Joe Doakes from Como Park writes:<\/p>\n
Many hard words have been exchanged about the 2008 election. Conservatives worry that ineligible voters swayed the election. Liberals scoff because there\u2019s little voter fraud. What if they\u2019re not speaking the same language?<\/p>\n
Example: President Obama routinely talks about America\u2019s lack of proven oil reserves. He\u2019s a smart man and is careful with words. The phrase \u201cproven oil reserve\u201d doesn\u2019t mean the oil in the ground. It means the oil you can feasibly and legally pump.<\/p>\n
If you can\u2019t get a federal permit to pump the oil, you can\u2019t legally pump it, so that oil is not included in the proven reserve. And to save the planet from Global Warming, President Obama won\u2019t give you a permit.<\/p>\n
President Obama is technically correct. All that oil sitting under the ground, waiting for a permit to be pumped out, is NOT part of America\u2019s \u201cproven oil reserves.\u201d As a result, we lack \u201cproven oil reserves.\u201d<\/p>\n
What does this have to do with elections? I think there\u2019s a similar language problem. If a convicted felon whose civil rights have not been restored goes to the polling place, signs the register, receives a ballot, marks it properly and deposits the ballot in the voting machine, is that an ineligible ballot? Yes. Is casting that ballot a case of voter fraud? No; he is who he says he was. Was it an illegal ballot? Not necessarily.<\/p>\n
It was not illegal for that felon to cast that vote. It\u2019s only illegal if he knowingly did it. If he didn\u2019t know he couldn\u2019t vote, no crime was committed. But the ballot was ineligible and should not have been counted.<\/p>\n
When Liberals talk about fraud, convictions and illegal votes, they\u2019re talking about a small subset of all the ineligible ballots. I\u2019m worried about the larger pool of votes that were counted, but should not have been. Nobody seems to have hard numbers. It\u2019s nobody\u2019s job to police the system.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m concerned about votes cast by un-restored felons, yes, but also by minors, the mentally disabled who\u2019ve lost their civil rights, and by the dead. But even after extensive conversation with Liberals, I can\u2019t seem to achieve actual communication. We\u2019re talking, but not the same language.<\/p>\n
Joe Doakes<\/p>\n
Como Park<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
The Dems have been pretty determined about trying to steer the conversation away from the numbers that actually matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Joe Doakes from Como Park writes: Many hard words have been exchanged about the 2008 election. Conservatives worry that ineligible voters swayed the election. Liberals scoff because there\u2019s little voter fraud. What if they\u2019re not speaking the same language? Example: President Obama routinely talks about America\u2019s lack of proven oil reserves. He\u2019s a smart man […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-election-integrity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=29743"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29743\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29747,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29743\/revisions\/29747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=29743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=29743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=29743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}