There are 15 states with photo ID requirements for voting.
This is correct. The states are: Idaho, South Dakota, Arizona, Kansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, Hawaii, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Mississippi, Tennessee, Georgia, and Florida.
Mr. Obama lost in all of them.
President Obama won Hawaii, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Florida. So he won 5 of the 15.
The other 10 are conservative states where he was not expected to be competitive. Conservatives like voter ID photo ID laws, so it's not surprising that conservative states passed these laws, or that Obama lost them.
The writer got his facts wrong, and then used faulty logic to try to make a point unsupported by his facts.
In places with the weakest controls, specifically counties in Florida, Ohio, Colorado, and Pennsylvania, he generally drew turnouts in the 90% or greater range and won by better than 95% of the vote.
The only criteria the writer has for "weakest controls" is that he claims it, based on the outcome. The claim of 90% turnout was false, and debunked in several news stories. No claim for the 90% is ever accompanied by an actual link to voting results. Obama did win some precincts by 95% or better, but so did every democrat running in those precincts over the last 10 years, because there are in fact places where everybody is a liberal democrat.
Losers tend to look for external explanations,
Especially easily deceived losers who like to grasp at straws and live in a fantasy world.
and a lot of conservatives looking at numbers like those from Florida's St. Lucie County (where Mr. Obama got 247,713 votes from only 175,554 registered voters)
That claim is false, started by an idiot who saw a report on the number of ballots returned, and didn't know that there were two ballots per voter. Now lots of conservatives repeat this stupid claim because they can't be bothered to check the facts.
are starting to question the legitimacy of the electoral results as reported.
This is one of those "action sentences" used by writers who don't have anything useful to say, but want to suggest that other people have bought into their delusion.
Sad thing is, there are real issues, but they are being buried by the absurd global conspiracy arguments being made, which act only to make conservatives look stupid.
That's not good news for democracy,
That's not good for conservatives, when our own side makes us look like fools.
because the system works only if we trust it -- and having a majority in the GOP write off a minority who think the results were rigged serves nobody.
Not sure what the writer's point is here -- he starts out talking about trusting the system being important, and then faults people for not buying into rediculous conspiracy theories. Not even Democrats. So what we need is an independent means of testing the electoral result.
Something the writer has no clue about how to actually do. For example, you could take a precinct where you think the results are odd, and then look at the historical data for that precinct. I did this for several of the precincts mentioned in various blogs, and found that the results of this election match historical norms.
You can also compare results to polls, and in this case you find the polls match the election results, even unvarnished trivial looks like the RCP average, which shows that Obama was leading in 3 of the 4 swing states mentioned in this article. The traditional way of doing this is, of course, to assume legitimacy, then gather anecdotal evidence of vote-cheating, promote that to sworn testimony through.....
That's hardly the "traditional way" of testing the results. What that is is simply the traditional outcome of an election. We "assume" legitimacy because there's no value in assuming fraud. Do you go to the grocery store assuming that all the food has been poisoned, and then buy equipment to test all your food when you get home to be, sure it is safe? No, you assume that if there was poison you'd find out about it pretty quickly.
The system works, because unlike the fantasy world occupied by the conspiracists who give conservatives a bad name, in the real world people who run for office actually want to win more than anything, having invested their lives in the process, and therefore are highly motivated to examine the election outcome and find evidence that they were cheated.
A perfect example of this is Allen West, who isn't the exception, but the norm. He saw things that looked wrong, and he pushed for a recount. We don't know how that will turn out.
I've never known a politician who would walk away from a fraudulent result without a fight. People who would do so would never get into politics in the first place.
You need to stop posting such fact-driven and common sense responses on these threads. You’ll put a real crimp in people’s delusion of having been “stabbed in the back.”
Wait, never mind. Looking downthread I see nobody has bothered to try to refute your comments, just continued on with the conspiracy claims.
FWIW, I’m in Florida, and they asked to see my driver’s license and looked it up to see if I was registered before I was given a ballot.