Thursday, October 4, 2012
Fraud Found!!!
As long as I count the votes, what are you going to do about it?
— William Marcy Tweed, Tammany Hall Statement (1871)
The Republicans have finally uncovered evidence of fraud they can prevent. For a time it seemed as thought they’d never find it and their relentless search created the illusion of incompetence.
Individual Republicans and Republican legislatures all over the country have been passing laws in order to make what they describe as voter fraud more difficult by a variety of efforts that coincidentally (although only the most cynical would believe deliberately) have a greater impact on the poor and minorities than on the rest of the population.
In Colorado, Scott Gessler, the secretary of state, decided that non-citizen voting was a serious problem in that state saying: “ We have to recognize that we have real vulnerabilities in the system. I don’t think we should be saying the sky is falling, but at the same time, we have to recognize we have a serious vulnerability.” As evidence of this he first said that he thought there were 11,805 noncitizens on the voting rolls. After presumably praying over this number or invoking some other deistic assistance, he reduced that number to 3,903 and sent letters to those individuals demanding that they offer proof of citizenship or be stricken from the rolls. Once the letters were sent out it was learned that there were only 141 noncitizens on the voter rolls or .0041 percent of the total number of voters in the state.
In Florida the Division of Elections said there might be 180,000 non-citizens on the rolls. After pursuing the issue it concluded that number was 207. In Florida, there are no cases of people having voted who were not entitled to vote.
In South Carolina a law was passed requiring photo ID in order to cut down on voting fraud of which there have been three cases since 2000. In Pennsylvania, the Republican legislature’s attempts to prevent voter fraud by requiring photo IDs are now in the court. Michael Wojcik who served as Alleghany County solicitor from 2004 to 2012 has written that there was never an accusation of voter fraud in that county. According to NBC’s Open Channel, the State of Pennsylvania advised the court that it would present no evidence of voter fraud in the trial involving the photo ID law that was passed in 2012. (Following passage of that law Republican Mike Turzai, in a moment of brazen and unbridled enthusiasm at the law’s passage, said the law was “going to allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania-done.” That left the impression that the law had nothing to do with fraud and everything to do with winning one for Governor Romney.) As was observed at the outset, there is, nonetheless, good news on the fraud front. Some has been discovered by the Republicans.
In the best of all possible worlds for which the Republicans were searching in their zeal to find fraud, they would have found dead Democrats voting, in some cases more than once, non-citizens voting, live Democrats voting twice, etc. Instead they found fraud being committed by themselves.
September 29th it was disclosed that several Florida counties were encountering suspicious registration forms. Florida’s Republicans, it will be recalled, were so concerned about the registration process that in 2011 the legislature passed a law that imposed such punitive requirements on people registering voters that the League of Women Voters and other groups said they could no longer conduct registration drives because of the law’s stringent provisions and draconian penalties for their violation (such as a $1000 fine if forms were not turned in within 48 hours after they were signed. The law’s unreasonable requirements were blocked in June 2012 but groups wanting to register voters lost almost a year because of their fear of violating the blocked provisions. ) The fraud the Republicans found was being undertaken by one of their own and it was real, actual fraud as distinguished from the imaginary kind of which they had been dreaming.
Strategic Allied Consulting was a firm hired by the Florida Republican party to register new voters. On September 29 it was reported that 10 Florida counties had encountered suspicious voter registration forms submitted by Strategic Allied Consulting employees. According to reports, some employees told people they contacted they were only registering Republicans, some forms had suspicious signatures and others had bogus addresses. In response to criticism of the company by Republicans, the company said the comments were “libelous” and that the fraud was limited to one employee although in Palm Beach County more than 100 applications were being examined and investigations were being conducted in 10 other Florida counties. In Colorado an employee of the company could be seen on a video telling a potential voter she was only registering Republican voters and that she was an employee of the county clerk’s office. Apparently the company’s one rogue employee was mobile.
Whether one employee was criminal and peripatetic or whether the company had many criminally inclined employees is irrelevant. What is important is that the Republicans have finally found fraud. The weapon they used was a mirror. The entire country is in their debt.
Friday, September 28, 2012
The Blame Game
Litigious terms, fat contentions, and flowing fees.
— John Milton, Tractate of Education
The endless question in America is whom to blame when bad things happen and the question is asked beginning at an early age. Any present or past proprietor of a small child knows that when any thing bad happens the child’s first response is that someone else is responsible and that attitude accompanies the child into adulthood and helps make the legal system what it is today. (The child only learns later in life that a bad thing can be made less bad if the child receives money as a result of the event.) There are countless examples of individuals blaming others for their misfortunes. Stella Liebeck is an example of this. She spilled hot coffee onto her lap following its purchase from McDonalds and did not think that the fault lay with her for having spilled it but with McDonalds for having served it so hot that it burned her when she spilled it. Her claim against McDonalds was ultimately concluded in a confidential settlement with the company.
Frequently, the victim of the bad thing tries to assert that the fault lies with a remote party rather than the person who could actually be responsible since the remote party is wealthier than the responsible party. Mary Danielle Gann had the misfortune to be celebrating a birthday in a bar that the court said was “known for its violence.” While in the bar she was assaulted by a patron wielding a “longneck” beer bottle. A long necked beer bottle can conveniently be converted from beer container into lethal weapon by grabbing the long neck and attacking others with the container part of the bottle. The assaulter struck Mary in the face resulting in permanent scarring. Being blameless, and confronted with a not particularly wealthy assaulter, she sued Anheuser Busch because it sold beer in long neck beer bottles instead of stub nosed bottles or cans that would be harder to convert into weapons. The court concluded the plaintiff’s theory was nonsensical and, using more formal language, threw the case out.
A bad thing also happened to Elizabeth Loyd. She sued the perpetrator of the bad thing. She was sitting at a picnic table near a fenced-in bullpen at a Little League game and was hit in the face by a baseball thrown by an 11-year old participant. She is suing the little boy for $150,000 to cover medical costs and an undetermined amount for pain and suffering. (Had she received better legal advice she would have sued the manufacturer of the ball since had the baseball been made of a squishy material she would not have sustained an injury. The baseball manufacturer might also have deeper pockets than the 11-year old.) Another example of suing the deep pocket rather than the perpetrator comes from Colorado.
A suit has been filed by two of the people injured when a crazed former university student opened fire in a darkened theater killing 12 people and injuring 5. The act was horrific and the person that one would first think of suing in such an instant would be the gunman. He, however, is penniless and a suit against him, though appropriate, would provide the victims with no compensation. Accordingly the plaintiffs have sued the owner of the movie theater for damages. It would not occur to someone not trained in the law, to think the owner of the theater, who had no idea the theater would become the site of a massacre, should have taken steps to prevent what was plainly unforeseeable. Most movie theaters hire young people to sell snacks and take tickets and it is certain that they receive no instruction on what to do in case of a massacre or other act of violence within the theater (other than what is on the screen) Nonetheless, the suit faults the company for those failures as well as not having security personnel in attendance and not having first-aid and evacuation plans in place. It also says the theater was culpable for not having an alarm on the exit door that the gunman used to go in and out of the theater and observes, in an aside, that the movie continued to play and the theater remained dark while the shooting was taking place.
If the suit is successful the response may be for theater owners to introduce into theaters some of the security measures found in airports. Off duty TSA personnel will welcome the opportunity to earn some extra money. For the rest of us, going to the movies will become a different experience. Whether one massacre requires such changes others can decide. Some might conclude that, horrific as it was, it is a tragedy for whose victims recompense from the responsible party is unavailable and attempting to blame the theater owner does little more than cast a bright light on the Americans’ attitude of trying to make others pay for unforeseen terrible things that happen to them.
Thursday, August 30, 2012
The Secretary of State vs. the Voter
Idle hands do the devil’s work
Anonymous
The fault lies with us and not Scott Gessler. If we’d left him alone he’d not have focused on mischief. And if the pay were better, a brighter lawyer would have sought the office.
Scott Gessler is Colorado’s Secretary of state. Before being elected he worked for a law firm that had the reputation of being one of the most active election law firms in Colorado. That is why he ran. He knew that if elected, the citizens would be getting a bargain since he would require no on the job training. He had the expertise to serve as Secretary of state since the Secretary of state is involved with many of matters he dealt with as a practicing lawyer. There were two things he had not considered when he decided to seek the office. The first was the salary paid to the Secretary of state.Scott wanted to be Secretary of state so badly that he forgot to ask anyone how much it paid and when elected was distressed to discover that it paid the paltry sum of $68,500. He had been a successful lawyer and had no idea that by serving as Secretary of state he would be taking a pay cut of more than half of what he received when practicing law. Even though he was probably a good lawyer (although his actions as secretary of state draw that into question) some people would think if he were a REALLY good lawyer he’d have tried to find out how much he’d get paid before he decided to run for office. When he found out how much it paid he said: “I don’t think anyone goes into governmental service to get rich. . .. The reason I ran is my experience in the election-law world.”
Although Scott didn’t intend to become rich he also didn’t want to live in poverty. Being a creative sort, he figured out how to increase his compensation while serving as secretary of state-he would convert both the Secretary of state’s job and his law practice into two part time jobs. He said he would practice law for 20 hours a month. When he announced that, people more sensitive than he, commented on the other thing he had failed to consider before deciding to run-conflicts of interest.
Many people observed that since the law firm for which he intended to work part time had many clients dealing with election law issues, he would have a conflict of interest working for that firm while serving as secretary of state. Hoping to blunt that criticism and being creative, Mr. Gessler said that whenever he took a case he would ask the Colorado Attorney General’s Office whether he had a conflict of interest. Good lawyers can normally figure that out themselves but since the Attorney General, like the secretary of state, is not terribly busy, he would almost certainly have welcomed the opportunity to help Scott Gessler, a fellow public employee. After countless unfavorable comments about Scott treating each job as part time he abandoned plans to work part time as a lawyer.
All of the foregoing is by way of explaining why the citizens are themselves to blame for Mr. Gessler’s recent foray into the world of criminal and constitutional law in which he appears to be singularly unschooled. Had people let him continue to practice law part time he would not have had the time to venture into those arenas.
Under Colorado law everyone who registers to vote must swear or affirm that he or she is, among other things, a citizen of the United States. Mr. Gessler has decided to create two classes of registered voters. One class comprises citizens he does not think lied when they registered and he ignores them. The second class includes those he thinks may have lied and even committed perjury. He has sent a letter to the second class of citizens and told them that if they committed perjury they should immediately confess and fill out a long form he sent them. (Not everyone who falsely claimed to be a citizen commits perjury since some people may have lacked the necessary intent to misrepresent their status.) If the recipients of the letter did not lie when registering to vote, he nonetheless instructs them to fill out the form, thus imposing a burden on them not imposed on other registered voters that may or may not pass constitutional muster. What he doesn’t tell the recipients is that if they admit they lied when registering, they may have admitted to committing a criminal offense that could result in a fine of up to $5000 or imprisonment in the county jail for up to 18 months.
Commenting on the low salary he receives Mr. Gessler told a reporter that Colorado is losing a lot of potential talent by paying such low salaries. He’s right. His election is proof of that. If the office paid more, Colorado would probably have a much brighter secretary of state. Scott Gesssler is proof that you get what you pay for.