Voter Fraud In Mississippi?

Last night Mississippi incumbent Thad Cochran won the Republican primary by enlisting Democratic voters, many of them--you know--black. The idea of one side turning out to vote in the other's primary has been discussed before (Rush Limbaugh, notably, launched Operation Chaos--an attempt to interfere in the Democrat's 2008 primary)--but it's rare that it is done full-bore with the candidate's official approval. This, folks, is what bipartisanship looks like.

It's also nominally illegal: the state code prohibits voting in a primary if you don't intent to vote for the candidate you are casting the primary vote for!

To this end (it turns out, unless the person declares out loud their intent NOT to vote for the person in the primary, you can't disqualify them) Tea Party / McDaniel people mobilized vote-watchers to spy, with their little eyes, citizens whose race begins with 'b.' The NAACP announced it would deploy counter-poll-watcher-watchers (who watches the poll watchers?) and The Omnivore dearly hopes that someone activated counter-counter poll-watcher-watchers to complete the battle-space. Alas, no word on that.

A Few Key Points

Mississippi requires Voter ID. It did not prevent substantial (probably election-swinging) numbers of democrats (many allegedly black) from voting. 

No one watching the polling (or watching the watchers watching the polling ... or, hopefully, watching the watchers watching the watchers watching the polling) reported any illegal activity. Son, The Omnivore is disappoint.

While deploying black democratic voters to the Republican primary understandably riled up Tea Party conservatives, it appears that counter-deploying poll-watchers understandably riled up black voters! No word on whether NAACP poll-watcher-watchers made anything worse (and no word on whether hypothetical poll-watcher-watcher-watchers were identified by anyone at all--The Omnivore swears if he lived in Mississippi ... or anywhere close ... he'd have been out there with a pair of field glasses).

On The Other Hand

McDaniel did not concede--and why not? After all, most conservatives believe voter fraud is a very real thing and there are people looking into it right now. Liberals, they don't even acknowledge that voter fraud exists. Well, The Omnivore is here to tell them: it definitely does:

A Wisconsin insurance executive and Republican donor was charged with voting illegally more than a dozen times in four elections.

The Journal-Sentinel reported that 50-year-old Robert Monroe was caught as a result of an investigation into a possible illegal voting by his son in Waukesha County. But after his son denied requesting an absentee ballot from his father’s address in Shorewood, suspicion turned to Monroe.

Ooookay--that's a little off narrative. But still: this is proof we need Voter ID: without it, Robert Monroe would be uncatchable. No one could catch him. It's an unprovable crime. SEE WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU STRIKE DOWN VOTER ID LAWS!?

Whew.

IS IT REAL!? (Alleged Thad Cochran Flyer)

So What About Cross-Over Voting?

To be serious here, for a minute, The Omnivore will admit he doesn't understand the utility of allowing Team A to vote in Team B's primary at all. The whole point of registering for a specific party is so that you get a say in their leadership. Allowing other people to vote just seems like rewarding people for not making a choice. Sure, it can go both ways--and sure, if you voted in the Dem primary you don't get to vote in the Rep primary, but come on!?

On the other hand, the "intent" rule is weapons-grade bullshit: firstly, you certainly get to change your mind--that's what the whole actual election is about. Secondly, a law about 'what's in your heart' is thought crime. The Omnivore doesn't hold any torch for that nonsense either.

In the end, there probably needs to be a cleanup of voting and primary processes across the US. There are certainly best practices out there--and we ought to use them. The inked thumbs that prevent multiple voting might not fly in the US (who wants to go to the office with a purple thumb?) But if you don't have any Id, that might be a reasonable compromise?

Electronic voting machines can also produce a paper trail (like the IRS was supposed to). Does anyone object to that? We might even use trap-door cryptography to link voters to votes in a way that would be theoretically impossible (with current technology) to reverse engineer--if each voter has a public key associated with their vote record and each vote in the ballot box had a counter-key that did not list the vote itself, you could match each vote-record to a specific voter in a way that would be hard to fake.

In any event, we need to get out in front of this: poll-monitor busy-bodies are just making a mockery of America and so are people voting multiple times. Even if it doesn't happen very often. Even if they're Republican.