I'm not focused on whether something's a "law" or not; I'm more focused on whether actions that were done were v**er suppression or not.

In my quotes below, I'll use braces ( {...} ) instead of square brackets, to avoid running afoul of the OPP formatting.

In what follows, the first paragraph is written satirically. This is a quote from pages 98-99, Ibid. (the same book as in my earlier post):

"Then there is the 'Mohamed Mohamed' posse. Because they share the most common name on the planet, they were able to pull off their e*******l crime. Though, inexplicably, they changed their middle names. In Columbus, Ohio, alone, there are more than 20 Mohamed Mohameds illegally registering in two states.

"According to Kobach.

"It would be a joke ... except that thousands of these Mohameds and Michael Jacksons and James Browns were purged from the v**er rolls ..."

"Once again, I brought in Mark Swedlund and his expert database team. They went through name by name and discovered that _two_million_ of the supposed matched v**ers had either mis-matched middle names or mis-matched suffixes (Jr./Sr.) or both.

"... reports about Crosscheck cited Kobach's statement that the v**ers were matched not only by first and last name, but by middle name, suffix, date of birth and last four digits of their social security numbers."

Pause, at this point, and reflect on the above example of many people named Mohamed Mohamed but having different middle names.

Resume:

"But then, I got my hands on the secret instructions for Crosscheck's implementation sent by Kobach to every v****g state official telling them they could 'ignore' mis-matches. Indeed, says Swedlund, almost _every_one_ of the millions on the list was a mismatch.

"... Not a single American newspaper asked for the actual list of alleged double-registered v**ers. Not one asked for the names of the _hundreds_of_thousands_ of v**ers named Jackson and Rodriguez and Mohamed who were purged and lost their right to v**e.

Page 101:

"Strach doubled down on the drama, hiring a big-name FBI agent, Chuck Stuber, to arrest these felon fraudulent v**ers {such as people supposedly v****g twice, once in each of two states}."

Page 104:

"... North Carolina's million-dollar manhunt had produced nothing, zero, ... 'These v**ers were hard to find.' So, I offered to give him Kevin Hayes's mom's address.

"His eyes popped open wide. He realized I had something he wished I didn't have: his confidential Crosscheck list for tens of thousands of North Carolina v**ers."

"North Carolinas's Stuber and Strach, after a year of hunting, never convicted, never even charged one double-v**er on the Crosscheck list .... There were no illegal v**ers ... but Crosscheck eliminated enough Hayeses, Jacksons and Mohameds to help flip the state from an Obama win in 2008 to Trump in 2016."

Page 109:

"You could call this Jim Crow trick the 'Last name game.'

"... According to the US Census, 85 of the 100 most common last names in America are minority names -- Rodriguez, Jones, Chong, Patel, Jackson, etc. ...

(Page 110) "The result, the list contains gazillions of Jesse Jacksons but not one double of Kris Kobach, Jon Husted nor David Koch."

Page 111:

"I showed him {Kobach} his own Kansas hit list, matching James _Evan_ Johnson with James _P._ Johnson. ... I showed him that the clearly illegal advice {"to ignore the social security number and other mis-matches"} had the Great Seal of the Secretary of State of Kansas stamped on it ..."

(end of quotes)

As you suggested that I do, you can "Try again", if you want to. I would just keep quoting from the same book, although maybe I've done enough of that and will give it a rest.

Clues (sometimes accurate and reliable ones) are left; I don't know how they would find clues in California, but it's easy to point to "ice cores" in places like Antarctica. There was no thermometer back a few millennia ago, but the stuff that ended up in the ice got frozen in place anyway, and is still there to measure _now_ when we _do_ have instruments.

I think so too.

Each person does have to choose. It's just not absolute for trusting one entity for everything. And when mistrust is high toward all of the choices, you have to do more by yourself. That only gives limited capability. That's why people band together to pool their resources. A few examples of banding together are: unions, governments, corporations, m*****a, and lynch mobs. Sometimes they band together for some good purpose, and sometimes they band together for some bad purpose, and usually it's a mixture in-between.

No, it's not "the Democrats" ("most in bed with the big companies, not the Republicans", you said). Instead of saying things like that, you'd be more effective to either focus on something more more specific or find a statistical study to back up the generalization.

Some people do things like she describes doing. I know one guy who has done it occasionally. Just not on the exact same topic.

"national enquirer": generally used as an example of yellow journalism.

It doesn't seem to have anything to do with anything she wrote. I think it's just something you inserted, maybe just being silly.

The main thing I have handy is a book: _How Trump Stole 2020_, by Greg Palast. One of his earlier books was _The Best Democracy Money Can Buy_ which is probably about the same topics (v**er suppression as much as anything else -- that seems to be the main thing he's been investigating for the past 20 years) but 20 years earlier.

I'll copy about a page of it (_How Trump Stole 2020_), here for you or anyone who's curious: This is from pages 12-13:

"When a registration drive sent Georgia officials 86,419 registration forms of new v**ers, mostly young students of color, Kemp {Brian Kemp, Secretary of State of Georgia} simply did not add 40,000 of them to the v**er rolls. In 2016, I {Greg Palast} flew to Atlanta to find out what the hell has woing on. I met attorney Nse Ufot:

"{She said:} 'You know what {Kemp's office} told us? "We don't know what you're talking about. What forms?" They did not disappear. We intentionally registered v**ers on paper forms so that we could make copies. We knew who they were. They were not on the v**er rolls.'

"Kemp responded by threatening to arrest the v***r r**********n leaders -- including the founder, Stacey Abrams -- for alleged criminal tampering of v***r r**********n forms. That is, they copied the forms so Kemp couldn't disappear them.

"Ufot saw the registrations sitting in government offices, piled high and dusty, 'with my own four eyes' (she wears glasses). Once the forms were 'discovered,' Kemp's office then claimed the government simply had no time to review the v**er applications. That was 2014. In 2018, four years later, and running against Abrams, Kemp still had not found time to add her v**ers."

A little earlier, on page 11, Palast wrote: "(If you're thinking, 'How can this guy run for Governor and be in charge of his own e******n {being Secretary of State of Georgia while running for Governor of Georgia, the same state}?,' you've never been to Georgia.)"

I've been in strange enough situations, occasionally, that I can imagine that such a thing could happen either in my life or in someone else's.

Just now I went back and re-read it. The strangest part of it seems to be "They go all red faced trying to get me red faced". Is that the part that you find not credible?

According to a literal reading, it would be "to find out what was going on".

I don't want to reply specifically about the v*****es this time; I'm trying to make a larger point about trust, verification, government, and large corporations.

As one contemplates "governments" and business "large corporations", and thinks about which of them to trust, one could think in several ways:

1. What are the motivations of that entity?

1.a. Large corporations (or leaders of them) occasionally say that their goal or purpose is to make "profit". This is sometimes referred to as "the bottom line", as if everyone ought to already be on the same page about exactly what is The Most Important Thing.

So, in my opinion, one can assume that a big business corporation is motivated by "profit" and that this is probably one of the top one or two things that motivate it. Profit is probably the _main_ thing that motivates it.

So what can one trust a large corporation to do? Well, most likely, one can trust it to expend considerable effort to increase its profits. If there is a tradeoff, it is likely to prefer whichever side of the tradeoff gives it more profits.

2. Accountability: Governments in the USA and large business corporations in the USA each have some kind of accountability, none perfect of course:

2.a. The most obvious accountability is where citizens v**e for or against political candidates. In this way, a president or a congressperson, and many local officials, who do something his or her constituents don't like, can be v**ed out of office.

2.b. Among large business corporations, I can think of three possible ways they might have "accountability":

2.b.1. Accountability to shareholders, who v**e. This would work best for the shareholders who have very large blocks of stock in that corporation.

2.b.2. A CEO's accountability to a Board of Directors (or wh**ever businesses are calling those bodies): this probably amounts to ensuring that a CEO has to keep profits up.

2.b.3. Citizens have the option to not buy the end-user consumer products of a corporation. For example, I could refuse to buy any Apple products (my computer, my iPhone). Then what would I do? Maybe I'd buy Microsoft products; but I like Microsoft even less than Apple. In the food industry, if I've got something against Genetic Modifications in the food supply (GMOs), I could refuse to buy any GMO foods, but that might be hard to do if GMO products were not labeled as such.

And so on. Our federal government is designed to be accountable and to have safeguards against abuses of its power. It was _designed_ in such a way that we are supposed to be able to trust it and verify what it's doing and hold its officials accountable. (But I see that some parts of the government, like "the CIA", are much less accountable than others, to v**ers.) All citizens who have reached v****g age, regardless of wealth, are supposed to be able to v**e. There's supposed to be some equal standing among the v**ers (regardless of wealth), sometimes expressed in the slogan "one person one v**e", although we can see that's not always true because of the e*******l college and various v**er suppressions.

The main purpose of the federal government, and its basic design, is to represent the will of the People.

The main purpose of large business corporations is to serve their shareholders.

I have some hope of correcting flaws and sins of the federal government; its purpose, and my purpose as a citizen, is to make it represent the will of the People, to put it most simply.

I don't think I could ever get a large business corporation to represent the will of the People in the way that the federal government was designed to do.

Why would you not believe what she told?

What she told was:

"I've done that. You remember back when Viriginia passed a gun law last year. I couldn't find a good article on it so I went up there to find out what was going on and boy things got interesting. They go all red faced trying to get me red faced and at a point I decided I had everything I needed. Mission accomplished!"

He wouldn't call it evil; but basically, yeah, what you're saying here is essentially true.

I like this post that 336Robin wrote.

I do have different thoughts about some of those Republicans, though.

This will definitely be off-topic, so if the reader wants to stay on topic, skip the following.

I want to share my thoughts about George Bush Senior (almost the only Republican president whom I might have liked).

I liked George Bush Senior. I did not know much about him. He seemed a decent fellow.

One of the few things I noticed about him was the criticism against him that went like this: "He said 'Read my lips. No new taxes' but he lied." That criticism fell flat with me.

First of all, such people, such as presidents and congresspeople, should not be making such simplistic promises about taxes, in the first place. Taxation is not _that_ simple. It makes sense to have taxes. We need the right balances between taxes and spending, and we have to decide _what_ and _how_ to tax, and decide _what_ to spend the money on and _why_. And _how_much_, of each thing, of course.

To make one blanket promise about taxes, like "no new taxes" is just silly. No-one can know whether we might need a new tax somewhere sometime (For example, if suddenly we're attacked and there's a war, we might have to tax to support a war effort. That's unlikely, I think, but possible, and nobody should promise one way or another about that, because something unexpected like that might come up.)

Such a promise is like pandering to people who don't know any better than to boil down taxation to such an oversimplistic thought.

So Bush was at fault for even making that promise; but I never took him seriously about that promise anyway. It was just a silly promise in the first place, barely above the level of the issue about broccoli or wh**ever vegetable he liked.

But the criticism about it was worse. Of all the things to criticize a president for, or to criticize his administration or policies for, there surely ought to be something better to talk about than "read my lips, no new taxes". The criticizers seemed to me sillier than the president, about that. They act as though all taxation were bad. It's not. _Some_ taxation is bad, but you'd never figure out which, by listening to those folks.

For a long time, it seemed like all I ever heard, about Bush Sr., was "read my lips" and variations on that theme.

So I felt that if that's what his criticizers are like, he must be a pretty good guy.

"there are still dedicated public servants"

Yes. I agree.

"to stop speeding up that change"

Right. I agree.