the time or money or expertise to search.
Like you said, Richard, we could solve all this by a central Federal database of names and addresses and a card, but that’s not the problem we are trying to solve here.
Villago Delenda Est
@Another Holocene Human: I was doing phone banking for the Dems locally just yesterday, and the predictive dialer was in the fail mode. They have this wonderful web interface (could use a few improvements, but pretty functional) and the concept is great. I don’t know what exactly the problem was yesterday, one of the IT guys indicated there was a load issue, but there were times when it would connect me without bothering to update the screen and give me the information on the voter I was contacting. Then there were times that I’d get connected to an answering machine or voice mail…something the predictive dialer is supposed to explicitly screen out.
The volunteer coordinator eventually just handed out call lists, and I went through about 40 calls in the space of a half hour and was far more productive than I was with the predictive dialer. Something else was broken…the dialer kept calling people who had been called multiple times and said YES I HAVE VOTED (this is Oregon…vote by mail for everyone) and they were getting pissed about all the additional phone calls.
I can’t blame them. I’d be pissed too.
pat
Interesting that this is being reported by Al Jazeera America.
Wouldn’t it be great if someone on, oh, say the Sunday talk shows or News Hour could do the same analysis and discussion that Richard has here?
In order to steal an election, you have to run the election.
Matt McIrvin
@Another Holocene Human: Massachusetts isn’t that worried about making it easy to vote, though, either. We’ve got no early voting, no same-day registration, no mail-in voting unless you’ve got some excuse.
The way they try to keep the rolls current is with this inactive-voter list that you can fall on by failing to respond to the town census, which is this thing that gets snail-mailed out several months in advance of the general election. If you’re on the inactive-voter list, you need to provide some proof of residency, like an ID with an address on it or a utility bill (it recently occurred to me that we’ve gone to paperless billing for so many things that the latter might be hard to supply). If you can’t, you get a provisional ballot.
Photo ID is not required, but I recall that in a primary election a few years ago a Tea Party group around Worcester got in some trouble for having “poll observers” hassle people on the inactive-voter list over the validity of their proof of address.
Omnes Omnibus
While I was working at the agency in charge of elections here in WI at the time of the Walker recall, we actually got a call for a Joe Stalin, who wanted to preemptively assure us that He existed, lived in Wisconsin, and damned well wanted Walker gone. He had heard that the pro-Walker people were challenging what they considered to be fictitious names, and he wanted to make sure we know he was real.
Richard Mayhew
@Villago Delenda Est: Yep, I just don’t do shorter well :)
lgerard
@Matt McIrvin:
I actually had a “conservative” who wanted to challenge another voter over this issue…..at least until I asked HIM for an ID….then he changed his mind
good times
Omnes Omnibus
OT: Tech question: Does anyone know why the sticher app in EJW’s posts has a script that becomes unresponsive in FF? Half the time I get the pop up saying that the script is unresponsive and do I want to end, but other times, like now, it just gums up FF completely and I have to restart it. It makes those posts basically impossible for me to read or comment on.
wmd
@Villago Delenda Est:
I cut my shift short because of the failures. And dealing with load isn’t that tough, just spin up some more Amazon Web Service instances and go. At least that’s what worked in 2008,2010 and 2012… and at this point there are other vendors offering equivalent services, so you can’t blame Bezos.
Omnes Omnibus
@Omnes Omnibus: A google search indicates that DK is having similar problems with Sticher. Fucking annoying.
Another Holocene Human
@Villago Delenda Est: Maybe that’s why I’ve been calling a million times from Maine for giving one fucking check to Mike Michaud. I actually hung up and I got redialed immediately yesterday. No energy so I hung up again. But as I told the very stupid (and aggressive) volunteer after I’d been called 2387049823423 times in one week already I DON’T LIVE IN MAINE … well then, good luck … THIS CONVERSATION IS OVER. I had to say that twice before I hung up. Ruder than the goddamn phone company.
kc
I’m glad someone at Balloon Juice posted about this. It’s going a affect a hell of a lot of people in a really bad way.
Another Holocene Human
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Thank you for the tip. Lord, that’s fucking weird, though.
James E Powell
This is what they did in 2000. It got them Florida, which got them the White House, which got them the Supreme Court. It is a winning formula and no one outside of some powerless activists and bloggers is ever going to call them on it.
Shame on all Americans who just let them do it.
Shame on all Democrats for not making vote-suppression a major issue.
JaneE
My maiden name was relatively unusual. My dad was the only one in our local phone book all my life. But during WWII he was working at an aircraft plant about 40 miles from home, on the night shift. His check was garnisheed because there was someone else with the same first name, middle initial, and surname on the day shift. It took a bit of doing, but the mistake was corrected. According to my dad, they used their fingerprint cards to verify that they were actually two different people.
Botsplainer
@RaflW:
Hutus and Tutsis.
pseudonymous in nc
Feature, not bug.
If the Goppers actually wanted a proper identity database, then they’d have to spend a shitload of money and also have the feds take the lead.
If they want to stop people from voting, a bunch of shitty databases is a bargain.
pseudonymous in nc
@pat:
It’s almost as if they can draw upon broad experience of places where there are no elections, sham elections, and struggles for free and fair elections.
I’ll say it again: it’s not really about technology. Large chunks of the US do not believe in free and fair elections, and that’s reflected in how they run them.
Elizabelle
Is Jimmy Carter monitoring our elections this year? I ask that not in snark. Georgia needs it, although he’s got a clear conflict of interest (of sorts) this year.
Lurking Canadian
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: the voter suppression is in place precisely to make sure nothing is done about the other issues you identified.
Tokyokie
I don’t think my name is particularly unusual, but it’s not all that common, either. Yet I know of at least four other people with my first and last name, only one of whom is a relative (a nephew). I found out about one of them when payroll at the big-city newspaper where I did a weeklong tryout several years ago sent my paycheck to some guy who’d interned in the advertising department a couple of years before, who, upon getting a check for $1,000+ with his (and my) name on it, promptly cashed it and moved.
SLKRR
Your solution is very similar to Brazil’s current system – federalized national elections using national ID cards with biometric identification. To top it off, voting is mandatory, because Brazil actually wants citizens to participate in elections, not just those citizens who vote for a particular party.
I agree with other commenters here that this solves a problem, just not one that Republicans are concerned about.
brantl
If these clowns had any real interest in stopping retail voter fraud, they would match name and social security #, but they don’t. And they keep committing wholesale voter fraud.
AndoChronic
Thanks for that explanation Richard. It makes the most sense from anything I’ve heard thus far trying to explain the phenomenon.