"We're gonna launch an investigation to find out. And then the next time, and I will say this: Of those votes cast, none of 'em come to me, none of 'em come to me. They would all be for the other side. None of 'em come to me. But when you look at the people that are registered: dead, illegal and in two states, and in some cases maybe three states. We have a lot to look into." -- Donald J. TrumpI regret to inform you that the nincompoop quoted above is President of the United States. When told that his claim of voter fraud had been debunked, the congenital fantasist-in-chief cited a 2012 Pew study. When the interview pointed out that the author of that study, David Becker, said they had found no evidence of fraud, the wack-doodle accused Becker of "groveling." Say what? Here is the transcript:
Muir: You say you’re going to launch an investigation into (voter fraud).
Trump: Sure. Done.
Muir: What you have presented so far has been debunked. It’s been called false —
Trump: No it hasn’t. Take a look at the Pew report.
Muir: I called the author of the Pew report last night. He told me they found no evidence of voter fraud.
Trump: Really? Then why did he write the report?
Muir: He said no evidence of voter fraud.
Trump: Excuse me. Then why did he write the report? Look at the Pew Report. Then he’s groveling again. You know, I always talk about the reporters that grovel when they wanna write something you wanna hear. But not necessarily millions of people want to hear, or have to hear
Muir: So you've launched an investigation.
Trump: We're gonna launch an investigation to find out. And then the next time, and I will say this: Of those votes cast, none of 'em come to me, none of 'em come to me. They would all be for the other side. None of 'em come to me. But when you look at the people that are registered: dead, illegal and in two states, and in some cases maybe three states. We have a lot to look into.This is not even about lying. It is about mental incompetence at lying. The jackass refutes his own alibi two sentences after presenting it.
The Pew report is not the only research paper on voter fraud out there. There are two others. It only gets worse.
One paper by Richman and Earnest was based on an online survey of citizens. It included a question about citizenship. Nearly 19.000 people completed the survey. A relative handful -- probably fewer than 100 -- non-citizens took the survey. The minuscule number of people who reported both voting and being non-citizens 4 (four!) is extremely likely to be entirely a classification error resulting from less than .1% of the 18,878 citizens checking the wrong box for citizenship status. In short, Richman and Earnest's estimate was based on a very small sample of non-citizens and was probably entirely an error artifact. The methodological flaw was described in detail in two-page 2015 article titled, "The perils of cherry picking low frequency events in large sample surveys."
Let me repeat the substance of the Richman and Earnest finding: 4 people among nearly 20,000 who completed an online survey identified themselves as non-citizens who voted in either 2010 or 2012. The statistical likelihood of that having resulted from a citizenship classification error is virtually 1 out of 1.
There is a third study of voter fraud that is worth mentioning, "Alien abduction and voter impersonation in the 2012 US general election," It employed a technique called "survey list experiment" to try to elicit survey responses regarding sensitive or illegal behaviors that people may ordinarily be reluctant to report on a survey. Instead of admitting specific actions, respondents are only asked to report a number of items from a list. Sensitive items are tested for by having a control group that is given only innocuous items while the experimental group is given the innocuous items plus a sensitive one.
The list experiment found that about 2.5% of their sample reported have voted under a name that wasn't their own. Although a relatively small number, this might seem to be a significant factor in a close election, especially if the impersonations were predominantly on behalf of one party. However, the researchers argued that the result is most likely to be explained by respondent error. Most of the respondents reporting impersonation is accounted for by respondents choosing the maximum number, possibly to complete the survey more quickly. To test whether choosing the maximum number explained their voter impersonation results, the researchers conducted a second experiment, this time including an "impossible event," namely being abducted by an alien.
The second experiment found that more people reported having been abducted by aliens than having voted using a name that wasn't theirs. In fact, nearly the same percentage of respondents (2.4%) reported having been abducted by aliens and being audited by the IRS during the past twelve months as had reported having voted under a false name (2.5%). This was despite the fact that the IRS audit rate for 2013 was a little less than 1%! In short, survey respondent were two and half times as likely to be both abducted by aliens and audited by the IRS in the same year as the general public was to be audited by the IRS. Period.
Donald Trump claims that he is under audit by the IRS. Donald Trump claims that there was massive voter fraud in the 2016 which denied him the popular vote victory. Donald Trump claims that the Pew report is evidence for his accusation of voter fraud. But notably, Donald Trump is SILENT on the vital national security aspect of this whole episode: ALIEN ABDUCTION!
Why is Donald Trump covering up ALIEN ABDUCTIONS?
A full three quarters of the proven voter fraud in the 2016 election was committed by Trump supporters. Let's leave it to Trump's people to point out that was three people.
ReplyDeleteSee? They caught all the trump fraud attempts and let all but one the billions and billions of Hillary fraud get away with it. Unfair!
ReplyDelete#alternativefacts
Debunk this for us Sandwich.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.investors.com/politics/editorials/illegals-did-vote-in-november-and-trump-is-right-to-investigate/
Anonymous,
ReplyDeleteNothing new to debunk there. They cite the Pew study and the Richman/Earnest one. They misrepresent the critique of Richman/Earnest and they cite some anecdotal evidence that there have been some cases of improper voting.
That anecdotal evidence is not very impressive. For example, they report that a "district court administrator" in an unidentified district court "estimated" that "up to" 3% of the 30,000 people called for jury were not U.S. citizens. What was the basis of this unidentified administrator's estimate? Did these 90 or so people not speak English very well or did they look different? They give no date for that evidence. They cite an incident from 1996 -- 20 years ago. A more recent incident involved "about a dozen" non-citizens in Kansas.
When they admit that their evidence "may seem like small potatoes" they are exaggerating. Their evidence seems more like a few potato peel scraps. But the clincher for their argument is "we don't know how big of a problem voter fraud really is..." That is true. We also don't know how big of a problem ALIEN ABDUCTION in the same year as being audited by the IRS is BECAUSE THERE HAS BEEN NO SYSTEMATIC STUDY. There are literally an infinite number of things we don't know because there has been no systematic study.
But there IS one thing that has been systematically studied: the Richman Earnest study. I read that study. The report you linked to MISREPRESENTED the conclusions of that study. When people stoop to bringing up evidence that has already been debunked, there no point to debunking it again because the purveyors WANT to believe and WILL believe no matter what.
so you afraid of a study?
ReplyDeleteNo, not at all. In fact, I wrote this post specifically to urge BROADENING the investigation to consider ALL the evidence, not just the cherry-picked anecdotes that the GOP trumpets.
ReplyDeleteWhat I suspect will happen, though, is that this will be a bait and switch operation to bolster GOP voter suppression efforts.
See Greg Palast's report from last August"The GOP's Stealth War Against Voters: in Rolling Stone:
"Election officials in more than two dozen states have compiled lists of citizens whom they allege could be registered in more than one state – thus potentially able to cast multiple ballots – and eligible to be purged from the voter rolls.
"The data is processed through a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which is being promoted by a powerful Republican operative, and its lists of potential duplicate voters are kept confidential. But Rolling Stone obtained a portion of the list and the names of 1 million targeted voters. According to our analysis, the Crosscheck list disproportionately threatens solid Democratic constituencies: young, black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters – with some of the biggest possible purges underway in Ohio and North Carolina, two crucial swing states with tight Senate races.
"Like all weapons of vote suppression, Crosscheck is a response to the imaginary menace of mass voter fraud. In the mid-2000s, after the Florida-recount debacle, the Bush administration launched a five-year investigation into the allegedly rampant crime but found scant evidence of wrongdoing. Still, the GOP has perpetuated the myth in every national election since."
Read the Whole thing.
See also, Politico "Trump's call for election-fraud probe fraught with peril" and Kansas City Star editorial, "Trump should drop bogus fraud claim, focus on real voting reform."
ReplyDeleteFrom the Politico story:
"In 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft set up a Voting Access and Integrity Initiative that coordinated election-fraud investigations. In 2005, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales declared such cases a “high priority” and authorized prosecutions of individuals not known to be part of any broader conspiracy.
"About 120 people were prosecuted and 86 convicted in federal court of election fraud between 2002 and 2007, according to a tally compiled by The New York Times.
"The issue became a political hot potato after the firing of nine U.S. attorneys in 2006. The administration asserted the prosecutors were let go for performance reasons, but a Justice Department inspector general review found that explanation to be inaccurate and at least three were terminated in part because they refused to pursue election-fraud related cases being pushed from Justice Department headquarters in Washington.
"It also emerged during the controversy that Bush relayed concerns to Gonzales about voter fraud in Albuquerque, Philadelphia and Milwaukee, and that Bush political adviser Karl Rove emphasized those concerns to Gonzales shortly before the main wave of U.S. attorney firings. The IG report concluded that the firings and misleading public explanations of them “severely damaged the credibility of the Department and raise doubts about the integrity of Department prosecutive decisions.”
The Kansas City Star editorial concludes:
"Lawmakers of good will should discuss a range of nonpartisan reforms to make voting simpler, more accurate and accessible. They should identify sources of funds for upgraded equipment, provide states with enforceable guidance to standardize the voting process and help guarantee voter rolls are complete (something even Trump says he wants to see).
"Americans must be allowed to vote, and they must trust the outcome. The president’s call for an unnecessary, ego-driven voter fraud investigation does nothing to advance either goal. A vigorous update of American voting systems would."
Eighty-six is the number of federal convictions for election fraud between 2002 and 2007. Trump claims, with ZERO evidence that 3 to 5 MILLION people voted illegally in 2016 AND "none of 'em come to me, none of 'em come to me."
Ignore for a moment the fact that 3,000,000 to 5,000,000 is several orders of magnitude removed from 86, "none of 'em come to me, none of 'em come to me" is the raving of a deranged person. Word salad. That is not a three-year old child speaking but someone who has the emotional maturity of a three-year old child. Be afraid.
Its simple. The Reptilian aliens that control our government through the Illuminati and various other secret and select societies have commanded Trump to do so through their brain wave mind meld.
ReplyDeleteYou may have a point there, Free Trader. REPublican... REPtilian... REXtillerson... Coincidence? I don't think so.
ReplyDeleteIt is why the Queen of England, another Reptilian, invited Donald to a state visit.
ReplyDeleteAs an aside, if the way we can prove we are not robots is by clicking a box on a screen, I think the robot rebellion will be quashed in short order.
The louder you squeal the more Trump is certain there's fire where the smoke is. If voter registration fraud were truly not happening, you all would gladly be silent and let him be hoist on his own petard. We all know it's real. It's been that way for decades. We're about the find out the extent and who benefits most. More popcorn, please.
ReplyDeleteYes, David, well documented Rovian tactic of accusing the opponent of what you're doing so they get diverted to defending themselves. I have no doubt there is SOME voter fraud. I have witnessed someone I knew to not be a citizen voting in a civic election.
ReplyDeleteBut this isn't about anecdotal incidents. This is a claim about systematic, large-scale activity that is 1. very well concealed and 2. utterly incapable of delivering the goods. The coexistence of the latter two characteristics is what doesn't survive the laugh test. Why would the diabolical Democrats even bother to pull off such an elaborate crime with no payoff? How could they be both so diabolically clever and so utterly clueless?
And what FUCKING "smoke" are you talking about, anyway? People objecting to Resident T. Rump's deranged ravings? The smoke that a pussy-grabbing con man got three million fewer votes than an establishment political figure? Or are you referring to the smoke that accompanies the myriad mirrors where Resident T. Rump gazes fondly at his reflection.
Hi The CIA asked me to sign a secrecy agreement with a writ of order attached for my immediate execution if I violated the terms of the agreement... one condition was I never participate in an uprising against aliens or give information to those who do. I am at a loss many days considering the cowardice of USA Armed Forced Generals and the media blackout of alien infiltration and ind control. Satanic alien worship includes a secrecy pact and swearing of allegiance ....body and soul to Satan in a religious sex ceremony. I guess this act and pledge of allegiance is such a embarrassment to those who worship Satan that they actually do keep their secrets. Unfortunately war is coming to America and it may be to late for our atmosphere to recover. The catastrophic failure of our Atmosphere is foreseen in both the Koran and Bible. I wrote a letter at warningfromgod dot com for all the good it does. Not much. God the Almighty spoke to me when I was a child and told me he deeply regrets there is so much evil here on Earth. God said he introduced evil into His Universe from a Sister Universe and the evil spread like cancer or a virus. In order to survive He created Heaven and Holiness and separated Himself from His own creation. Donold Trump can disclose alien control of our military and Intelligence Agencies but He would most likely pay with His life. I believe that it worth risking death to fight Satanic aliens for God and Jesus. God bless you Sincerely Shawn Riddick
ReplyDelete