Virginia AG Agrees Obama Stole the Election
Ken Cuccinelli, the extremely far right attorney general of Virginia, went on a wingnut radio show that has been making outrageous allegations that Obama stole the election and completely agreed with the hosts that what they’re saying is correct and that they were “preaching to the choir.”
JACOBUS: There needs to be a way for people to be able to report this stuff and have it looked into. I mean, just across the country, we’re hearing so many stories. And people can talk about it, but nothing seems to be done. And, in fact in these states where voter ID is required to vote…
WILSON: Photo ID.
JACOBUS: Photo ID. Voter photo ID. Obama lost every one of those states. He can’t win a state where photo ID is required. So clearly there’s something going on out there and until there’s a way to have something done about it where when you report it, you know it’s going to be looked into, the other side just says “Oh, well, you’re just poor losers,” and that sort of thing.
CUCCINELLI: Your tone suggests you’re a little upset with me. You’re preaching to the choir. I’m with you completely.
Let me suggest another explanation for why Obama lost all the states with photo ID laws. In the absence of any evidence at all of actual voter impersonation — and there is none — maybe, just maybe, it’s because photo ID laws were passed in states with total Republican control of the government. It’s hardly a surprise that a state whose voters support the voter suppression agenda of the Republican party would also be likely to vote for Romney instead of Obama. But that’s logic, which the wingnuts think is a satanic plot or something.
lclane2:
November 30th, 2012 at 12:16 pm
Correlation equals cause, but only if it’s a wished for cause.
raven:
November 30th, 2012 at 12:18 pm
Cuccinelli is also famous for launching a witch hunt. The only witches he found all seemed to be climatologists.
AFAIK, the courts refused to let him burn any scientists at the stake. Yet.
Virginia is also getting hit hard with rising sea levels in one of their major cities, Norfolk.
He is also running for governor of Virginia. Maybe he can do what they did in North Carolina, prohibit rising sea levels by passing laws against it.
John Pieret:
November 30th, 2012 at 12:21 pm
All the phoney voters are hiding with the UVA emails that showed climate change is a fraud.
Chiroptera:
November 30th, 2012 at 12:22 pm
I bet there is a correlation between states which voted for Romney and states in which there is a high proportion of people who believe Obama is anti-colonial, Kenyan, Muslim, Marxist, or any combination of these.
To me, the real correlation is obvious: voting Republican correlates with ignorance and stupidity.
dingojack:
November 30th, 2012 at 12:29 pm
raven – worked a bit like this, right?
:) Dingo
eric:
November 30th, 2012 at 12:30 pm
Ed:
Don’t bother. You fell into the trap of thinking this pundit actually told the truth. He did not. There are 10 states that require photo ID, and Obama won 3 of them: Michigan, Florida, and New Hampshire.
eric:
November 30th, 2012 at 12:34 pm
Ack, forgot to include links.
Here is a map of the states that require photo ID.
Here are the comparative election results.
Johnny Vector:
November 30th, 2012 at 12:36 pm
Eric makes a very good point. There is something in my nature (and the nature of most of the people I know) that makes the first thought about something like this “well there’s an obvious reason why that happened.” When really, more and more the first thought should be “Is that even true?”
Sastra:
November 30th, 2012 at 12:58 pm
Hyman’s Maxum: Don’t try to explain HOW something works until you find out THAT it works.
Words of wisdom named after skeptic Ray Hyman; they have a general application.
alanb:
November 30th, 2012 at 1:00 pm
Yes, but Michigan, Florida, and New Hampshire do not have strict photo ID laws. In the words of Wikipedia, “voters at polling place must either show photo ID or meet another state-specific requirements, such as answering personal questions correctly or being vouched for by another voter or poll worker(s) who have a voter ID.” Surely there must be something in those words that allow for tens of thousands of fraudulent votes.
Raging Bee:
November 30th, 2012 at 1:12 pm
Your tone suggests you’re a little upset with me. You’re preaching to the choir. I’m with you completely.
Gee, why are they upset with Kookinelli? Probably because, as a state attourney general, he’s one of the people who should be able to deal effectively with actual evidence of criminal conduct…and his hands are tied because he doesn’t have any evidence to work with.
dingojack:
November 30th, 2012 at 1:22 pm
Using the links provided by eric, here’s the breakdown:
No voter ID – 13:5 in favour of the Democratic Party,
Non-photo ID – 8: 12 in favour of the Republic Party,
Photo-ID – 4:3 favours Democrats (just)
Strict Photo ID – 0:4 in favour of the Republican Party.
Optimal strategy for the Republicans non-photo or strict photo.
Dingo
—–
Shit, I missed one.
eric:
November 30th, 2012 at 2:07 pm
This assumes there’s a strong correlation. I’m with Ed in thinking that voting requirements contribute to the way states swing, but honestly, if you picked a group of states at random a 8:12 split or a 4:3 split would be reasonably likely based on chance alone. Even a 7:3 split isn’t that unlikely. We have to be careful about being overly deterministic and seeking patterns in randomness here. Especially since “has legislature that passes voter photo ID law” and “votes consevatively in presidential election” are not exactly independent variables.
W. Kevin Vicklund:
November 30th, 2012 at 2:11 pm
@Dingo
Rhode Island, at a guess, making it 14:5 for No voter ID.
W. Kevin Vicklund:
November 30th, 2012 at 2:22 pm
Using the links provided by eric, here’s the corrected breakdown:
No voter ID – 15:5 in favour of the Democratic Party,
Non-photo ID – 7: 12 in favour of the Republic Party,
Photo-ID – 4:3 favours Democrats (just)
Strict Photo ID – 0:4 in favour of the Republican Party.
Optimal strategy for the Republicans non-photo or strict photo.
thisisaturingtest:
November 30th, 2012 at 2:23 pm
That, to me, is the nub of it right there. In order to demonstrate that a thing exists, or happened, you need objective evidence for it, something independent of just a subjective perception of an effect by someone who wants to attribute it to that thing as the specific cause. Otherwise, the reasoning becomes circular, as here:
“We need voter-ID to prevent the kind of voter fraud that re-elected Obama!”
“How do you know that voter fraud happens, or that it elected Obama?”
“Because Obama only won in states without it!”
That’s just a loop.
Ichthyic:
November 30th, 2012 at 4:09 pm
I’m thinking that this is nothing more than post hoc correlation.
it contributes very little to the way states vote, certainly nothing significant, and the states that PASSED those laws would have ended up with no significant difference in vote tallys anyway.
Voter ID laws were never anything more than a publicity stunt.
cjcolucci:
November 30th, 2012 at 5:10 pm
I am a New Yorker, and the link says we have no voter ID laws, but I was asked to show something. Why, I don’t know. I showed my driver’s license. I don’t know what my wife showed, since she doesn’t drive and didn’t bring her passport.
Aaron:
November 30th, 2012 at 7:05 pm
I’ll make a counter claim: Romney cant win any states without some form of voter suppression supporting him.
CSB:
December 1st, 2012 at 2:02 am
I live in Michigan, and from personal experience (I left my wallet at home when I went to vote this election) I can tell you that the photo ID requirement here is rather toothless. If you don’t have it with you, you sign an affidavit on the back of the paper they give you, you give your date of birth to the poll workers, and they give you a ballot. Not a provisional, one, either — a normal ballot that gets processed just like any other.
It’s still enough to cause problems for all the “bus around millions of unregistered black voters” plans that exist only in the most delusional corners of Michelle Bachmann’s cranial region, but it won’t actually cause many problems for people who lack photo ID. Honestly, they’re more likely to be screwed over by the lack of early voting and strict “you must have cause” requirements for an absentee ballot than by not having the photo ID.
macallan:
December 1st, 2012 at 7:58 am
Isn’t that the same clown who refused to investigate voter registration fraud which actually happened right under his nose?
Oh, wait, those were republicans.
dingojack:
December 2nd, 2012 at 9:41 am
Using W. Kevin Vicklund’s more accurate data*
Approx. odds of occurring by chance:
Except for photo-ID there’s something going on here.
Dingo
—–
* Thanks for that.
I counted a grey as a blue, and missed a grey. :(
Ichthyic:
December 2nd, 2012 at 5:08 pm
not necessarily; you understand this, right?
post hoc analyses are extraordinarily subject to bias, after all.
and correlation /= causation… etc.