• Twitter
  • Facebook
News-Sentinel.com Your Town. Your Voice.
Opening Arguments

Dogging the system

Yesterday, I remarked on the cat who's running for the U.S. Senate. Here's one vote that feline won't get:

An Albuquerque man says he successfully registered his dog to vote in Bernalillo County.

The dog owner said he saw a voter registration booth on the University of New Mexico's campus a few weeks ago and decided to see how easy it would be to register his dog to vote.

He said he was trying to expose the problems with the registration system.  He said he just received the dog's voter registration card in the mail Wednesday, and it was way too easy.

Shows how valuable our photo-ID requirement is, huh? "Say you wanna vote, mutt? Whip out that driver's license." 

 

Comments

littlejohn
Sat, 03/03/2012 - 2:09pm

The dog's owners are Republicans, otherwise there would be a great hue to have them arrested for voter fraud. The dog is a Whig.

Tim Zank
Sat, 03/03/2012 - 8:28pm

Certainly does bolster and prove once again our (the sane people) argument that voter I.D. is just common sense.

 

Christopher Swing
Mon, 03/05/2012 - 7:31am

Let us know when the dog actually manages to cast a vote.

And what kind of conviction the owner gets from his bone-headed stunt.

Tim Zank
Mon, 03/05/2012 - 12:36pm

I don't see anything "bone-headed" at all in exposing a broken system. The dog is irrelevant except to make the story a little more cute. The simple facts are, this guy was walking along on the campus when approached about registering to vote so he makes up a name and a social and registers as a democrat and BINGO, 2 weeks later his voter registration card shows up, which he can take to the polling place and cast a vote. Would you find that troubling Mr. Swing if he'd registered as a Republican instead of a Democrat?

 

How many other people approached on campus that day did the same thing with the express purpose of casting an extra vote?

 

I'd also bet $100 had he registered as a Republican it would have been researched and bounced.

Harl Delos
Mon, 03/05/2012 - 3:53pm

That's the reason there is 30 days between registration and election, Tim- so that there is time for the parties to examine and bounce bad registrations.

I hate to admit that Swing is right, but you know what they say about blind pigs and acorns....

Christopher Swing
Mon, 03/05/2012 - 7:41pm

It's pretty bone-headed in that:

1. Guy faces criminal charges: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/buster/registered-voter-dog-investigated-879412

2. It only got as far as registration, the easy part. He didn't successfully get to the part where a vote was cast and not caught.

Harl sees this too, even if he insists on being a childish jerk about it.

littlejohn
Mon, 03/05/2012 - 9:17pm

Tim, you still haven't produced evidence of your busloads of drunken, chain-smoking Democratic voters. Or were you just making stuff up?

Tim Zank
Mon, 03/05/2012 - 10:25pm

Claiming Democrats don't cheat at elections and voter registration (after over a century of evidence to the contrary) is kind of like Iran claiming they need Nukes for fuel, you just have to shake your head at the shear boldness of it all.  

Friggin hilarious.  

Harl Delos
Tue, 03/06/2012 - 4:55am

Claiming that the Dixiecrats, part of the GOP since Nixon's "Southern Strategy", haven't been trying to disenfranchise everyone but white protestant non-disabled since the 1800s is also absurd, Tim.

For decades, conservatives objected to a national identity card, but for some reason, making government bigger for no damnable reason at all seems to be the pastime of the neo-con.  

Show me a way to prove that your birth certificate is your own, and this scheme might make some sense - but you cannot, and it does not. 

Christopher Swing
Tue, 03/06/2012 - 7:35am

Tim, the fact that you can find examples of any party (ever) engaging in voter fraud doesn't lend any credence at all to your particular favorite urban legend. Extraordinary claim, extraordinary evidence and all that.

But looks like our little conservative dog-registering friend might have had ulterior motives:

"A local watchdog group claims that Tolbert's stunt was politically motivated because his wife works for Republican Heather Wilson's Senate campaign. Tolbert denies that."

But as far as dummies pulling this sort of registration stunt, looks like there's plenty even just in this one place:

"The county clerk said this is the second time this has happened during her five years in office. She said the last time, that person pleaded no contest and received two years of probation."

http://www.koat.com/news/30588160/detail.html

It's entertaining ("Friggin hilarious" even) to watch these people remove themselves from the voting rolls trying to make a point in about the dumbest way possible and damaging their own cause in the process.

john b. kalb
Tue, 03/06/2012 - 10:14am

And today we learn (from AWB) that a dead demo from our town is still contributing to the jackass party!  And maybe voting last November also??

Tim Zank
Tue, 03/06/2012 - 10:42am

John Kalb, it's a disgrace, but it's just what they do and it will never change.

Christopher Swing
Tue, 03/06/2012 - 11:39am

Are those the dates he gave the money to the party? Are those the dates the money was formally received? Were they checks? Was it via his wife or estate?

Too bad there's not an actual journalist around to answer these questions.

Christopher Swing
Wed, 03/07/2012 - 8:19am

Oh, and what do you know, an actual journalist did show up, and it looks like Dan Turkette has made a fool of himself again: http://bit.ly/x75BIo

(I like how he just assumes the Fort Wayne Newspapers IP address he has is Ben Lanka's specific computer. Wouldn't someone visiting from the N-S also show up as being a FWN IP? That's just Dan's bonus buffoonery, given his big talk about knowing teh intertubes.)

I like how Turkette cries about people doing actual journalism stealing from him (he still thinks people can steal facts) but then he copies Lanka's <i>entire article</i> into his post without permission.

Quantcast