Yeah, There's Still No Voter Fraud, Despite Your Idiot Facebook Friends

Yup yup yup

In today's "nobody could have seen this coming" news, it seems there's a whole passel of Donald Trump supporters who are finding CRIMINAL VOTER FRAUDING AND ELECTION RIGGING all over the place, and running to Facebook and other social media to spread the word. Mercy, it sure does prove there's a great big market for paranoia out there, if not any actual voting fraud. Some F'rinstances:

The Voting Machine Changed My Vote! Except It Didn't!

This'n comes straight from the Horse's Ass:  

Except, no, that didn't actually happen -- but thanks to the miracle of retweets, tens of thousands of people "know" it's true. What really happened was that the voter dun goofed (though perhaps we can also look at poor voting machine design, maybe? ): Frank Phillips, the Tarrant County Elections Administrator, explained what really happened:

“Our investigations have indicated that the voter did not follow the directions for straight-party voting when they inadvertently click the ‘enter’ button or turn the wheel, causing the change in votes,” he said. “Further, in each incident where we could actually speak to a voter, they tell us that they discovered the changed vote on the summary screen display.”

So there was a goof, the voter saw it on the summary screen, and then either corrected the goof or got help from a poll worker. Now, we'd add that crummy machine or interface design that might lead to such errors is bad and should be fixed, but that's not fraud, that's inefficiency. I hate certain features on my smartphone, but I don't think LG corporation is out to rig which calls I can answer.

The Voting Machine Changed My Vote! It's Broken, And Will Be Fixed!

In Georgia, a touch-screen voting machine in Bryan County was taken out of service after a voter reported he'd tried to vote for Hillary Clinton, but the screen showed a vote for Donald Trump; after three tries, it finally recorded the right choice, and the vote was recorded. The man's wife had the same problem, so the couple had a poll worker look at it, and the machine was removed from service. The Georgia Secretary of State's Office has opened an investigation, but suspects it was only a problem in how the machine was calibrated:

“We are confident that machines are not ‘flipping’ votes,” said David Dove, the office’s chief of staff and legal counsel. “It appears with this particular machine that the county did not properly conduct logic and accuracy testing on this unit. That test ensures the geographic areas on the unit’s screen correspond to the underlying ballot format. This testing is required by state law.”

Translation: machine broken, not fraud. A few reports of similar errors were reported in other counties, and voters are being advised to double-check their choices before finalizing their votes. Yr Wonkette's takeaway from both this and the Texas story: there's a lot to be said for paper optical scan ballots.

Snopes reports that a story of a single miscalibrated machine in Illinois -- from the 2014 election -- is also circulating as "evidence" of widespread voter fraud.

Bring On The 'Fraud' Fraud

New York Times correspondent Campbell Robertson tweeted this correction of an outright hoax story making the rounds on Facebook:

So, totally fake. But your paranoid uncle saw it on the Internet!

If You See Something, Freak Right The Fuck Out

Buzzfeed writer Katie Notopoulos discovered a terrifying case of potential voting fraud -- or at least a terrified Facebook poster who saw someone writing down names from a graveyard and simply KNEW it had to be a vote-rigger copying down the names of dead people to register them to vote:

Pro-tip to amateur sleuths: This would really be a slow, time-wasting way to find the names of dead people to add to voter rolls, considering that most obituaries are available online nowadays. Also, "I can't think of any other reason a person would be doing this" probably says a lot more about the person doing the thinking than about the person in the graveyard. (We'd have assumed they were amateur ghost-hunters, and felt quietly superior because we know there's no such thing as ghosts. We'd have been wrong, but at least without calling 911.)

Happily, the graveyard invader was just doing genealogical research. And said he was a Republican. The original vote fraud investigator was challenged in her Facebook comments by the suspect, and her self-righteous justification -- she was only protecting the integrity of the vote!!!!! -- is simply precious:

Look, bub, if you were a REAL conservative, you'd appreciate I was out there protecting the vote from ghosts and calling the cops on you.

So there's your roundup of all the fraud that isn't happening! Also, no, the Justice Department didn't send out a memo warning that it's against the law to investigate voting fraud. But they did say voter intimidation is against the law, which is the same thing, isn't it?

Keep watching the polls! Or the skies, since in-person voting fraud is about as real as chemtrails.

[ RawStory / Ft Worth Star-Telegram / AJC / Snopes / Snopes again.]