Ferguson Part Deux - No charges to be filed!

[busdriver11]

<p>Funny, STILL talking about voting? STILL pretending that voter fraud doesn’t happen? I always wonder why people deny the obvious and pretend like it doesn’t happen, and maybe here is a reason why:</p>

<p>"The Washington Post</p>

<p>Could non-citizens decide the November election?</p>

<p>October 24, 2014</p>

<p>Could control of the Senate in 2014 be decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens? Some argue that incidents of voting by non-citizens are so rare as to be inconsequential, with efforts to block fraud a screen for an agenda to prevent poor and minority voters from exercising the franchise, while others define such incidents as a threat to democracy itself. Both sides depend more heavily on anecdotes than data.</p>

<p>In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races.</p>

<p>Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether they actually voted.</p>

<p>How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.</p>

<p>Estimated Voter Turnout by Non-Citizens<br>
2008 2010
Self reported and/or verified 38 (11.3%) 13 (3.5%)
Self reported and verified 5 (1.5%) N.A.
Adjusted estimate 21 (6.4%) 8 (2.2%) </p>

<p>Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin."</p>

[dietz199]

<p>@emilybee: Yes, that is pretty much all I have…because if you read the article it will tell you no equal subsequent efforts by the justice department have been undertaken since that time. Now, if this does not concern you …well…then 'nuf said.</p>

<p>And…if one accepts quotes from the daily kos, the vox, huffelpuff and my personal favorite poster child of all time biased reporting - Salon - then one needs to deal with quotes from the Heritage Foundation.</p>

[emilybee]

<p>^ I see nothing but a lot of conjecture and “coulds” and “are best guess” etc, etc, etc. </p>

<p>“Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.”</p>

<p>It’s possible and could, etc., etc., etc. </p>

<p>That is not proof. </p>

<p>Also doing a bit of sleuthing on line turns up they are using YourGov’t online surveys for their data. I could not access the report only the abstract so had to look to find information from the actual study. </p>

[sally305]

<p>busdriver, that research is full of holes that even the study’s authors, two professors at Old Dominion, acknowledge.</p>

<p>

In a October 24 blog in The Washington Post, Jessie Richman and David Earnest, two authors of the study, admitted that their “extrapolation to specific state-level or district-level election outcomes is fraught with substantial uncertainty.” The authors noted that the non-citizen sample they examined was “modest” and relied on self-reporting, which can create errors, and attempts to verify the accuracy of the self-reporting was imperfect and supplemented by estimates.

</p>

<p>Further examination by more reputable academics has questioned the results.</p>

<p>

Brown University political scientist Michael Tesler questioned the study’s “methodological challenges” in a blog in The Washington Post, such as the possibility that non-citizens may have misreported their citizenship status. Tesler noted that many self-reported non-citizens in 2012 reported being citizens in 2010, indicating a high rate of response error “which raises important doubts about their conclusions”:

</p>

<p><a href=“http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/10/28/what-other-academics-think-of-the-questionable/201347”>http://mediamatters.org/research/2014/10/28/what-other-academics-think-of-the-questionable/201347&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

<p>I guess I don’t know why “researchers” would put forth such grand conclusions when even they know their methodology is flawed.</p>

[dietz199]

<p>^^^^^ Maybe they were prepping for membership in the ACA enrollment number/cost savings reports group? :-* </p>

[sally305]

<p>Well, if this thread wasn’t off the rails before it certainly is now.</p>

[collegealum314]

<p>Well, going back to the topic at hand, is there evidence that minorities are discriminated against by the police? Do any studies on this normalized by the appropriate parameters to eliminate confounding variables? </p>

[sally305]

<p>Yes. The arrests for drug-related crimes alone bear this out.</p>

[collegealum314]

<p>By the way, the NYPD is mostly minority. If they are racist, is it minorities who are racist? Or are the whites on the force so racist it makes the overall effect of the NYPD discriminatory?</p>

[busdriver11]

<p>I know, I know, illegal voting couldn’t possibly ever happen. I mean, look at the source? Give me another example, I don’t trust that one. Name someone, show me something else. Ah, that situation is too old. It never happens that illegals, dead people and felons vote. Ever, just impossible. Of course, well, when they do, we know who it’s usually for so let’s just pretend it never, ever happens.</p>

<p>People are so biased they are completely blind to truth. I appreciate honesty, no matter what side it supports.</p>

[emilybee]

<p>Busdriver - lots of things are possible but that doesn’t mean it happens. </p>

<p>For instance, it’s possible that the Malaysian airplane is not somewhere at the bottom of the the Indian Ocean but landed on some airstrip on some tiny island in the middle of the ocean where it was camouflaged and is sitting there waiting to be used in a terrorist attack. I read a lot of articles suggesting that and there are many, many people who believe that. After all, it is not like a plane was never used to carry out a terrorist attack. </p>

[cobrat]

<p>

By the way, the NYPD is mostly minority. If they are racist, is it minorities who are racist? Or are the whites on the force so racist it makes the overall effect of the NYPD discriminatory?

</p>

<p>Minorities can be racist against their fellow minorities in service of the ruling group. </p>

<p>This has been borne out many times in history such as in India during the time of the Raj when some Indians hoping to gain favor with the British colonial authorities participated in the discrimination and brutalization of fellow Indians. </p>

<p>This was something which elicited not only notice, but even perturbed a few British officials who disagreed with the widespread commonly accepted racism common among many British officials and residents in India during that period. </p>

[VaBluebird]

<p>Police have authority. We…none of us…are supposed to resist arrest. It sucks, yes, especially if you are innocent. It’s a royal pain in the neck to have to hire an attorney, go to court, etc. Policemen are supposed to know the laws and enforce them. That is their job. That’s why we have them. They make the call. This is the way it is. Eric Garner may hve been “resisting arrest” by arguing with them but he wasn’t running away or throwing punches or rushing them or going for a weapon or any thing at all threatening. But once they say "you are under arrest’ you’re supposed to give up. OTOH, there is no way in bloody h*** they needed to do that to him. Ugh.</p>

[emilybee]

<p>I don’t care if someone is resisting arrest. That is not a crime punishable by death. Period. </p>

[busdriver11]

<p>Seriously, emilybee, comparing the likelihood that voter fraud could exist, with the possibility that the Malaysian 777 is sitting somewhere on an airstrip? Long sigh…well that says it all. You can’t argue with irrational.</p>

<p>I give up, back to topic. If you resist arrest with aggressive force or a weapon, I’d say you have given yourself a death sentence. </p>

[awcntdb]

<p>

I don’t care if someone is resisting arrest. That is not a crime punishable by death. Period.

</p>

<p>That is a true and an accurate statement. </p>

<p>However, a police officer in a defensive situation is not metering out punishment; he is actively saving his own life. Self-defense is not punishment and to cal it that misses the point that an altercation was actually going on. The policeman was ending an aggressive altercation, not punishing. </p>

[collegealum314]

<p>

Yes. The arrests for drug-related crimes alone bear this out.

</p>

<p>Yeah, but are these statistics normalized for socioeconomic status, age, urban/rural setting (I’d assume crime in poor rural areas is less than in poor urban areas), and other factors?</p>

[VaBluebird]

<p>I don’t care if someone is resisting arrest. That is not a crime punishable by death. Period.>>>>>>></p>

<p>Yes, that is what I said.</p>

[marie1234]

<p>A police officer may not seize an unarmed, nondangerous suspect by shooting him dead…however…Where the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a threat of serious physical harm, either to the officer or to others, it is not constitutionally unreasonable to prevent escape by using deadly force.
—Justice Byron White, Tennessee v. Garner</p>

<p>And, then there’s the whole self defense thing, too. If a suspect resists arrest the police are not just going to get back in the car and get coffee or donuts. That’s not how it works.</p>

[emilybee]

<p>" comparing the likelihood that voter fraud could exist, with the possibility that the Malaysian 777 is sitting somewhere on an airstrip? Long sigh…well that says it all. You can’t argue with irrational."</p>

<p>Airplanes have been used by terrorists no? But considering all the plane flights which take off and land without becoming a terrorist weapon I assume you consider the probability of it happening to be infinitesimal and not anything which will affect 99.9999999999% of all people who have ever flown or will fly. </p>

<p>But, it is possible because it has happened a few times in the past, no? It could happen, no? A terrorist can hijack a plane and turn it into a weapon, no? </p>

<p>That is the same argument you are using to insist there is voter fraud. </p>

<p>You will never be disabused of your belief that there is voter fraud which effects the outcomes of elections and it’s obvious that no statistic which shows how insignificant a problem it is will convince you otherwise. </p>