Thursday, August 03, 2017


HITLER NOTE

Around 15 years ago, I was contacted by Michael Miller, who was in the process of compiling a very comprehensive set of historical notes which would cover all the major aspects of Nazi doctrine.  He asked me to do the chapter on Nazi socialism.  The resultant site was a very useful one that quite a few people consulted from time to time.  A couple of years ago, however, the free website hosting the material deleted it all.  "Free" websites are like that in my experience.  I did however keep a full backup of everything and I have now reloaded it all here.  I have also  put a link to it towards the bottom of my sidebar here.  I have lost touch with Michael Miller.

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New Report Exposes Thousands of Illegal Votes in 2016 Election

A new bombshell study released by the Government Accountability Institute shows why President Donald Trump’s Advisory Commission on Election Integrity has such an important job ahead of it.

The institute concluded in its report that thousands of votes in the 2016 election were illegal duplicate votes from people who registered and voted in more than one state.

The Government Accountability Institute, founded by Peter Schweizer, author of “Clinton Cash,” seeks to “investigate and expose crony capitalism, misuse of taxpayer monies, and other governmental corruption or malfeasance.”

Over the last few months, the institute sought to obtain “public voter information” from every state in order to search for duplicate votes. This is the same type of information the president’s election integrity commission has requested.

With this report, we may have a clue as to why some states are resisting providing this data.

The Government Accountability Institute was able to obtain voter registration and voter history data from only 21 states because while some states shared it freely, “others impose exorbitant costs or refuse to comply with voter information requests.”

These 21 states represent “about 17 percent of all possible state-to-state comparison combinations.”

The institute compared the lists using an “extremely conservative matching approach that sought only to identify two votes cast in the same legal name.” It found that 8,471 votes in 2016 were “highly likely” duplicates.

Extrapolating this to all 50 states would likely produce, with “high-confidence,” around 45,000 duplicate votes.

The institute obtained this level of confidence by matching not only names and birthdays—which can be the same for different individuals—but also by contracting with companies, such as Virtual DBS, that have commercial databases to further cross-check these individuals using their Social Security numbers and other information.

According to the Government Accountability Institute’s experts, “the probability of correctly matching two records with the same name, birthdate, and Social Security number is close to 100 percent.” In fact, “using these match points will result in virtually zero false positives.”

The probability of 45,000 illegal duplicate votes is the low end of the spectrum, and it does not even account for other types of fraud such as ineligible voting by noncitizens and felons and absentee ballot fraud.

To put this number of fraudulent votes in perspective, Hillary Clinton won New Hampshire by fewer than 3,000 votes out of over 700,000 cast. Just this number of duplicate votes alone has the power to swing state results and, in turn, elections.

Unfortunately, New Hampshire refused to turn over its data for this study.

There have been other razor-tight elections in recent years. In 2000, the presidency was decided by 537 votes out of a total of 105 million cast. In 2008, Al Franken won his Minnesota Senate race by a mere 312 votes. He ended up being the deciding vote that gave this country Obamacare.

Though the institute did not look at the 2008 elections in this study, there is little doubt that the 2016 numbers show that duplicate voting and voter fraud are a real problem that can have serious consequential effects.

The Government Accountability Institute also used the state of Rhode Island as a test case. Over 30 percent of all registered voters in Rhode Island have no Social Security or driver’s license number on file.

While it is legal to register without providing this information, the institute notes that “confirming the identities of some of these voters is impossible using only the data contained in the state’s voter registration system.”

Without this “uniquely identifying information … there is no way to confirm a voter’s identity or citizenship … ” This shows the vulnerabilities that are ripe for any person or group wanting to take advantage of them.

The institute also found more than 15,000 voters registered at prohibited addresses “such as post office boxes, UPS stores, federal post offices, and public buildings.” In some cases, more than 100 voters “were registered to the same UPS store locations.”

They also found voters whose registered addresses were “gas stations, vacant lots, abandoned mill buildings, basketball courts, parks, warehouses, and office buildings.”

The institute tried to bring some of these problems to the attention of Rhode Island election officials as part of its test case. It provided officials with a list of 225 voters who “were registered using prohibited addresses.”

But Rhode Island refused to do anything about the problem beyond sending a letter to the voters. If a voter did not respond, the state refused to take any further action.

Instead, in an obvious attempt to deter the Government Accountability Institute, the state said that the institute would have to file a “voter challenge” and would be subject to a misdemeanor penalty if it filed a “false challenge.”

The fact that these election officials did not want to thoroughly investigate possible voter fraud illustrates one of the problems in this area: Too many election officials don’t want to know about these problems, and refuse to do anything when it is brought to their attention.

The Government Accountability Institute points out that the quality of the voter registration data in some states is very poor, with missing and obviously incorrect information. The institute found 45,880 votes cast by individuals whose dates of birth were more than 115 years before the election.

Several hundred votes were cast by individuals whose registration birthdates “indicated they were under 18 years old at the time of the election,” although some of these were through provisional ballots.

All of this is just the latest evidence that we have serious, substantive problems in our voter registration system across the country and that voter fraud is, without a doubt, real.

The Heritage Foundation has a database that is being constantly updated. It documents nearly 1,100 proven instances of voter fraud, including cases where elections were overturned because of proven fraud.

This kind of work, which the Government Accountability Institute has done, will be invaluable to the Election Integrity Commission as it researches the registration and voting process and looks for ways to fix its vulnerabilities and security problems, enhance our democratic process, and make sure every eligible American votes and is not disenfranchised by illegal votes.

Election integrity and public confidence in the election process are fundamental to preserving our democratic republic.

SOURCE

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The Obamacare Facts That Liberals Don’t Want You to Know

Perhaps too often, Americans take the findings of independent government agencies—whether executive or congressional—as fact.

The Congressional Budget Office, which has impacted the health care debate, has consistently said that repealing Obamacare would lead to around 22 to 23 million Americans losing their insurance by 2026.

This has been a frequent talking point for those that would like to keep President Barack Obama’s signature health care law.

But a recent commentary by health care expert Avik Roy pointed out how this number may be misleading at best.

Roy wrote in Forbes that according to leaked information he received from a congressional staffer, this 22 million number is in fact mostly coming from the projection of a repeal of the individual mandate.

The individual mandate is one of the most controversial parts of Obamacare that essentially forces Americans to buy health insurance, or receive a fine. Republican-backed repeal proposals to repeal universally aim to eliminate this regulation.

Roy wrote that “of the 22 million fewer people who will have health insurance in 2026 under the Senate [health care] bill, 16 million will voluntarily drop out of the market because they will no longer face a financial penalty for doing so: 73 percent of the total.”

Unlike the progressive narrative that repealing Obamacare will lead to tens of millions of Americans getting booted from their plans, it shows that nearly three-quarters of those leaving their plans will voluntarily withdraw from the ones they have.

An enormous 73 percent of the 22 million number will simply stop buying the product they are forced to purchase under current law.

This important fact has been mostly left out of the debate, as the CBO has not been entirely transparent with how its numbers are calculated. So far, the CBO has essentially refused to explain the primary reason so many Americans will go uninsured.

The CBO has been consistently praised for its purportedly unbiased analysis. A recent commentary for Wired said that “since its inception four decades ago, the CBO has occupied a rarified space in which the objectivity of data reigns.”

Americans are simply given a presumably nonpartisan number that pours out of the inner sanctums of a tight-knit agency as they debate the merits of policy that impacts all Americans and generations to come.

But in the messy space of politics, opaqueness of methodology can return skewed or incomplete results.

Drew Gonshorowski, a health care expert for The Heritage Foundation, wrote about the CBO’s transparency problem in The Hill. He wrote:

The CBO could better serve legislators, media and researchers if their models and methods were made public. Lifting this veil would allow more discussion around the effects of various proposals without having to wait for an explicit CBO score … [And] maybe one of the most important aspects of such a change, this would allow legislators to have real conversations about the effects of their legislation, publicly, with less delay.

Reps. Mark Walker, R-N.C., and Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, wrote in a commentary for the Washington Examiner how often CBO projections have been wrong and why it’s wrong for Congress to “blindly follow” its estimates.

For instance, they noted how the original 2010 CBO projections for Obamacare claimed that “21 million Americans would enroll in the insurance exchanges by 2016.” The real number ended up being around 10 million and is one of the reasons the market is so unstable.

The American people deserve an open debate on one of the most important policy issues of our generation.

It is a debate over the priorities and outcomes of a health care system that favors the individual and the family over the collective—one that throws vast decision-making power to government and bureaucracies, or is limited and placed closest to the hands of the people.

This is why transparency over potential policy outcomes is so essential.

SOURCE

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For more blog postings from me, see  TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL, GREENIE WATCH,  POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, AUSTRALIAN POLITICS, and Paralipomena (Occasionally updated),  a Coral reef compendium and an IQ compendium. (Both updated as news items come in).  GUN WATCH is now mainly put together by Dean Weingarten. I also put up occasional updates on my Personal blog and each day I gather together my most substantial current writings on THE PSYCHOLOGIST.

Email me  here (Hotmail address). My Home Pages are here (Academic) or  here (Pictorial) or  here  (Personal)

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1 comment:

Robert said...

Saying that if government-run-and-controlled health care were abolished in America that 22 million people would "lose" their insurance is like saying that a group of 22 people who escaped from prison "lost" their government-provided housing! No big loss, and what is gained is far more valuable.