{"id":18867,"date":"2017-08-13T00:29:56","date_gmt":"2017-08-13T06:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lastbestnews.com\/site\/?p=18867"},"modified":"2017-10-04T06:05:56","modified_gmt":"2017-10-04T12:05:56","slug":"city-lights-voter-fraud-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/2017\/08\/city-lights-voter-fraud-is-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg\/","title":{"rendered":"City Lights: Voter fraud is just the tip of the iceberg"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Voters\"<\/a>

Let’s go back to those happy days before the era of rampant voter fraud.<\/p><\/div>\n

Last month, I had occasion<\/a> to criticize Montana Secretary of State Corey Stapleton, who seemed to be determined to cast doubt on the validity of our election processes.<\/p>\n

I thought it was a strange goal, given that the secretary of state is the chief elections officer for Montana. I wondered, was it something like having Scott Pruitt lead the Environmental Protection Agency, which he seems bent on dismantling<\/a>?<\/p>\n

\"Ed\"<\/a>

Ed Kemmick<\/p><\/div>\n

Maybe, but it’s not hard to imagine why some people might consider the EPA heavy-handed, and anyway Pruitt was appointed by President Trump, not selected by voting citizens.<\/p>\n

But Stapleton was elected, and prior to his election I can’t think of many agencies\u00a0of government that were as intrinsically admired as our county elections offices. Occasionally there were some glitches in the vote counting, and some years there were long lines at the voting booth, but nobody doubted the results once they were in.<\/p>\n

Even when there were recounts, they served only to strengthen trust in elections, because\u00a0they almost always demonstrated the soundness of the complicated process of collecting and accurately tallying votes. So I was baffled by Stapleton’s relentless harping on all the voter fraud that apparently only he could see.<\/p>\n

Now, however, I get it. Stapleton cleared everything up last week, when he addressed a meeting of the Montana Association of Clerks and Recorders at Fairmont Hot Springs.<\/p>\n

He was reported <\/a>to have said, “We\u2019ve got to acknowledge that if we live in a state that has never \u2026 prosecuted and convicted voter fraud, then we might have a bias toward a system that doesn\u2019t want to know that. I\u2019m not trying to say that everything is rotted. I\u2019ve never tried to say that. But what I\u2019m saying is, you can\u2019t rule that out.\u201d<\/p>\n

In other words, he is simply acting on the axiom that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” Why blithely assume that because no one has ever been convicted of voter fraud, that there must be little or no fraud occurring?<\/p>\n

\"CapreAir_Variable\"<\/a><\/div><\/div>Stapleton, like Socrates before him, wants to shake up our way of thinking, expand our minds, make us more open to possibilities we have resisted considering.<\/p>\n

He wants to change the bias of our elections system to one that is constantly on the lookout for voter fraud, dedicated to prosecuting, convicting and pillorying those who would seek to change the direction of our country through fraudulent practices. People, for example, who would forge their spouse’s signature because it’s election day and he or she is still at work and forgot to vote\u00a0on time, which has never happened in the Kemmick household.<\/p>\n

Indeed, this approach would work just as well in countless other areas of government.<\/p>\n

I did some looking and do you know that in our entire\u00a0history, no one has ever been convicted of illegally killing a whale in Montana? Do you think no one has ever illegally killed a whale in Montana, or is it possible that Fish & Game has a bias toward not wanting to know whether such illicit harvesting has taken place?<\/p>\n

Similarly, I found that no cosmetologist had ever been convicted of intentionally starting a client’s hair on fire. Could it be that the Board of Cosmetology is predisposed to assume that all incidents of pate-related wildfires resulted from accidental causes? I’m not saying the Board of Cosmetology is rotten through and through, but I certainly can’t rule that out.<\/p>\n

And like all good Montana citizens, I want to believe that employees of the Montana Lottery are not taking home giant sacks of scratch cards every day and giving them out to friends and relatives. It would not be prudent to harbor\u00a0such Pollyanna-like notions, however.<\/p>\n

If we need TSA-style body monitors checking out the people leaving the Montana Lottery offices, let’s just admit it, rather than stumbling along in a daze\u00a0of willful ignorance.<\/p>\n

Lastly \u2014 and admittedly this is more a federal matter than one that concerns the state \u2014 is anyone else alarmed by the Border Patrol’s announcement last week<\/a> that it had apprehended an undocumented Irishman trying to hike his way into the United States near Glacier National Park?<\/p>\n

When I heard the news, my first reaction was to consider it jolly good fun. I mean, come on, one Irishman in a world with millions of refugees, with a U.S. president still threatening to build a multibillion-dollar wall along our southern border?<\/p>\n

But think about it. If we live in a country that only very rarely interdicts migratory Irishmen, isn’t it time to ask ourselves whether our Border Patrol is biased in the direction of failing to acknowledge that there might be tens of thousands\u00a0of Hibernians leaking through our northern border week after week?<\/p>\n

Corey Stapleton is too good to be a mere secretary of state. President Trump would be doing all of us a great favor by appointing him\u00a0to head the U.S. Border Patrol.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month, I had occasion to criticize Montana Secretary of State Corey Stapleton, who seemed to be determined to cast doubt on the validity of our election processes. I thought it was a strange goal, given that the secretary of state is the chief elections officer for Montana. I wondered, was it something like having […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":18868,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[702,926,6154,6155],"class_list":["post-18867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-prairie-lights","tag-corey-stapleton","tag-epa","tag-montana-association-of-clerks-and-recorders","tag-secretary-of-state","prominence-top-story"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=18867"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19605,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18867\/revisions\/19605"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=18867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=18867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/montana-mint.com\/lastbestnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=18867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}