Instrumentation, Part II

There were 321 war crimes committed by the Nazis in World War 2.

“Nonsense”, you say.  “321 would have been a slow week at Dachau, or an off-day at Auschwitz.  That figure is absurd to the point of being a form of Holocaust denial!”

“Nonsense”, one might respond.  “There were a total of 321 convictions for war crimes at the end of the war.  Thus, there were 321 war crimes!”

Absurd, huh?

Counting convictions doesn’t measure the extent of a crime, or any other activity.  At most, a count of convictions measures the number of people suspected, investigated, arrested, indicted, tried and then convicted for one or more activities.

Joe Doakes of Como Park notes the similar absurdity of measuring election issues by counting convictions:

Dog Gone and I have been chatting at Penigma (yes, I know I said I would quit; it was a slip but really, I can quit any time I want).

Hi, Joe.

 She’s convinced voting irregularities are not widespread because convictions are not widespread. There were only 26 felony-level convictions as of 2010 and that’s insignificant in an election with 2.9 million votes cast.

By that standard, rape is rare because there are few convictions. DUI is a minor nuisance because everybody pleads to Reckless Driving so there are few convictions for DUI.

And as some lefties claimed a few years ago, North Dakota was the most corrupt state because it had the highest convictions-per-capita rate for corruption.

And nobody was killed in the Sikh temple in Milwaukee – because nobody has been convicted and with the shooter dead, nobody ever will be. No conviction, no murder. Those six bodies in the Coroner’s Office? They’re just resting (Sikh prefer kipping on their backs).

Except . . . there are six dead bodies lying on slabs. It really happened. Whether or not somebody gets convicted, those six people are still dead.

Counting murder convictions is not the best way to count murders victims. The best way to count murder victims is to count dead bodies left by murderers. Similarly, the best way to count illegal votes is to count votes cast by ineligible persons, not convictions for illegal voting.

The County Attorneys surveyed in 2010 confirmed they investigated 1,531 cases of illegal voting. They know the votes were cast. They suspect the people casting them shouldn’t have, which is why they were investigated. Some cases were false-positives so they aren’t a problem. The rest – whether or not the prosecutor chose to file charges – are votes that everyone agrees should never have been cast. But they were cast and counted into the 321 [!!! – Ed.] vote total that put Franken over the top. And Franken was the 60th vote in the Senate needed to make Obamacare filibuster-proof.

Illegal voting doesn’t have to be widespread to be a problem – a small number of targeted crimes can change a nation. That’s why it’s important.

Seriously, is that so hard to understand?

Joe Doakes

Como Park

Because understanding it would negate a narrative that I suspect the DFL has spent years and millions building.

And no, we don’t have a conviction to prove that.

Yet.

26 thoughts on “Instrumentation, Part II

  1. U.S. election fraud = THE HOLOCAUST.

    What are you, afraid Joe Biden’s hogging all the attention lately?

  2. If logic were a victim, you’d be John Wayne Gacy – the angriest clown of all!

  3. Anyone who is thinking of engaging the posse over at pen’s place

    I learned that lesson when I worked in bars; if the guy in the booth with the furniture-moving-company uniform and the beer gut wants to tell people he’s a SEAL or an undercover cop or home from his gig with the CIA in Nicaragua, let him. He’s probably doing less harm at the bar than somewhere else.

  4. Citing facts and figures, using logic and reasoning only work when the person you’re talking to has the capacity, ability and desire to receive the information. You may as well be preaching into a vacuum.

    They don’t GET it because they don’t want to GET it.

  5. You’ll take away Angryclown’s squirting flower when you pry it from his cold, dead hands.

  6. Anyone who is thinking of engaging the posse over at pen’s place

    Will need to wear neoprene hip waders to protect against all the bat guano strewn about.

  7. I read that piece of tripe at Pen’s Place. It was painful. The information doesn’t go into your eyes, it forces its way up your butt. You’ll need an analgesic suppository if you go more than a few paragraphs.

  8. TBS observed They don’t GET it because they don’t want to GET it.
    To which I might add, the get offended when you actually do get it. Hence the rational gymnastics trying to justify ignoring an obvious problem you should not have noticed.

  9. Whoa, gentlemen. (Hi, Angry Clown!)

    First of all, let’s go back to the post Terry directed you all to, about the Caucus last February.

    Let’s take a look at some of the craziness that is extreme and not moderate among Republicans.

    Let’s start with Kurt Bills, your primary winner to run against A-Klo in November, promoter of such incredibly stupid (and unConstitutional under Article 1 Section 10) ideas as Minnesota minting our own money with his HF 1664 legislation.

    Then we have one of your several batshit crazy Congressional candidates, Allen Quist, who believes that there were dinosaurs, specifically Stegosaurus, roamed around southeast asia in the 11th century because he saw a photo of a carving on a temple in Cambodia. The carving doesn’t look like a Stegosaurus, and the premise that it has dorsal plates like a Stegosaurus doesn’t hold water either – Stegosaurus fossils show two rows of very distinctive plates, not one. And the pattern of what is certainly foliage, if stylized foliage, is consistent with the ornamental filling of otherwise empty space around figures in other carving on the same temple. THAT is Quist’s justification for his claim about evolution being incorrect; the man is profoundly ignorant, and has been considered extreme within the GOP going back to his early bat-shit crazy days when Bachmann was praying over the empty desks of her fellow members of the legislature.

    I could go on at length, but any party that put Tony Sutton in charge of anything, ever, or gave Brodkorb any power, IS nuts.

    When you have a party that throws out former governors and other notable representatives of your own party — as happened with Qui, Carlson, and numerous others, for supporting a more moderate party –there is a fair claim that the party has become extreme. When you have a party where your own long serving members of Congress are quitting when they could win re-election relatively easily because they are fed up with the obstructionist agenda and the extremism — as has happened recently with several prominent and long serving members of both house and senate — then this is a problem for your side of the aisle. It is not ONLY my opinion or observation.

    Now on to the topic at hand – you Mitch, make a false argument, and Joe misrepresents facts. That’s not surprising; I’ve found Joe to make factual errors regularly.
    Let’s start with this:
    The County Attorneys surveyed in 2010 confirmed they investigated 1,531 cases of illegal voting. They know the votes were cast. They suspect the people casting them shouldn’t have, which is why they were investigated. Some cases were false-positives so they aren’t a problem. The rest – whether or not the prosecutor chose to file charges – are votes that everyone agrees should never have been cast.

    Investigating the 1,531 votes, it is NOT true that the people casting them should not have done so. NO ONE agrees “these are votes that should never have been cast.” Certainly this is not what is stated ANYWHERE in the study Joe quotes. What it does say, explicitly, is that investigating a vote does NOT mean it was improperly cast.

    Under our legal system, courts sentence felons, and the corrections departments administer those sentences. That means they determine when to let people out of jail early for good behavior, that means they handle the cases of people on probation or on parole. The corrections officers handling those cases determine when someone is considered to have completed the terms of their sentence. They have that authority, and the responsibility of informing felons when they have their voting right reinstated.

    The felons who voted in 2008 had in each case completed the requirements to have their voting rights restored; they triggered investigations because at that time – unlike NOW – the only data base that was not computerized was from the corrections departments, and their data supplied to the Sec. State was two months out of date. So the names of people who completed their sentences in that time triggered investigations. Those investigations found irregularities in some of the files, most of them in Ramsey County, where there were some errors made by corrections officers, like not having notice of the right to vote signed by the person they supervised inside the file. There were a few files where the scheduled date for the felon supervision to be concluded was contradictory, but none of those were significantly different from when the sentence was concluded — the dates at issue were a matter of days to a week.

    But those errors were on the part of the corrections officers, not the felon, which is why they were not prosecuted. It was not that they voted improperly – once they were given the go-ahead by corrections, who had the legal authority to do that, the former felon cast a legal vote, not an improper, illegal, or ‘shouldn’t have been cast’ vote. Those numbers represent some very minor clerical errors, in most cases incomplete file keeping; but they do not represent improper or illegal voting by the felons. What those investigations DID determine, where a felon was not charged, was that they had completed their requirements under their sentencing to qualify for reinstated voting rights, AND that they really had their right to vote reinstated by a corrections department.
    That takes them entirely outside the comparison with Nazi war crimes.
    Mitch wrote:”Counting convictions doesn’t measure the extent of a crime, or any other activity.”
    Counting convictions when evey ballot has been counted, recounted, and examined by multiple individuals, and where every possible irregularity has been investigated, and found NOT to be a cirme DOES measure criminal activity in the context of voter fraud claims.
    It is further supported that these are NOT wrongful votes when the two candidates for Senate, BOTH Coleman and Franken, and their respective attorneys, stated to the Court while making their respective cases, that they did not claim voter fraud or problems with felon votes. That was the case with the 2010 recount findings as well.

    Every single court case where voter ID has gone before a judge, at any and every level, the states have stipulated there is no voter fraud. In the case of Pennsylvania, most recently, they claimed zero voter fraud in the past, that they did not anticipated voter fraud in the future, and that the Voter ID law was NOT about voter fraud (which is consistent with prior court cases, all the way back to Indiana).
    Then we have every single study, research project, and official investigation, including the one by Ashcroft under Dubya, that has failed to find any evidence of voter fraud, including by felons. The rare instance has been consistently put at around 1 in 15 million.
    That is massively different from your example.
    What you have is the Minnesota Moron Majority, with sloppy and badly flawed methodology, making claims about illegal voting where it turns out, as exmples, that there were two SEPARATE people with the same name and birthdate voting, not voter fraud or duplicate voting. They are wrong. You are wrong.
    Further, neither YOU Mitch, nor Joe, has any substantive evidence that those votes which were investigated were cast for Franken/Obama.
    While the Chris Uggens studies do track the votes of FORMER LEGALLY VOTING Felons, they also stipulate that the voting by current and still illegal felons is in the 1 in 15 million range.
    These were not statistics; they were real flesh and blood voters; their voting could have been very different, from that pattern, which takes cases of former felon votes that vary greatly, from a lot of elections, and average them together. NO ONE has docuented that THESE investigated votes were votes for Democratic candidates, and it would be inaccurate to try to extrapolate who they voted for in that election.
    But lets look even closer at the felon voting problem to see who to blame.
    The legislature, in a bi-partisan effort to correct problems with changes to felons’ status to vote, passed legislation that was supported by Sec. State Mark Ritchie to correct that problem. BI-partisan – it had substantial Republican support.
    What happened to the legislation?
    Tim Pawlenty wouldn’t sign off on it. So it seems to me that the blame for the problem in 2008 should go back to T-Paw, not Ritchie, and not Democrats.
    And the problem is now fixed; the data base for corrections is online, and the voter roll books are current on possible felons.
    I had one notation to that effect in the voter roll books (I handled 2 different ones) in the primary voting earlier this week in my first stint as an election judge.
    That one person never showed up to vote while I was on duty, but if they had, they would have had to verify to our satisfaction that their felony status had changed and that they were in fact eligible to vote — so thank you Mark Ritchie for fixing THAT problem!

  10. What was the word count from Mitch and Joe?

    Of course, they don’t quote sources. Like page 6 of the Election Integrity Report that Joe neglected to include (or possibly read):
    11. Investigations by County Attorneys. Because it is a felony if someone intentionally votes or registers to vote when they are not qualified, County Attorneys are responsible for the investigation of possible ineligible voting. They are also responsible for the prosecution of voters who have committed voter fraud.
    Not kinda maybe sorta if. They ARE responsible for prosecuting voter fraud.

    Joe also neglected the recommendation, because of the number of people advised by corrections to vote, where there were errors or omissions in the former felons files, that improperly advisign someone that prevents them from voting when they legally could — which was also discovered to have occurred with felons in those poorly maintained files.:
    will consider revising Minnesota Statute §204C.035 Deceptive Practices in Elections from a gross misdemeanor to a felony with a requirement to serve time, thus disenfranchising those who intentionally deceive voters as that particular punishment applies to the crime. That’s at the bottom of page 3.

    Bottom of page8:Many of those who responded to our telephone calls stated that they had not responded to the paper questionnaire because there was no fraud or even investigations of fraud in their counties.

    pages 12–15 support my explanation, and debunk Joe’s interpretation (I doubt Joe read that far in the report).

    page 31
    c) Informing people who are convicted and sentenced that they cannot vote. As some county attorneys noted, educating people who are convicted of a felony that they cannot vote could both prevent them from either registering to vote or from voting. In fact, this requirement passed by an overwhelming majority in Minnesota‟s House (118 voted for while 9 voted opposed)70 and Minnesota‟s Senate (47 for while 18 opposed)71 in 2009. But, the Governor vetoed the bill saying that 1) Minnesota already has enough mandates 2) the Minnesota Department of Corrections already “has a process in place that informs offenders about their voting rights prior to being released from prison”; and 3) citizens should be responsible for “being informed about their own situations and rights.”72The responses to our survey indicate the current process the Department of Corrections has of informing felons does not work. The most common suggestion from County Attorneys was to better educate felons. Furthermore, many investigations of ineligible voting by felons did not result in a conviction of voter fraud. As noted earlier, in order to commit fraud, a person must intentionally break the law. As such, if felons are not aware that they cannot vote, they cannot be convicted of fraud.

    NONE of that supports Joe’s contention that these were ‘votes that should never have been cast’. None of my conversations with the attorneys cited in this report suggest those were illegal votes or ‘votes that should never have been cast’.

    big stink, you don’t have facts and figures, not reliable, verifiable accurate ones. Joe certainly doesn’t, and Mitch habitually doesn’t.
    I am invited to write for other sites by credentialed journalists, because of my depth of investigation, and analysis. This was excerpted from an email today:”

    “I believe your articles and analysis are great and should be shown to educate the public about the financial status. ”

    Everyone else on the site has impressive credentials working for major networks, or major print, not just in the U.S., but internationally.
    I’m a bit daunted.
    But it’s a great ego boost on top of the fun of debunking Mitch and Joe. Joe’s a sweetheart, like Mitch, but he can’t read for comprehension worth beans.

    I suppose come Monday, it would be a kick to contact the sources of the study Joe is misrepresenting, and see if I can score an interview to specifically address Joe’s errors in greater detail.

  11. I suppose come Monday, it would be a kick to contact the sources of the study Joe is misrepresenting, and see if I can score an interview to specifically address Joe’s errors in greater detail.

    No, DG. What WOULD be “nice” is if the sources of the study would do an interview with someone that would actually question their premises.

  12. OMG, is DG talking about this?
    http://www.ceimn.org/files/Facts%20about%20Ineligible%20Voting%20and%20Voter%20Fraud%20in%20Minnesota_with%20appendix.pdf
    It is a political document. Both of the authors are highly biased, and neither of them is qualified to do a rigorous analysis of the issues surrounding electoral fraud. It is not scholarly research and it is not a legal document. It is as much of an opinion piece as Bill O’Reilly’s weekly newspaper column.
    Joe Doakes is right. It is junk.
    Perhaps Mr. Doakes is learning the lesson I learned some time ago. You can not have a discussion with a person who does not understand how to effectively create and argue a thesis.
    At Pen’s place I wasted hundreds of keystrokes trying to explain to Dog Gone that it isn’t good practice to get your definition of “trickle down economics” from an ask.com article written by a motivational business speaker.
    It’s like unpeeling an onion over there. Beneath an obviously incorrect statement there are misunderstood readings, and beneath the misunderstood readings there are false assumptions, and beneath the false assumptions there is confusion about how syllogisms work, and beneath that a blind rage towards half of the American electorate.

  13. Jeebus H. Hanukkah!

    Dog Gone can pee dribble over 2,000 words of her nonsensical spamtacular ejaculations in about three hours, and I’ve been working on an 1,800 word technical article for the last three days.

    Then again, I care about accuracy. And I get paid $1 a word. And I’m not bat-shit insane.

  14. Terry, yes, that’s the one we’re debating.

    Page 10: There were 1,581 (or possible 1,531) investigations. 77% were investigated for being felons, 23% for other reasons.

    Page 11: 66% of completed investigations were “not chargeable” so the cases were dropped. Only two County Attorneys explained what “not chargeable” meant in terms of results: In Dakota County, 53% of the investigated cases were dropped, in Anoka County, 82% were dropped.

    Why were the cases dropped? Dog Gone thinks it’s because the felons who voted had their rights restored by Corrections but Elections didn’t know that so it was all a clerical error. Their votes were right and proper.

    That’s not what the County Attorneys said. Page 11: “As reported by Dakota and Anoka Counties, the primary reason ineligible voters were not charged was because they did not KNOWINGLY and INTENTIONALLY break the law.”

    Pages 13-14: County Attorneys reported felon voters claimed they didn’t know they couldn’t vote. We need to teach felons better about their lack of rights.

    What about the other 23% of investiaged cases? Page 11: The remaining 24% of the completed investigations‟ outcomes were nearly evenly distributed in the following categories: dismissed due to lack of evidence; heard in court; found guilty; and found to commit election fraud.” By my math, that makes 12% of 1,531 investigations for 183 convictions.

    more to follow . . .

  15. Here’s the interesting question:

    When Convicted Felon A slides his ballot into the ballot counting machine, the lights blink and the motor whirs and the ballot is whisked away inside the machine. The vote total is increased by his one ballot. Franken has 321.

    Later, the Convicted Felon is convicted (assume he’s one of the 26 convictions Dog Gone acknowledges), what happens to that vote? Does it get subtracted? Does Franken now have only 320?

    No. That illegal vote remains counted EVEN THOUGH we know for certain it was an illegal vote that never should have been cast.

    Okay, but it was only 26, what’s the problem? Well, no, 26 felons who admitted knowingly and intentionally voting. 183 convicted of double voting, illegally registering people, etc. And what about those dropped cases?

    Dog Gone argues that the County Attorney is responsible to prosecute crime. If they didn’t prosecute, there must not have been a crime. I think that argument is backwards, which is the point of my Sikh temple analogy. The morgue is full of dead bodies riddled with bullets. Somebody killed those people. The prosecutor will never prosecute anybody for it because the gunman is dead, too, but the victims remain just as dead. The wrongful act occured.

    Similarly, the votes cast by all 1,531 felons remain cast. Some had their rights restored (false positives), some were convicted (at least 26 but maybe 183), some . . . got away with it. They claimed “I didn’t know” just like every felon claims “those aren’t my drugs” and “that’s not my gun.” The fact that every felon told the same story is proof to Dog Gone that they were honest felons. To me, they look like liars who KNEW they couldn’t vote and lied when they got caught.

    If felons are disproportionately Black, and in 2008 Blacks voted overwhelmingly Democrat, then it’s reasonable to wonder if those 1,000 dropped-cases-but-counted-votes were Democrat votes that Franken over the top, got Obama a filibuster-proof majority, and imposed Obamacare on us all.

    Voter fraud doesn’t need to be massive to change the course of the nation. A few hundred Minnesota felons could do it. Might already have done it.

    I can’t prove it. But this study doesn’t Disprove it, either.

  16. Calling it a “study” is giving the thing a status it doesn’t deserve, Mr. Doakes. It is a non-peer reviewed summary of survey results prepared by a group with no demonstrated ability carry out such a survey or summarize its results.
    The standards for these things when they are produced by social scientists in academia or at think tanks is abysmally low, and this does not even approach those standards.

    Here is one of CEIMN’s bullet points:
    “Nearly 50% of survey respondents answered an opinion question regarding whether they
    believed fraud was a problem in their county. Of those, over 90% indicated that they did not
    believe fraud was a problem in their county.”

    This is crap. This tells you nothing. CEIMN doesn’t even bother to try and deal with selection bias, that is, it might well be that of the 50% who did not respond to the question, over 90% would have said that voter fraud WAS as a problem in their county. Real social scientists acknowledge the issues with surveys and have various ways of dealing with the problem of self-selection. These people don’t even try.
    The only statistical technique they seem to be comfortable using is percentages.
    The whole thing is junk.

  17. Seeuentee;DG

    Dog Gone, do you think the most prominent DFLer (Mark Dayton) should be treated like the DFL treated him at the 2010 convention?

    Now isn’t there some carpet to tend to.

    Dog Gone is a liar.

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