Pages

Labels

Thursday, May 31, 2012

2 teachers and a busload of high school students vote — using early in-person absentee balloting — in the Walker recall election.

"A witness at the Milwaukee Municipal Building on Friday reported seeing about 30 students from Pulaski High School arrived at the polls around 10 am. About 10 or 11 of them used their class schedules to vote."
However, according to the Milwaukee Elections Commission and the Wisconsin Government Accountability Board, voters do not need to provide proof of age in order to register. All they have to do is check off a box on the registration form certifying that they are a qualified elector, a U.S. citizen and at least 18 years old by the time they vote.

"The whole system relies on the honestly and integrity of the individual," Sue Edmond, Milwaukee's Election Commission director, told the MacIver News Service. "If we find after the election that they lied, they could be charged with a felony."
The new voter ID law is not currently being enforced (because of the judgment of 2 Dane County judges). Interestingly, the new Marquette Law School poll, surveying likely voters in the recall election found that "61% percent favored requiring a government-issued photo id to vote, while 37 percent opposed that." People really do worry about voter fraud. Given the polls that show Walker leading — the Marquette poll has him 7 points ahead — if Barrett wins, people should be suspicious.

Here's Reince Priebus on the subject:
"I'm always concerned about voter fraud, you know, being from Kenosha, and quite frankly having lived through seeing some of it happen," Reince Priebus said. "Certainly in Milwaukee we have seen some of it, and I think it's been documented. Any notion that's not the case, it certainly is in Wisconsin. I'm always concerned about it, which is why I think we need to do a point or two better than where we think we need to be, to overcome it."...

Lester Pines, an attorney involved in a separate legal challenge to the voter ID law, also denounced Priebus' comments, saying they were baseless.

"His statement that Republicans need to outperform Democrats by one to two percent to account for vote fraud is an absolute, total, 100% lie," Pines said. "It is a fantasy. And Reince Priebus and his ilk are saying this and they're saying it over and over and over because they're using the well-known propaganda tool called 'the big lie.' If you say it enough times, people will believe it. There's no other way to characterize this except that Reince Priebus is a liar."
"The Big Lie" is indeed a well-known propaganda tool, but it is not simply something that's repeated a lot. "The Big Lie" refers to "colossal untruths" of the sort that ordinary people don't even think of telling, which they don't suspect because "they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." I'm quoting Mein Kampf there. It's Adolph Hitler's term. Know it. Use it, but know what you're saying when you use it and only use it when you mean it, Mr. Pines. Don't make casual, vague allusions to Hitler. It's not right.

0 comments:

Post a Comment