A National Movement is Sorely Needed for 2016 and Beyond
How to Stop the Wild Elephants
This topic needs a refocus to wake up the voting community before we have a repeat of either 2010 or 2014... now is the time to act. Therefore, I offer this review and two excellent sources.
A couple of highlights vis-รก-vis the concept of voter fraud and
more strict rules are needed:
- Fraud by individual voters is both irrational and extremely rare.
- Many vivid anecdotes of purported voter fraud have been proven false or do not demonstrate fraud.
- Voter fraud is often conflated with other forms of election misconduct.
- Raising the unsubstantiated specter of mass voter fraud suits a particular policy agenda.
When there has been election fraud
in American elections, it has usually been committed by politicians, party
operatives and election officials who have something at stake in electoral outcome.
Voters rarely commit fraud because for them, it is a motiveless
crime, the individual benefits to the fraudulent voter are immaterial, while
the costs are prohibitive.
The most important
illustration of outright corruption of elections is the century-long success of
white supremacists in the American South stripping African-Americans of their
right to vote. Elites and party bosses in the urban North followed the Southern
example, using some of the same tricks to manipulate electoral outcomes and to
disfranchise immigrants and the poor.
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