Top Republican official admits that they could not have won in Wisconsin without voter ID laws keeping thousands of eligible people from voting.

Courtesy of Mother Jones:

Election officials and Democrats in Wisconsin have repeatedly argued that the state’s strict voter ID law allowed Donald Trump to win the state in 2016 by keeping thousands of voters—predominantly in Democratic-leaning areas—from the polls. Now a top Republican official in the state is saying the same thing. 

“We battled to get voter ID on the ballot for the November ’16 election,” Wisconsin Attorney General Brad Schimel, who defended the law in court, told conservative radio host Vicki McKenna on April 12. “How many of your listeners really honestly are sure that Sen. [Ron] Johnson was going to win reelection or President Trump was going to win Wisconsin if we didn’t have voter ID to keep Wisconsin’s elections clean and honest and have integrity?” 

The law, which went into effect in 2016, required specific forms of government-issued photo identification to vote. In a cover story last year, Mother Jones reported that the law kept tens of thousands of eligible voters from the polls and likely tipped the state to Trump. A federal court found in 2014 that 9 percent of registered voters in Wisconsin did not possess the identification necessary to vote. In a University of Wisconsin study published in September 2017, 1 in 10 registered voters in Milwaukee County and Madison’s Dane County who did not cast a ballot in 2016 cited the voter ID law as a reason why. That meant that up to 23,000 voters in the two heavily Democratic counties—and as many as 45,000 voters statewide—didn’t vote because of the voter ID law. Trump won the state by 22,000 votes.

Just another reminder that without cheating, unnecessary voter ID laws, gerrymandering, Russian meddling, Republicans cannot actually win.

For me it is not so much the winning, but rather the good that you can do once you win.

I guess that is why I'm a Democrat.

Voter ID laws in Wisconsin suppressed as many as 200,000 votes. Trump won by a mere 22,748.

Courtesy of The Nation:

According to federal court records, 300,000 registered voters, 9 percent of the electorate, lacked strict forms of voter ID in Wisconsin. A new study by Priorities USA, shared exclusively with The Nation, shows that strict voter-ID laws, in Wisconsin and other states, led to a significant reduction in voter turnout in 2016, with a disproportionate impact on African-American and Democratic-leaning voters. Wisconsin’s voter-ID law reduced turnout by 200,000 votes, according to the new analysis. Donald Trump won the state by only 22,748 votes. 

The study compared turnout in states that adopted strict voter-ID laws between 2012 and 2016, like Wisconsin, to states that did not. 

While states with no change to voter identification laws witnessed an average increased turnout of +1.3% from 2012 to 2016, Wisconsin’s turnout (where voter ID laws changed to strict) dropped by -3.3%. If turnout had instead increased by the national no-change average, we estimate that over 200,000 more voters would have voted in Wisconsin in 2016. 

This reduction in turnout particularly hurt Hillary Clinton’s campaign. 

The lost voters skewed more African-American and more Democrat. For example, Wisconsin’s 2016 electorate was 6.1% more Republican, and 5.7% less Democrat, than the group of ‘lost voters’. Furthermore, the WI electorate was 3.7% more White and 3.8% less African American than the group of ‘lost voters.’ This analysis suggests that the 200,000 lost voters would have both been more racially diverse and have voted more Democratic. 

Just another reminder that Trump could not have won the 2016 election without significant cheating.

He not only had the help of the Russians and the Comey letter, but he also had voter ID laws suppressing turnout all throughout the country. 

Let's face it the man stole this election, and the sooner we get his orange tinted corpulent ass out of the People's House the better it will be for the country.

Alabama passes law requiring photo ID's for voters, then stops issuing drivers licenses in mostly black counties. Gee, what a coincidence.

Courtesy of Raw Story: 

The state of Alabama, which requires a photo ID to vote, announced this week that it would stop issuing driver’s licenses in counties where 75 percent of registered voters are black. 

Due to budget cuts, Alabama Law Enforcement Agency said that 31 satellite DMV offices would no longer have access to driver’s licenses examiners, meaning that residents will need to travel to other counties to apply for licenses. The move comes just one year after the state’s voter photo ID law went into effect. 

AL.com’s John Archibald asserted in a column on Wednesday that the U.S. Department of Justice should open an investigation into the closings. 

“Because Alabama just took a giant step backward,” he wrote. “Take a look at the 10 Alabama counties with the highest percentage of non-white registered voters. That’s Macon, Greene, Sumter, Lowndes, Bullock, Perry, Wilcox, Dallas, Hale, and Montgomery, according to the Alabama Secretary of State’s office. Alabama, thanks to its budgetary insanity and inanity, just opted to close driver license bureaus in eight of them.” 

“Every single county in which blacks make up more than 75 percent of registered voters will see their driver license office closed. Every one,” Archibald explained. “But maybe it’s not racial at all, right? Maybe it’s just political. And let’s face it, it may not be either… But no matter the intent, the consequence is the same.”

Okay seriously does anybody NOT think this is racially and politically motivated?

Mass voter purges, not good candidates, may help to explain how the Republicans did so well in this midterm election.

Courtesy of Aljazeera:  

Interstate Crosscheck is a computerized system meant to identify fraudulent voters. While Crosscheck’s list of nearly 7 million names of “potential” double voters has yet to unearth, as of this writing, a single illegal vote this year, it did help Republican elections officials scrub voters from registries, enough, it appears, to have swung several important Senate and governor’s races in favor of the GOP. 

There is good reason to believe that Crosscheck-related voter purges helped propel Republican candidates to slim victories in Senate races in Colorado and North Carolina, as well a tight gubernatorial race in Kansas.

Crosscheck compares the lists of voters from states that participate in their program. If it finds two similar names it red flags them and they can then be prevented from voting.

Guess which groups of Americans are more likely to share similar, or even the same, name.

It is no surprise that Republicans control most of the top election positions in Crosscheck’s 27 participating states. In all, Crosscheck tagged a breathtaking 6,951,484 voters for the possible removal from the voter rolls as “potential” duplicate voters. 

Duplicate or double voting is a crime punishable by 2 to 10 years in prison. Yet, despite this supposed vote-fraud crime wave, not one suspect on Crosscheck lists was charged, although prosecutors would have access to any alleged fraudsters’ names and addresses. 

The Crosscheck list purges could easily account for Republican victories in at least two Senate races. In North Carolina, the GOP’s Thom Tillis won over incumbent Sen. Kay Hagan by just 48,511 votes. Crosscheck tagged a breathtaking 589,393 North Carolinians as possible illegal double voters (though state elections officials cut that down to roughly 190,000). 

In Colorado, Republican Cory Gardner was able to force out incumbent Senator Mark Udall in a race that had poll-watchers guessing all summer. The outcome might have been more predictable if Colorado had made public that 300,842 of the state’s voters were now subject to being purged from the voter rolls. 

Other states’ voting officials are less forthcoming about their purges. For example, North Carolina and Ohio refused to release their Crosscheck lists on the grounds that all these voters, more than a million in those two states, are subjects of criminal investigation, which allows them to keep the information confidential. 

If other states followed Virginia and scrubbed just 13.5 percent of their Crosscheck lists, that would more than cover the spread in the North Carolina Senate race and significantly contributed to the margins of victory in several other states. Moreover, this could account for the comeback victory of incumbent governor Sam Brownback in Kansas. Kansas originated Crosscheck and its Secretaries of State have been using it to promote the cleansing of voter rolls since 2005.

And that my friends is how you steal elections, and subjugate the will of the people.

This is why the conservatives are always demanding increased voter ID laws, it is not to keep voters from voting more than once, it is so that they can more easily disenfranchise hundreds of thousands of voters who might dare vote in way not to their liking.

New study confirms that stricter ID laws are nothing more than a Republican attempt keep Democrats from voting. Tell me something I DIDN'T know.

Rick Perry, Governor of the state with many of the most egregious voter ID laws.

Courtesy of Salon:  

According to new research by University of Massachusetts Boston sociologist Keith Bentele and political scientist Erin O’Brien, the states that have enacted tougher voter ID laws in the past few years are also the same states where both minority and lower-income voter turnout had increased in recent years. 

Focusing further analysis on just 2011, when the vast majority of voter ID regulations were passed, the researchers found that states which passed the legislation were highly likely to have:

 - Republicans in control of both houses of the state legislature and the governorship 

- Strong probabilities of being swing states in the 2012 elections 

- Minority turnout which was higher in the 2008 election and with high proportions of African-American voters 

- Larger numbers of allegations of fraud in 2004, though these had a “much smaller substantive impact relative to partisan and racial factors” 

The authors note that the study’s results carry ominous implications and demonstrate voter ID laws have “an uncomfortable relationship to the political activism of blacks and the poor.” Their paper further situates voter ID within a realm of policies that “collectively reduce electoral access among the socially marginalized.”

That's the Republican mindset for you, pretend to protect the citizens from voter fraud, while all along working to take away the right to vote from anybody who might not vote the way you want them to.

Assholes!

New Republican voter ID requirements revealed.

Oh laugh now, but you KNOW it's coming. Especially in the South.

Sarah Silverman on protecting our vote.

Video is somewhat NSFW, so make sure no impressionable children, conservative assholes, or humorless supervisors are anywhere in the vicinity when you start it.

Personally I found it pretty funny, and quite informative, even though I am not always Silverman's biggest fan.

I love MSNBC, but I REALLY can't stand S.E. Cupp!

Okay you know I do try to find something to like about just about everybody. Admittedly I don't always find it, but I do try.

So I have watched a few episodes of the new MSNBC show The Cycle, and really thought that this fairly young group had some good energy and have really enjoyed a few of their segments.

However there is one member of the panel that I simply cannot find anything positive to say about, And that is their token conservative, S.E. Cupp.

Before this gig I had seen her several times on other MSNBC shows (Most notably "Now with Alex.") and was able to take her in small portions without wanting to bang my head against the desk.

But now that she is a permanent part of the panel on "The Cycle," and they are letting her speak longer without reaching over and slapping her for interrupting the grownups, I am simply going to have to start skipping this show altogether so that I don't go to a local mall with a high powered rifle and open fire on innocent shoppers.

I know you think I am overreacting, but you are wrong. My first episode of "Cycle rage" was when S.E., while claiming to actually BE an Atheist, said just about the dumbest thing about atheists that I have heard in my entire life.

But I thought, "Hey Gryphen perhaps you are just a little overly sensitive about how Atheists are perceived and are letting this get to you more than it should." So I thought, "Good point, voice inside my head." and moved on.

But then in yesterday's episode S.E. introduced a discussion of those bullshit Voter ID laws and I..I just about...well take a look and you tell me if I am overreacting.

Okay did you see it?  Was I wrong?

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She literally pretended to be so hung up on the idea that 86 people might have voted illegally that she used THAT as a talking point for excusing the possible disenfranchisement of MILLIONS of patriotic Americans who might not be able to get the needed ID in order to vote. And she KNOWS she is making a ridiculous point, and simply does NOT CARE, just so long as she can drive home the GOP talking point.

Fuck, fuck, fuck, you lady!

God that pisses me off! You know this is exactly what the point of Aaron Sorkin's HBO series ("The Newsroom") is all about. Sometimes there is NO alternate point of view, because only ONE SIDE is right!  And clearly in this case anybody with a handful of working braincells should know which side that is.

My advice to MSNBC is to get S.E. Cupp the hell off that program so that it can finally be the show that it seems to want to be, one which actually discusses important topics in an intelligent and energetic manner, WITHOUT feeling the need to invite the booger eating retard across the room to chime in with their opinion.

And by the way if that fucking idiot really is an atheist, then that must mean the mildew stain on my shower curtain truly IS the miraculous depiction of the little baby Jesus. But it ain't and neither is she.

Republican Congressman in Pennsylvania admits that the voter ID law has nothing to do with stopping voter fraud, and everything to do with stopping President Obama.

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You know I had earlier decided to avoid Hardball after I became irritated with Tweety's habit of talking over his guests, and his trumpeting of certain GOP presidential hopefuls, but lately he has been doing some very impressive pieces on the Republicans and I now find myself looking forward to what he comes up with next.