The president threatened Michigan and Nevada about withholding funds if they pushed mail in voting. Kind of like the Ukraine extortion deal.
“Nevada ‘thinks’ that they can send out illegal vote by mail ballots, creating a great Voter Fraud scenario for the State and the U.S. They can’t!” Trump posted. “If they do, ‘I think’ I can hold up funds to the State. Sorry, but you must not cheat in elections.”
Never mind that several Republican run states do the same thing.
“The Trump campaign itself is encouraging supporters to request absentee ballots, such as in an email sent to Pennsylvania voters Wednesday that urged them to “request your ballot and cast your vote from your own home.”
Spokesman Tim Murtaugh said that the campaign is against mailing all voters ballots because it could lead to fraud, but “it is responsible to advise our voters of what the laws are in their states.”
I think the GOP and it’s fearless leader are in panic mode.
IMHO
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 
Voter fraud is the new buzz word for “not enough votes for Republicans” There are several states that conduct their elections by mail and the fraud level is so minuscule that it doesn’t even get mentioned. Even Utah, that bastion of liberal politics, has about 90% of their votes cast by mail. Source: Some guy named Mitt Romney. You may have heard of him.
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The DETECTED vote fraud is minuscule, but you can’t count the ones that are successful.
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Perhaps you can show us all the undetected voter fraud cases, and we can arrange to prosecute the ones responsible.
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That, of course, is the point.
Just because we haven’t caught a lot of voter fraud does not mean it is not happening, and on a large scale.
When you look out over the ocean, you can’t see the sharks but that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.
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Like you say about gun control, can you show that there is a problem before you infringe upon the right to cast a ballot.
Republicans seem to think that there is a lot of fraud, but have yet to demonstrate that there is. One of the most noteworthy was by the NC GOP that actually caused a second election. But standard safeguards caught the folks.
Other attempts to remove polling places in poor areas or targeting minority voters “with surgical precision” by the GOP is also fraud. Same with removing all but 5 polling places in Milwaukee, but not permitting mail in ballots that people hadn’t even received to be counted. The Dems still kicked butt, but at risk from the virus.
So, yes, the GOP is attempting to infringe upon the Constitutional right to vote based on lies about our voting systems. That is fraud.
Trump is threatening states that do what he wants on restricting votes by mail. He has said point blank that it is so Republicans can win.
You don’t think that is fraud?
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I think it is preventing elections from being stolen from Republicans.
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You mean allowing elections to be stolen BY Republicans.
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The idea just fell apart in Florida.
https://www.politico.com/states/florida/story/2020/05/21/a-trump-election-conspiracy-collapses-1285442
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Trump and many of his fans thrive on conspiracies.
This is the default position of most autocracies. Trump knows his folks eat this stuff up.
Bill Gates and the plot to rule the world is a favorite that Trump is not even trying to squash.
Everything is a hoax and everyone is out to get him.
“Oh my, lions and tigers and bears.”
IMHO
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You mean Broward county, where people vote absentee in alphabetical order?
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Read the story, Don. It was the investigation begged for by the GOP.
N-O-T-H-I-N-G-B-U-R-G-E-R!
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And a judge in Texas approved the move there. It was overturned by an appellate court, but it seems the battle may be on.
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And it appears Missouri is the new GOP testing ground for undoing the will of the people with regards to gerrymandering.
I apologize for the pay wall, but if you have NYT access, you can see David Daley’s piece on what is happening there.
Some key paragraphs.
“So last week, Missouri lawmakers looked to dismantle the initiative — called Clean Missouri and supported by 62 percent of the state’s voters — that would have taken mapmaking authority away from politicians and handed it to a nonpartisan state demographer. If Republicans have their way, that demographer won’t draw a single line and control over maps will be returned to a commission of party insiders.”
“First, the new bill would add language to the state constitution that makes it harder for Missouri citizens to gain legal standing to challenge a gerrymandered map in court.”
“Second, under the new plan, if a legal challenge did make it into the courts, the state constitution would limit the remedies available to judges. A judge would not be able to throw out the entire map as unconstitutional but merely to order smaller changes to individual districts — essentially retaining most of the advantages embedded into the map by partisans.”
“Perhaps most dramatically, the Republican plan would open the door to drawing state legislative districts in a way that could shift the essence of representation itself. The longtime standard has been to count everyone — the total population — when drawing up equally populated legislative districts.
“Republicans, however, have urged states to redistrict based on voting-age population instead — and so count only American citizens over the age of 18. What impact would this switch have? Before his death in 2018, the Republican redistricting mastermind Thomas Hofeller completed a study to assess the impact of drawing political maps that were based not on a state’s total population — the current practice virtually everywhere in the nation — but on citizens of voting age. Looking at Texas, he concluded that the switch would pull power away from cities and toward older, rural populations. It would also, he said, “be advantageous to Republicans and non-Hispanic whites.””
Hofeller is the same guy who helped draw the racially gerrymandered NC districts with “surgical precision” that were thrown out by the Supreme Court. He’s dead, but his plans still live on.
One word: Chilling.
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Republicans have always known they can’t win in open, well-participated elections. Decades ago the strategy was to find hot button cultural issues that would get votes. Abortion, guns, marriage are all topics that will raise the participation of single issue voters. Lately, immigration and to a degree both race and anti-Semetism, have been co-opted by the GOP.
Now afraid that Trump may have alienated some of the base and independents, as well as inspired enthusiasm among Democrats, the strategy is to prevent participation in the election.
Desperate people take desperate measures.
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I just hope people pay attention and don’t allow GOP representatives over turn their will.
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