Chicago Tribune: Voter fraud is fake. Voter suppression is real.

[pat_k]

DT Tweeted Friday that Democrats have complained for years about unsafe elections but “Now they are saying what a wonderful job the Trump Administration did in making 2020 the most secure election ever.”

We MUST be clear. We are fighting voter suppression. And many suppression tactics were in full swing this election. We cannot allow denunciation of false claims of fraud to be twisted in proclamations of 0 voter suppression. We have a LOT more work to do to combat voter suppression.

Chicago Tribune
Column: Voter fraud is fake. Voter suppression is real.
By DAHLEEN GLANTON
NOV 16, 2020 AT 5:00 AM

America is long overdue for a serious conversation about disenfranchised voters.

But let’s be clear. There is a big difference between voter fraud and voter suppression. Voter fraud is fake. Voter suppression is real.

The people who poured into the streets of Washington, D.C., Saturday to protest the election they say was stolen from Donald Trump are reacting to a fantasy based on lies. Voter fraud is a myth created by Republicans who refuse to accept defeat.

The reason no one can come up with legitimate cases of widespread voter fraud is because they do not exist. Such theories have been debunked in studies by several academic institutions, including the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University and Arizona State University.

Purging names from the rolls, denying people access to ballots and forcing voters to wait in line for hours, however — that’s real. It is designed to dilute the vote of Black and brown people. It is deliberate and systemic.. . .

It’s laughable to hear Republicans complain about being disenfranchised. They’ve been disenfranchising Black voters for decades, either by directly setting up barriers or refusing to address voting issues that have long been known.

The push to throw out mail-in ballots they deem as “illegal” is the GOP’s latest attempt at voter suppression. If Trump were to prevail, millions of Black voters in Philadelphia, Atlanta, Milwaukee and Detroit would be disenfranchised.

Let’s talk about what real disenfranchisement looks like.

In the aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, the U. S. Commission on Civil Rights set out to bring the long-standing disenfranchisement issue to light and address it on a national scale.

During three days of hearings across Florida, the commission collected more than 30 hours of testimony from more than 100 witnesses under oath and reviewed more than 118,000 pages of documents. These accounts are from those documents.

More

[Blue Owl]

1. K&R

[MustLoveBeagles]

2. K&R

[SMC22307]

3. Two cases of Republicans committing voter fraud in Pennsylvania...

a son voting for his deceased mother and a father trying to vote for his very-much-alive son. Voter fraud doesn't happen very often, but it is a thing. Voter suppression is very much a thing and I hope like hell Biden/Harris do something about it.

[pat_k]

4. Yes. The number is infinitesimal.

A study of 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases in 50 states between 2000 and 2012 found the level of fraud was infinitesimal compared with the 146 million voters registered over the 12-year period. link

Only 10 of those cases were voter impersonation.

That's 2,068 cases of alleged fraud across fifty states across ten years. So the "universe" of votes cast to compare that number to is larger than the number of registered voters cited. Not sure how many of the alleged cases were confirmed or how many were just "attempts" that were prevented, but another study found the number of prosecutions to be 38.

[SMC22307]

5. Yep. And rightwing politicians, media blowhards, scamvangelicals, etc...

have convinced a terrifying number of Americans that it's actually a thing. How do we combat that?

[pat_k]

6. I wish I knew.

When the propaganda is something the target is highly motivated to believe, I just don't know how to combat it.

Perhaps we need to figure out what makes them so highly motived to believe (and to discount all evidence to the contrary). If we understood the motivations, perhaps we could attack those motivations-- rather then just throwing evidence at them (evidence that slides off like water off a ducks back).

It seems to me they constantly prove the insignificance themselves. In all their searches for fraud, they only ever come up with a tiny number of cases.

Coates, who now works as the general counsel for the American Civil Rights Union, pointed to a list of voter fraud allegations kept by the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank in Washington. The list, based largely on news clippings and news releases, counted more than 100 allegations of voter fraud in the U.S. since 2012, only a handful of which were allegations of voter impersonation that could have been prevented by voter ID. The Republican National Lawyers Association also has a list of more than 200 allegations of election fraud of all kinds reported by news outlets since 2012. link

[2naSalit]

7. K&R

[LAS14]

8. Wo! Is the Chicago Tribune no longer a Republican paper???? nt

[pat_k]

10. Media bias fact check puts them center-right

So yes, they remain biased. Nice to see they have Dahleen Glanton as one of the "Tribune Voices."

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/chicago-tribune/

Overall, we rate the Chicago Tribune Right-Center biased based on moderately right-leaning editorial positions and High for factual reporting due to a clean fact check record.

These media sources are slightly to moderately conservative in bias. They often publish factual information that utilizes loaded words (wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes) to favor conservative causes. These sources are generally trustworthy for information, but may require further investigation. See all Right-Center sources.

[LAS14]

11. Thanks for that link!! nt

[Hermit-The-Prog]

9. Republicans screech about voter fraud in order to cover up their election fraud.