Friday, October 18, 2013

Terminology is important: Election Fraud v Voter Fraud


 


Terminology is important: Election Fraud v Voter Fraud

LaFeministaRSS
Daily Kos member


I'm not going to point fingers at anyone but just to try and clarify why this is important.
Election Fraud is the illegal interference with the process of an election.
Voter fraud is a popular, if vague phrase, which in general seems to mean that individual voters misrepresenting who they are. When organized, this becomes electoral fraud.
Voter fraud has been proved to be extremely rare in the US, no matter how much the right wing scream about it, but when they actually act upon this mistaken belief it can result in:
Moreover, these claims of voter fraud are frequently used to justify policies that do not solve the alleged wrongs, but that could well disenfranchise legitimate voters.
Which becomes Election fraud and a far more serious and real threat than individual voter fraud. It is less about what happens in the polling booth and more about removing the right to vote. The general methodologies used in election fraud
1] Disenfranchisement: Making it difficult or impossible for certain groups of people to vote when they have the right to vote.
2] Intimidate: To render full of fear.
3] Vote buying: Paying people to vote.
4] Misinformation: Lying to gain votes
5] Misleading or confusing ballot papers.
6] Destruction or loss of ballot papers.
It doesn't have to be all of the above, just one of the above is enough.
Rather than preaching to the choir I will just state
Which groups of people are trying to commit election fraud?
1] By trying to make your right to vote harder
2] By scaring people witless with lies.
3] By pumping unlimited money into the campaigns?
4] By repeating debunked lies as if they were facts.
5] By making ballot papers incomprehensible.
6] By historically losing cast ballots.
Once you have answered these question then you have a duty to vote for the other side no matter what your political views happen to be, it is after all a threat to our democratic process.
You could argue that lying in politics is all part of the process, myself, I regard it as election fraud.

Originally posted to LaFeminista on Fri Sep 28, 2012 at 01:06 AM PDT.

Also republished by Community Manifesto Initiative.

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