{"id":31928,"date":"2012-11-20T12:15:46","date_gmt":"2012-11-20T18:15:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=31928"},"modified":"2012-11-20T13:18:50","modified_gmt":"2012-11-20T19:18:50","slug":"know-when-to-hold-em","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=31928","title":{"rendered":"Know When To Hold &#8216;Em"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Minnesota is plagued with voter fraud. \u00a0The evidence &#8211; both empirical (200 convictions in Ramsey County &#8211; the only county that the Minnesota Majority was able to browbeat into taking actual evidence seriously) and anecdotal (yet again, the stories from the U of M and many precincts in the Fourth and Fifth CDs demand an investigation that will never come) is everywhere.<\/p>\n<p>Most Minnesotans that pay attention and aren&#8217;t bobbleheaded Fraud Denialists &#8211; the people who&#8217;ve grown adept at plugging their ears and chanting &#8220;nya nya nya best system in the country la la la&#8221; &#8211; know this.<\/p>\n<p>So why did the Voter ID Amendment fail?<\/p>\n<p>Not because it wasn&#8217;t needed, or because a majority of Minnesotans who actually pay attention voted &#8220;no&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p>Dan McGrath &#8211; who led the effort from the beginning &#8211; <a href=\"http:\/\/looktruenorth.com\/elections\/voter-integrity\/20676-why-voter-id-failed.html\">has a long, detailed take that oozes the exhaustion and disappointment he no doubt feels<\/a>, over at True North. \u00a0 Go read the whole thing; it&#8217;ll be easier than copying and pasting the whole thing here.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/looktruenorth.com\/elections\/voter-integrity\/20676-why-voter-id-failed.html\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone\" src=\"http:\/\/www.looktruenorth.com\/images\/FreedomDogs\/looktruenorthsmall140.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"140\" height=\"185\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>A few takeaways, both McGrath&#8217;s and mine.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>The anti-Amendment crowd outspent the proponents by a daunting margin. \u00a0Which is odd, considering that in every poll up to the very end, the measure was passing by a bare minimum of 3:2. \u00a0Now, polls are obviously a mess, in this state more than most. \u00a0But what could\u00a0<em>possibly\u00a0<\/em>cause a movement to spend\u00a0<em>that\u00a0<\/em>much money to thwart a measure so overwhelmingly supported by so many people, even &#8211; initially &#8211; DFL-identified voters? \u00a0 Pure, simple love of the status quo?<\/li>\n<li>The pro-Amendment forces were not only too small and too underfunded &#8211; they were fatally fractured, to the point that some pro-Amendment groups actually fought each other. \u00a0Precious time and money was wasted. \u00a0There was too little of both under even the right circumstances.<\/li>\n<li>The movement started out with massive bipartisan support &#8211; and then turned the issue into a partisan one. \u00a0That might have worked in a year when the conservative\/GOP brand was a big winner. \u00a0It was clearly not, this year &#8211; but the lesson remains; it was a huge mistake to make it a GOP vs. DFL issue; that did the DFL&#8217;s framing for them. \u00a0This\u00a0<em>should\u00a0<\/em>have been a &#8220;Justice versus Fraud&#8221; issue, repeated relentlessly and at every opportunity.<\/li>\n<li>That failure made it\u00a0<em>easy<\/em> for the DFL to tie it to the Marriage Amendment, and kill them both with their &#8220;Vote No Twice&#8221; campaign; it was elegant, and simple enough to drive into the heads of all the low-information voters that dominated this past election.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>My prediction: \u00a0The DFL is going to build &#8220;safeguards&#8221; to fraud into the system in the next two years that it&#8217;d take a decade of conservative rule to untangle. \u00a0Look for voters to not be required to give names at the polls by 2014; by 2016, people will be picking up ballots at WalMart. \u00a0By 2018, they&#8217;ll come pre-filled from the DFL.<\/p>\n<p>Facetious? \u00a0We&#8217;ll see.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Minnesota is plagued with voter fraud. \u00a0The evidence &#8211; both empirical (200 convictions in Ramsey County &#8211; the only county that the Minnesota Majority was able to browbeat into taking actual evidence seriously) and anecdotal (yet again, the stories from the U of M and many precincts in the Fourth and Fifth CDs demand an [&hellip;]<\/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-31928","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\/31928","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=31928"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31936,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/31928\/revisions\/31936"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=31928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=31928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=31928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}