Saluting Nonprofits

Here. Hear. Here. Hear!

“forced voter speech”? Please. Nobody is being tortured into speaking about anything. And implying that ‘government run elections’ are bad? I think we’ve just seen in NC that our government is doing a pretty good job, with the help of some fiercely independent citizens and a free press, of policing and running elections. Fine if you disagree, but please don’t exaggerate. Voter-owned elections are about matching many small contributions with a modest fund so that hard-working candidates regardless of party can present themselves to the voters for their choice.

I’m not being paid to speak. I’m just a college student. I find it disgraceful and appalling that taxpayers have to fund candidates for office whether or not they support that candidates positions. It is unethical and shameful that we will be forced to pay for candidates and positions we oppose morally, ethically and/or philosophically.

Taxpayer funded elections undermine the rights of voters and they destroy the integrity of our elections.

Greg your argument is absurd. Education enables individuals to enter the marketplace on relatively equal footing, and this is the only type of equality that matters/is possible. But since you asked, “Does taxpayer funded education undermine the rights of voters and destroy the integrity of our education system?”; the answer is crystal clear. North Carolina’s public schools are failing. If the teacher’s unions supported the students as well as the teachers, then perhaps this wouldn’t be the case. If the state of North Carolina adopted relevant standards/course of studies for high school students to meet before they graduated, then perhaps they would be employable without having to sit through four years at a tier II/III institution of “higher learning” and receiving a certificate of attendance.

But no, we should allow bureaucrats to stuff their pockets with kickbacks from the college loan industry, all the while delivering a broken product to the taxpayer.

Politics is supposedly the way in which our society’s future is determined, and in a competitive system why should I be forced to support socialist politicians that can exploit this system through mining the membership list of SEANC? Incumbents already have vast advantages, why add publicly financed elections to the toolbox with which Democrats enable themselves to ruin our State?

Jerimee- From their web site: http://www.ombwatch.org/

OMB Watch is a nonprofit government watchdog organization located in Washington, DC.

Our mission is to promote open government, accountability and citizen participation.

Ironic that you would choose to talk on voter fraud on the very day that Patrick McHenry’s aide Aaron Lay took a plea deal for voting illegally.

Try this little experiment: find a single substantiated case of voter fraud occuring in any number. Sure, you’ll find a couple GOP activists voting in multiple states, but that’s just petty lawbreaking.

Gonzales is in a lot of hot water because he fired some of America’s top attorneys when they were unable to prosecute claims manufactured by the GOP. But no doubt Jim Stegall will find fact where others have only found misinformation. Let us know.

It is a shame that conservative activists still resort to voter suppression.

Jerimee, did you read the link? Never mind, here ya go:

“So, less than a week before the midterm elections, four workers from Acorn, the liberal activist group that has registered millions of voters, have been indicted by a federal grand jury for submitting false voter registration forms to the Kansas City, Missouri, election board.”

“Acorn workers have been convicted in Wisconsin and Colorado, and investigations are still under way in Ohio, Tennessee and Pennsylvania.”

ACORN has been in the news quite a bit over the last couple of years for this kind of shenanigans, as I suspect you know. The organization is indefensible, as is Congressman McHenry’s smarmy aide.

And citing the DNC’s website as a source to document alledged GOP efforts to suppress likely Dem voters is just silly.

And the convictions in Wisconsin and Colorado–how did “Republican operatives” manage to arrange those?

Face it, folks. Rabid activists such as those found in ACORN and similar groups (regardless of ideology) sometimes cheat, as do some in more main-stream groups. It’s a fact of life as old as human nature itself. Measures such as photo ID are nothing more than a prudent step to keep elections honest. I’m not interested in keeping ANY legally eligible voter from voting. But neither am I eager to see my vote, which I take very seriously, cancelled out by someone who has no right to cast one.

For the life of me, I don’t understand why leftists such as yourselves aren’t just as concerned about this as I am. If you really believed that “Republican operatives” were the main culprets behind voter fraud, it seems to me that you all would be anxious to see the rules rigorously enforced. Your objections to what most people consider a common sense measure to protect the integrity of the voting process looks suspicious.

I’m not the one one making the case–the case has already been made by the state, and the criminals found guilty and punished. I suspect that more are on the way.

If you wish to be taken seriously you would do well not to link to such a ridiculous screed as “Politics of Voter Fraud.” Your second link doesn’t work at all.

Finally, you might directly address the question of why many on the left fear elections in which only legally registered voters may cast a ballot. I’m fine with that standard–why aren’t you?

It didn’t work last night, fee or no fee.

And by the way, how exactly do you catch someone in the act of committing voter fraud? Isn’t it true that if it’s going on at all, it will be virtually invisible? It’s not like, say, murder, where you have a corpse left on the ground afterwards. Seems to me that the only way we will ever have objective data would be to question every voter as he or she left the polls–and that is an impossibility.

Knowing that, it seems that your defense of allowing unknown persons to cast ballots by pointing out a lack of convictions for voter fraud is just one more dodge.

Can you give me one example of a circumstance that would truely prevent an otherwise eligible voter from obtaining a photo ID?

I asked for an example of a circumstance that would truely prevent an otherwise eligible voter from obtaining an ID. None of what you wrote fits the bill.

How can a person be so inconvenienced by having to wait in line at the DMV, yet NOT be equally inconvenienced by having to wait in line to vote? Seems to me that if someone can take the time to travel to the voting booth and wait in line to vote, that person can do exactly the same to get the appropriate ID. You can’t argue that the one requirement is impossibly onerous and the other not.

And that ID doesn’t HAVE to cost ten dollars. It only costs ten bucks because the state decided to make a little money off of it, or defray the costs. The state could easily drop that requirement in the interest of fairness.

So what if it’s not foolproof? Tell me what safeguards we have in our system ever are? It’s certainly closer to foolproof than the way we do it now. And so what if voters “experience difficulty in voting when data on the photo ID is not consistent with voter registration information?” Shouldn’t there be some “difficulty” when such discrepencies in official documents are brought to light?

Face it, we have a broken system that is wide open to exploitation by nefarious groups and individuals of ALL political persuasions. Photo ID ain’t perfect, but it would be a hell of lot better than the wild-west scenario that currently prevails.

It’s still one day–one freak’n day–out of, gosh, how many years does your registration stay valid?

Can we not ask that those who wish to vote take this one, tiny step to help insure the integrity of the process?