Published November 6, 2015 – Woman Jailed on Charge of Illegal Voting
A Grand Prairie woman who is not an American citizen was arrested Friday on charges she voted illegally in Dallas County, prosecutors said.
Rosa Maria Ortega, 35, was booked into the Tarrant County Jail and was being held on $10,000 bond.
…
Dallas County Elections Administrator Toni Pippins-Poole said records showed that Ortega had voted a total of five times.The first was in the Republican primary in 2004 and the most recent was the Republican primary runoff in May 2014, Pippins-Poole said.
Ms. Ortega’s conviction and eight year prison sentence last month is getting a lot more attention. Not all that informed attention (apparently people in this country don’t understand how one can be a legal resident and not a citizen) and the GOP & Trumpsters are using this to support their claim of massive voter fraud. Conveniently omitting that this case predated the 2016 election and either ignoring that Ms. Ortega had previously illegally voted in Republican primaries or fact-free allegations that she must be a stealth Democratic messing with the GOP primary results.
Nothing wrong with widespread reporting of an instance of voter fraud. Nothing wrong with a penalty that would discourage most people from voting illegally. That would be:
Two-thirds of US would struggle to cover $1,000 crisis
Not $5,000. Thirty days in jail would be a real punishment for most people. Eight years is like something out of the dark ages.
What’s also not okay is for jerks to use this one instance as evidence for Trump’s claim of millions of illegal voters. Or that it contradicts what liberals have said about voter fraud. Liberals have always allowed that voter fraud exists in teeny-tiny numbers (and based on the very rare fraudsters that have been caught, they are as likely (or more likely) to be Republican as Democrat. The liberal position is that tight restrictions on voter eligibility disenfranchises far more legally eligible voters than the few non-citizens that attempt to vote. And that those tighter restrictions increases the administrative cost of elections, increased and unnecessary government spending that Republicans pretend to care about). (Note that NYTimes has a front page article on this case if you care to read it.)
Voter disenfranchisement is always wrong. Doubly wrong when, as it generally is, to suppress the legal vote of one’s political opponent. If a party and/or candidate can’t win fair and square, then they aren’t suitable for public office. Doesn’t matter if it’s Democrats or Republicans disenfranchising voters.
The penalty for voter fraud should be the same regardless of political party affiliation, race, color, or creed. I may chuckle at a white Republican caught engaging in voter fraud, but I don’t find it appropriate to throw him/her in the slammer for eight years. How many Republicans would disagree with me on that? Any?
I’m OK with it as a maximum penalty, but I can’t see imposing the max in this case. I could see a $1,000 fine and no jail or at least time-served for a first offense that was not part of a conspiracy to defraud. Having a conviction in itself carries an economic penalty and would undoubtedly hurt her chances of naturalization.
Would also say that a guy I worked with was a former Chicago precinct captain and ghost worker. his patron, a prominent alderman, is now serving a twenty year sentence. I do approve that sort of punishment for organized fraud. But I see no allegation of that in this case.
My friend’s real job was voter fraud after the polls closed. It’s a lot easier. All they had to do was put in ballots for many people who didn’t vote. The primaries were particularly important to the Machine and typically few people vote. So if your precinct has 800 registered voters and only 100 show up, you put in two or three hundred phony ballots and mark people you know as having voted. Very few people check to see if they are listed as having voted. If they do it can be brushed off as a clerical error. This and other techniques are easier and more rewarding than sending phony voters out.
My friend’s real job was voter fraud after the polls closed.
That’s election fraud. Not voter fraud. Important to use the correct correct description because the crimes are different. And election fraud is more prevalent and more damaging than voter fraud.
I stand corrected. To recap: Election fraud after the polls close is a lot easier and more effective than voter fraud.
Indeed.
I tend to agree 8 years in prison is out of the dark ages. But then, this is still a country that leads the world in incarceration, and judges (many of whom face re-election) probably have learned it’s better to err on the side of being too tough.
This one went a little too far however.
Agree, a stiff fine (for her income level), plus many hours of community service and maybe some classwork time learning about civics and the Constitution, would have been a better solution.
And much less costly to the state — which contrary to rightwing claptrap, lefties are mindful of.
Doesn’t it cost over $100K to incarcerate someone for a year? Texas is spending nearly a million dollars on this case considering police, attorneys, judge and the like. A woman voted five times when she didn’t have the right. Good use of taxpayer dollars, right?
Likely below the average (which last time I checked was approx $50,000/yr) in Texas.
Speaking of costs:
All The Trump Kids Are Skiing In Aspen This Weekend, Guess How Many Secret Service Agents Are With Them?
(Inaccurate title — the two youngest Trump kids aren’t there and they have their own Secret Service details.)
Sure costs the public purse a lot of many to make sure no adult children of Presidents (former Presidents as well because the last three have extended the protection for their adult children after the expiration of their term of office) are ever harmed. (Not that such protection did JFK any good and it didn’t prevent an attack on Reagan.)
How much did Obama’s Hawaii vacations cost? This is trivia. (So was the griping about Obama’s trips)
Now that case of the secret service partying with prostitutes, that’s a legitimate gripe.
Part of the “bad behavior” in the military, FBI, CIA, and SS is male/macho culture. (Many in JFK’s SS detail in Dallas drank until the week hours of the morning and then had little to no sleep.) Not easy for the boss to institute a zero tolerance policy that will be adhered to without exception. Get real — pissing off those in charge of one’s personal protection doesn’t sound like a good idea to me.
Presidential vacation costs — some of that can be roughly calculated. It’s not as if a POTUS can fly commercial and isn’t allowed to take vacations and somewhat regularly return home. (Only those that hate whoever is in the WH get apoplectic over reasonable presidential vacations. GWB took an excessive amount of time off, but the costs were reasonable.)
Obama took two formal vacations a year — Hawaii and Martha’s Vineyard — and included his whole family. (Total one-way flight time/year eleven hours plus two helicopter rides from the WH and limo or helicopter at the destination. ten hours and Did he, with or without his family, average as much as one return to Chicago a year? They added on a few vacation days to some of their overseas official travel. Were there a hundred SS agents along when Michelle and their girls went on their ski vacations? (Have no idea is that was an annual trip.)
Five trips to Palm Beach in less than two months — total one-way flight time ten hours and twenty minutes. Plus five helicopter flights and limos in FL. In addition the huge security costs in NYC for the kid too precious to change school mid-year. (No estimate on the separate government travel arrangements for the wife and kid to DC and Palm Beach.)
Trump kids since the inauguration that have been reported — Uruguay, Kuwait, Vancouver, Aspen, and some Caribbean island. SS agents were also in tow for Barbie and Ken’s family Christmas Hawaii vacation.
(Trivia — weekends in residence at the WH or Camp David aren’t logged as vacation time off.)
Still absolutely minor in my view. Hardly a blip in the total budget. What’s the cost of one F-35 again? Or the Bridge to Nowhere? The ACA changes, that’s something to complain about. Gutting the EPA that’s something to complain about.
Symbolism always matters.
Believe you meant comparatively minor. But why are you comparing the Trump family government costs to that of a piece of military equipment? Half a million dollars a day (by one estimate) to protect a wife and child that choose to live in NYC isn’t chump change.
Nixon voluntarily relinquished Pat’s SS protection with a statement that he didn’t think she needed SS agents to go to the hairdresser’s. Shortly after that, he relinquished his own SS detail because he didn’t view it as a necessary government expense.
Proxmire thought $900 hammers weren’t too insignificant not to highlight.
Congress did try to rein in the increasing number and cost of SS details for former presidents and spouses in 1997. But that was repealed in 2012. And even if he doesn’t make it to the three month mark, Trump and his wife will have lifetime SS protection (and he can probably add some post-presidency SS protection for Ivanka as well). I appreciate that there are a lot of nuts and a lot of guns in this country, but how many former presidents have been attacked or been seriously threatened? The Lincoln assassination conspiracy included VP Johnson and SoS Seward, who was seriously injured and the attack on Johnson not carried out. VP Marshall may have been targeted by a bomb that did go off, but afterwards he declined personal protection. The risk for presidential candidates is higher than it is for VPs.
VPs (in general) are much lower in public profile than presidents and therefore, don’t attract the attention of nutcases. Perhaps callous on my part, but wrt political assassinations, VPs are expendable; so, why bother? It’s my understanding that Biden’s daughter declined SS protection without adverse effect.
The Secret Service doesn’t release information on threats to family members of sitting presidents and VPs or former presidents and spouses. So, we have to rely upon the agency to assess the risk and request the appropriate budget. (Are they competent to do that? Do they pad the threat levels to keep the size of the agency larger than needed?) What we do know is that protection for losing presidential nominees ends with the election and VPs lose protection when they leave office. So, the number of threats must be at or near zero and actual attacks have been zero. (Although Obama did extend Cheney’s SS protection.)
Like Carter, but for different reasons, the Obamas will need protection for some time. But that’s because religious nutcases, Republicans, and rightwingers have fomented so much hatred for them. Now Democrats are doing the same thing and a hundred SS agents are required to protect Trump’s adult children on a ski weekend.
A billion here a billion there, pretty soon you are talking about real money.
I’ll concede that my years in DoD may have given me a false perception, but I still think it’s chump change.
Famous Romans used to walk around the Forum and live in their houses without guards. Until the Republic started to fall apart.
Inappropriate not for at least one person here to acknowledge an anniversary. The 14th for the beginning of our destruction of Iraq.
Sold to us by Bush/Cheney, the warmongering Democrats in Congress, cable TV, and the NYTimes and WaPo. An excerpt from WaPo’s Cohen:
A fictional character in a musical as a “favorite philosopher” should have been a clue that a deep thinking wasn’t writing the column.
Only a fool would not have seen through Powell’s dog and pony show. But the fools in America have been a majority for a long time and learning appears to be beyond their mental capacity.
>>An excerpt from WaPo’s Cohen:
it is truly amazing, the collection of fucking brain-dead godawful idiots who are paid to spew on America’s most respected media outlets. Cohen, Friedman, Brooks, Will, Dowd, Krauthammer… I could go on for a while… every one of them will improve the world when they stop wasting our valuable air…
but worse than them are those critics who talk about how Cohen or Brooks are bad but don’t understand this is really an indictment of the owners of the WaPo and NYT and what they want us to be told.
I still remember Senator Byrd’s appeal to let the UN inspectors do it’s job before going to war. (I was listening to it on my car radio.) Very eloquent, but he was dismissed by his own Party as an old racist, not to be listened to.
Meant to add that that same Party was shocked to lose his state and was dismissed as deplorables. or was it “horribles”. Everyone knows they meant “Dumb Hillbillies.”