Posted on 03/10/2003 11:01:15 AM PST by jjm2111
Edited on 05/26/2004 5:12:34 PM PDT by Jim Robinson. [history]
March 10, 2003 -- There's an old joke about a lady who goes into a butcher shop to buy a chicken. She lifts up a chicken and starts sniffing it. She sniffs under one wing, then the other, and on and on till she has sniffed up and down the entire bird. Finally, the butcher blurts out: "Lady, could you pass that test?"
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
Supposedly, the Brooklyn DA's office has received several thousand emails on this one alone.
Why do I feel like Ms. Main is not giving us the whole story here?
Did he live where he voted from? Ms. Main says he did stay and recieve mail there. This does not mean that he lived there. Did he have a permanent residence elsewhere?
If I stay at a friend's house on alternate Fridays, and have mail delivered to me there, am I allowed to vote in that district? Or do I have to vote in the district where I live?
Contrary to Ms. Main's opinion, this is a major issue. Residency and voting requirements are spelled out in the US Constitution. Copious blood has been shed to establish and defend that document. Mr. O'Hara, apparently, violated the law knowingly and repeatedly. How can anybody have any objection to prosecuting him for that?
Keep in mind that snow-bird double-voters, who voted in both New York and Florida during the last Presidential election, very nearly gave us President Al Gore. This stuff matters.
This guy was an active political figure in the Borough. Clearly he knew that what he was doing was illegal. I would bet you dollars to donuts (even money, these days) that lots of other people knew as well. Given this, I have no problem with prosecution of this case.
I am sure other people do it as well. I am in favor of prosecution of those cases also. Vote fraud is wrong, and should be prosecuted at every opportunity. People all over the world have died to try to get the right to vote, and some "political gadfly" can cancel my vote through fraud.
That stinks.
I dont't often agree with Charlie Hynes, but more power to him in this case.
The key thing is, did he vote more than once? Why should it matter where he really lives, as long as he voted only once? I agree that if he committed vote fraud, this is a serious offense, but merely using a non-resident address for voting is trivial.
How so? If my district is solidly Democrat, should I be allowed to vote in another district where there is more likely to be a close race? That's not trivial at all!
If voting in Brooklyn means so much to this fella, he should move to Brookly and vote. But anything else is fraud. Fraud, fraud, fraud. It says so right on the voter registration form.
This fella is a lawyer. He knows what fraud is, and he knows he put his license at risk when he registered fraudulently. Charlie Hynes is just calling his bluff.
In addition, the legal system holds lawyers to a higher standard with regards to fraud. They have special duties as officers of the court. The way this duty is enforced is by convicting them of a low-level felony and yanking the license. That is exactly what happened in this case.
...the DA's office put the chief of its homicide division on the case.
Are you saying that this doesn't seem like selective prosecution? That it's not a little bit of overkill for an offense which, if it even is an offense, is minor in the extreme--at least compared to murder, armed robbery, rape, and being a corrupt, vindictive district attorney?
What, the Democrats get their vote fraud, so we should get ours?
The biggest punishment this fellow recieved was the suspension of his law licence, as the result of being convicted of a felony. I'm sorry, but when you are a lawyer, loss of license is the penalty for fraud.
A question, why did not this person register at his residence? Would he have been able to vote from the district in which he voted if he had registered truthfully?
In any case, every voter registration form I have ever seen includes a statement that it is being filled out under penalty of fraud, and is signed to the effect that it is truthful. Any lawyer who fills out a form like that fraudulently should have his licence pulled. This is a just punishment.
Since I feel the punishment is just, I obviously do not feel that the prosecution was unwarranted.
When you read the article, look how Ms. Main dances around what the actual infraction was. He "stayed" at the address. He "recieved mail" there. She is reaching to make his infraction seem as minimal as possible. If she could have included that he actually lived in the same district and voted exclusively in that district, don't you think she would have?
This is a hit piece on Charlie Hynes. The author is going to include every bit of exculpatory evidence possible, to bolster her case that this is an unjustified prosecution. If it really was a paperwork error, or he just moved and forgot to re-register, I would expect that that information would be in the very first paragraph, wouldn't you?
And the law that requires that people vote from their residences is not some musty/dusty hundred-year-old relic. In fact, it's even older than that, since it derives directly from the Constitution. It's just one of those basic laws that everybody knows, but just in case you don't, it's clearly spelled out on your voter registration form.
Of course he was targeted by the Democrats and the DA. So what? When a lawyer commits fraud, he should be targeted by the DA. As for the manpower allocations in the DA's office, that's the DA's business. If the people don't like it, they can vote him out.
But I had moved from Brooklyn some time before, and re-registered at my new address. I have voted faithfully at that address ever since. To go back and grab a Kebab at the Sahara and cast a vote against Hillary! would have been a great outing, but it would have been wrong.
Should I have done it? Sahara really does have excellent Kebabs.
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