Welcome to Buster's Blog

Irregular commentary on whatever's on my mind -- politics, sports, current events, and life in general. After twenty years of writing business and community newsletters, fifteen years of fantasy baseball newsletters, and two years of email "columns", this is, I suppose, the inevitable result: the awful conceit that someone might actually care to read what I have to say. Posts may be added often, rarely, or never again. As always, my mood and motivation are unpredictable.

Buster Gammons















Thursday, December 19, 2013

Husted Finds No Voter Fraud In Ohio, Says "We Must Prevent This From Happening Again"


Ohio's Republican Secretary of State Jon Husted is a proponent of voter-ID laws and is in favor of further reductions in early voting.  Some of his voter-suppression efforts in 2012 were ruled unconstitutional.

Husted's office just completed a thorough analysis of all votes cast in Ohio in the November 2012 election.  Of the 5.7 million ballots cast in Ohio, Husted found a statewide total of 17 ineligible voters.  Seventeen.  All were living legally in Ohio.  None were undocumented immigrants.  None, said Husted, were intentionally fraudulent.  But the 17 were not U.S. citizens, and were therefore ineligible to vote.

A little quick math -- 17 out of 5,700,000 is 0.000003, or 3/10,000th of one percent.   This is not just statistically insignificant, it's statistically invisible!  In Ohio, Obama defeated Romney by 170,000 votes, about 3 percentage points.  His margin nationally was 4 points.

So when Husted announced finding all of 17 ineligible voters, he said with a straight face, "We must modernize to prevent [this] from happening again."
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[Like most of his ilk, Husted tries to justify voter suppression as an effort to fix the non-existant problem of voter fraud.  But I must commend him for coming out in favor of both online voter registration and mailing absentee ballots to all registered voters.  I still don't trust the little weasel, but those are actually good ideas.]

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