Texas regulates the electrical grid and overseas its management. When the grid fails due to weather in 2013, you want to make sure it doesn't happen again, right? Well, Texas voters were assured the issues were fixed -- only to have the exact same issues in 2021. That is a government failure; the government required power generators to upgrade their equipment and failed in any oversight or verification that the work was done.
I see...you're for government oversight...and verification.
I generally don't consider weather related events in my assessment of political figures. For example, I don't hold CAs' wildfires against Newsom. The reason being there's more than one possible explanation for why a wildfire is burning houses down....
1. It could be that residential builders were reckless in regards to where they built.
2. It could be that wildfire experts made poor recommendations.
3. It could be that whatever agency (BLM?) at the state or federal level simply lacks resources to follow recommendations fast enough.
4. It could be that everyone did exactly as they should....but unfortunately the weather event has unique characteristics that weren't prepared for.
It seems odd to me to blame damage from a weather event on a politician. Imagine if Puerto Rico simply blamed their top officials every time a strong hurricane caused damage. It seems silly to me but hey....you're certainly entitled to think that way.
That's the funny part, the voting machines technically didn't "fail." Part of it was programming errors by Texas election officials, where candidates weren't properly entered for the straight party ballots.
Ok....you're telling me that voting machines can be accidentally compromised by election officials.
Got it.
The voter, if they were watching, they would see that a candidate was wrong on the summary screen. There are other possible ways it might error, such as hitting buttons too soon -- but Texas (as well as the voting machine company) claim that is user error and that the machines work properly.
Right. Was this issue resolved either by voters or election officials?
These are "ancient" (in terms of technology) voting machines since they've been used since the turn of the Century (I believe they were first used in the Dallas area for the 2000 elections).
You'd be shocked at the process in other modern western democracies. There's more than one that still use IDs and paper ballots
It appears the company has also
sued to stop their replacement with newer, rival, machines in some areas of Texas (it is an Austin based company).
I'm going to guess they had some sort of contract.
But, again, Democrats first
filed suit over these machines in 2007, they continued having issues with
almost every election, and they are still used in some counties of Texas (though some counties have replaced them in the last several years). Per Republicans, there are no issues with these machines.
Well which is it? Are they faulty or not?
I understand that each side has its narrative regarding the machines...and they differ...but I'm only concerned with the evidence.
Was or is there any evidence regarding the truth of claims of voting machines failing to function as voting machines?
Fraud, largely on payments received from a donor. He was
impeached by the Texas House and then narrowly avoided being removed from office by the Senate. There were multiple threads on these forums about it. He also has now settled his federal fraud lawsuit, agreeing to community service.
I watched the court proceedings of one of the accusations. I honestly don't know what to think. I either missed something or this was largely about some renovations done to Paxton's house....and it was treated like the capture of some international drug kingpin. I know there was an acquittal...perhaps an appeal or new charges....a settlement as you said.
I guess what I'm saying is that I have no idea what Paxton has to do with the topic of the thread. Does his case involve voter fraud or something related to the elections?
I'm sorry, nothing is blocked by Democrats in Texas -- they have been completely marginalized by the Republican majority in Texas. Texas is, for all practical purposes, a one party state.
Let's be honest.
This isn't just a Texas issue. Democrats...for some reason....don't want to ensure that only citizens are voting. The election law proposed by the Biden administration basically would have removed the power of some states to write their own election laws and not others. It basically just made it easier to commit voter fraud, and made it much harder to catch.
We do? Odd, I haven't see that. What I've seen is one party that wants to make it harder to vote
How so?
-- particularly for poorer individuals --
Let's imagine a homeless person that's a US citizen and has no ID or documents like a birth certificate, and cannot recall their SSN....
Do you think this person will have an easier time voting or harder time voting than an illegal who crossed the southern border without getting caught and is sharing a home in Alabama with 40 similar people?
and another party that is trying to protect the voting rights of the poor.
How?
It's odd how the party allegedly trying to ensure "citizens are the ones voting and there's no foreign influence" are the ones that keep being found guilty of wrongfully purging citizens from the voting rolls.
How many citizens have they "wrongly purged"?
Do you understand that federal law requires states to routinely remove ineligible voters from their rolls/registry?
Reports that show they haven't made a similar mistake as when they announced a similar purge about 5 years ago.
How many people were wrongly removed 5 years ago?
Serious question. I don't know. When I look for a number...I get stories like this...
Voting rights advocates are raising concerns about the effects of Republican-led measures designed to prevent noncitizens from voting, which is illegal and rare.
www.google.com
That make big claims about "voter suppression" and the rarity of illegal voting. I can fully understand why someone who isn't media literate or can't spot obvious bias in the news they are reading might become misinformed.
Again, cleaning up voter rolls is a required practice. The article (please read it) describes a woman who naturalized and then registered to vote after she became a citizen....only to be removed from the voter registry.
It doesn't exactly say why she was removed apart from the fact that she her "noncitizen immigration number" got her removed from the registry.
Surely she had already proven she was a citizen just to get on the registry....right?
Well no...apparently not.
Allen announced he had put 3,251 voter registrations on track for removal in mid-August as part of a new process that flags anyone on the state voter rolls with a noncitizen identification number. Allen shared the list with the attorney general for "further investigation and possible criminal prosecution," his office said in a release.
This seems to strongly suggest that not only do you not need to prove citizenship to register to vote in Alabama....but even more concerning, the only noncitizens they can identify on the voter registry are those that entered the US legally.
The article doesn't really address this though....instead, this dumb statement is made....
“Every single naturalized citizen in Alabama has an immigration number, every single one,” Lang said.
Ok....and????
By the way, the very next paragraph actually disproves whatever this expert was supposedly trying to prove.
According to the latest data available from the Department of Homeland Security, 3,998 people were naturalized in Alabama in 2022. The year before, 1,614 people became U.S. citizens in Alabama.
If 3251 people were being removed because they have noncitizen immigration numbers....and 3998 people had naturalized....clearly not every naturalized citizen has a number despite what the "expert" says.
The ultimate crux of this horrible dilemma for this poor woman who naturalized is that she would have to fill out the form again.
She not sure she wants to.
Is this supposed to be voter suppression????
Because in my quest for evidence....I stumbled across Alabama’s voter registration form. Let's take a peek, shall we?
Alabama requires a photo ID at the polls or with the application....but these aren't exactly hard to get. Not every state requires a SSN for a driver's license.
When you start actually looking at it....it's pretty bad how easy it is to get around not being a citizen.
You may see the above form and think that the photo ID will do the trick. There's no way around that. Then you look at the Alabama voting rules and...
In addition, a voter who does not have a valid photo ID in his or her possession at the polls shall be permitted to vote if the individual is positively identified by two election officials as a voter on the poll list who is eligible to vote and the election officials sign a sworn affidavit so stating.
So while an ID will be asked for....apparently it's not entirely necessary if you are on the voter registry and two officials swear you are who you claim to be lol. I'm not sure how that works... but I would guess they simply ask you to verify the information on the application.
We're basically using an honor system here. How would an official in Alabama figure out who is a noncitizen if you don't actually need a SSN or photo ID to be able to vote?....as long as you check the "yes I'm a citizen box" you should be good to go.
Having said that, I should be one of the million voters removed from Texas voting rolls -- though in my case it would be because I moved from the state and am now registered to vote in a different state.
? I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here....
Or creating
fake pro-Trump social media by using stolen pictures from European social media accounts; though I don't know those are foreign accounts, they could have been made by the Trump campaign. Honestly, you complain there is only one party involved in trying to fix it but then have issues if there are investigations caused by legitimate claims of ties between the Tump campaign and Russia, of Egypt paying Trump millions, or any other investigation into foreign influence campaigns that are alleged to be helping Republicans.
Yawn...am I supposed to think there's some "legitimate" investigation into Trump that hasn't been pursued?
I saw the Egypt story. It had zero evidence. It was just a story...quite literally. The unnamed "informant" was claiming that the FBI or whoever learned about some supposed bank withdrawal of 10 million $ months after it happened.
How? Did they pay an informant for this? Did the bank call up the FBI? WaPo certainly doesn't seem to know or care.
Seems rather necessary to even justify an investigation. After all, the informant used to keep the Trump/Russia probe going after it turned into nothing was a ex foreign spy hired by the Clinton campaign lawyers....and his "intel" was entirely bogus.
I'll agree both sides have issues. Then again, foreign influence does not have anything to do with elections being secure.
Well go back and rethink the question I had about the homeless US citizen with no ID or documents...and the illegal residing in Alabama. Apparently you can just check the box that says you're a US citizen and you're good. In the section asking for a driver's license and SSN....just check off the box that says you don't have any DL or SSN. Then when asked for your ID on your day to vote....simply tell them the information you used to register, promise extra hard you're a citizen, and it seems like you're good to vote.