One Response to “People In The Street Carrying Signs, Mostly Saying Hooray For Our NARN”

1. Mammuthus Primigenius Says:
   August 19th, 2017 at 2:47 pm

   Hey Mitch-
   You had a guest today who mentioned a notorious Brennan Center study that showed no, or very little, voter fraud.
   The Brennan Center uses a definition of voter fraud designed by an academic (a poli-sci prof, not a lawyer) to track voter fraud as a consequence of public corruption. It was not designed to identify and detect voter fraud that results from non-conspiring voters knowingly or negligently casing votes in the wrong precinct or who vote despite not being legally allowed to vote, or who double vote.
   This is a profoundly cynical move on the part of the Brennan Center. It is lying. It knows its metric is bad, it knows that the broader public defines voter fraud differently than the poli-sci prof whose work is being abused by the Brennan Center. Since it serves the Brennan Center politically, this is the metric that they use.
   Here is the Brennan Center’s doc:
   https://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/legacy/The%20Truth%20About%20Voter%20Fraud.pdf

   Here is the Brennan Center’s definition of voter fraud from the doc:

   “Voter fraud” is fraud by voters.
   More precisely, “voter fraud” occurs when individuals cast ballots despite knowing that they are ineligible to
   vote, in an attempt to defraud the election system.1

   Every clause of that definition is critical, including the very last (“in an attempt to defraud the election system”).

   The footnote says:
   “1 See also Minnite, The Politics of Voter Fraud, supra note 12, at 6 (offering a similar definition).”

   Similar, but not identical, so the Brennan Center is simply making up their own definition.
   And what is the definition from Minnite in “The politics of Voter Fraud”.
   First note that the tract is not titled “The legality of voter fraud” or “The Effects of Voter Fraud.” It is a political definition, not a legal definition. Also note the Minnite def is not given by the Brennan Center. They don’t even tell what page of the document it is from.
   The Minnite doc is here: http://www.projectvote.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/03/Politics_of_Voter_Fraud_Final.pdf

   Defining voter fraud
   Conceptual clarity is important in evaluating evidence of fraud. We begin with a discussion of what voter fraud is and what it is not. The first problem in defining voter fraud is that as a crime, it defies precise legal meaning. In fact, there is no single accepted legal definition of voter fraud. We have fifty different state electoral systems and fifty state criminal codes governing the administration of elections, plus a federal code that applies in national elections, and no uniform standards. In fact, some states do not actually criminalize ‘voter fraud,’ although they all criminalize acts that are commonly lumped together under the term, such as illegal voting, providing false information to register to vote, and multiple voting.2
   The legal incoherence contributes to popular misunderstandings

   Minnite goes to describe that her definition is only a subset of what is popularly considered voter fraud, and that the reason she is using the subset is that she can get this data from the Justice Department. The JD investigates conspiracies to steal elections, not a voter validation that is poorly designed to catch individuals who knowingly or unknowingly vote illegally.

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