Maine Saturday Open Thread

[BongoBrian]

If Ron Paul only needed 2500 people to make him a shoe-in in Maine, why not pay $100 to 2500 people to go and vote and become delegates? That would only cost $250,000 for the state and all the delegates.

...certainly cheaper than all the advertising costs.... and much more effective! *;0)

 

[BongoBrian]

13 folk cant even fill the places of the local football team... whats going on?

In Scotland in Glasgow (southside) there are less than 50,000 voters.... listen to the numbers of votes cast... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XBp2mFngNk&feature=youtube_gdata_player

 

[kombayn]

I'm hoping right after the debate on Wednesday, we find out that Ron Paul actually won Maine like Rick Santorum won Iowa. I think Super Tuesday will be real interesting because Ron Paul can win Alaska, Idaho & Vermont. If Romney, Gingrich, Santorum & Paul split a bunch of states on Super Tuesday, the talk of a brokered convention gets REAL and VERY REAL, real quick.

 

[MoneyWhereMyMouthIs2]

You're argument seems to be that unless a whole bunch of conditions are met, then there IS fraud.

Nah, not really. But I don't see why anyone who wants an accurate election immediately destroys evidence that would help with accuracy. Not to mention, the caucus that was canceled and the second one which was stated would not be counted at all. (I don;t care how much snow predicted, they could have postponed.) I may have called it fraud at some point, but I'll also go with incompetent and highly suspicious.

Your argument is that they set it up so that fraud could be committed.

That is closer to what I am saying, and when you match that up with their behavior and words, it makes it seem even more likely.

I *am* starting to think vote fraud is real, and also happening. It's a tough pill to swallow. It is obvious that the GOP leadership is against Paul. They make that known whenever they can. What a shame. They pretend they want people to choose, but they really want to choose for themselves. They are getting exposed and if they are in favor of free and fair elections, they sure don't act like it.

 

[parocks]

If Ron Paul only needed 2500 people to make him a shoe-in in Maine, why not pay $100 to 2500 people to go and vote and become delegates? That would only cost $250,000 for the state and all the delegates.

...certainly cheaper than all the advertising costs.... and much more effective! *;0)

I'm not sure. There are probably laws saying you can't directly do that.

However, I did not invent the concept of "Walking Around Money". I did start a thread for discussion of "Walking Around Money" in November.

Here it is
What's "Street Money"? Or "walking-around money"? Or "get-out-the-vote money"?
http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showth...oney-quot-Or-quot-get-out-the-vote-money-quot

I posted 13 times on this thread. One other person commented.

Point is: some things are illegal. other things aren't illegal. I suspect that things that might be illegal for one person or group to do might not be illegal for another person or group to do. A random "rogue volunteer" might do something that the official campaign cannot.

If you'll look at that thread, you'll see that typically Democrats do spend 10s or hundreds of thousands of dollars on "Walking Around Money". John Kerry spent over 100K on Philadelphia alone.

Apparently, there are infrastructures in Democrat land that expect candidates to spend that money. I don't know the exact details. But we are talking about
OFFICIAL CAMPAIGNS giving money to locals whose job it is to GOTV. You will see that these campaigns who do this are not getting in trouble.

I'm not suggesting that the Ron Paul OFFICIAL CAMPAIGN do this. But we have people sending superbrochures which many think actually hurt. If that money was put to what I'm calling EXTRA GOTV, which to me means any number of things where the goal is to spend money, and get people to the polls without phoning people on a list and asking them to vote.

There does not seem to be a law stating that you can't provide any incentives just to vote. You can give away free beer at a party.

If you read the old thread, you might see that there seems to be a legal distinction between paying someone to vote, and paying someone to vote for a particular candidate.

We are in a situation where we know that 18-29 males prefer Ron Paul. It might be more legal to pay 18-29 year old males to vote than it is to pay 18-29 year old males to vote For Ron Paul.

And we aren't talking about direct cash payments. Some people here. Me, RP08orbust, and some others, recognize that incentivizing this process in some way might lead to additional votes.

I was really trying pretty hard to get people in Washington County to understand that we weren't going to get enough votes without Extra GOTV.

Money, from here, went to someone on the ground in Washington County, with the idea that that person would do something for Extra GOTV. I don't know if that person actually did that. But the effort was made. I personally offered $100 to anyone who, when they were driving to East Machias, would stop into a bar/restaurant I identified, and rent 2 tables that grassroots could use as a Extra GOTV headquarters. No one stepped up.

Some of us are trying, but no one seems at all interested in doing the Extra GOTV That Must Be Done To Win.

The Official Campaign is doing a good job with the tried and true phone from home voter id / gotv system. I'm not suggesting that program is run badly or unnecessary.
They're doing a good job, keep up the good work. But, it's just not enough.

The grassroots really should stop trying to think of ways to get old women to like Ron Paul. I'm not saying that no old women support Ron Paul or that old women can't be persuaded to vote for Ron Paul. I'm saying that way too much time an effort is spent by the grassroots on persuasion. Thinking of TV ads, thinking of what the magic "make them like Ron Paul" words are. Skip that. Let the upper levels of the official campaign worry about crafting the appropriate message. It would be nice to have a coherent message, not one cluttered up by superbrochures and anything else that's out there.

We know, every poll has said, that the 18-29 males prefer Ron Paul. To win, all we need to do is get them to the polls. All we do is bitch when they don't vote. The grassroots spends $0 on the number 1 problem we have and the number 1 problem the grassroots is the most equipped to solve.

 

[parocks]

13 folk cant even fill the places of the local football team... whats going on?

In Scotland in Glasgow (southside) there are less than 50,000 voters.... listen to the numbers of votes cast... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XBp2mFngNk&feature=youtube_gdata_player

A couple things to consider. In Washington county, some people had to drive over an hour each way to the caucus. And the caucus process isn't a short one.
First, about 2 hours of speeches, and then about 1-2 hours of voting. We're talking a commitment of time for some of 6 hours. And a lot of people just don't want to watch State Reps give speeches, no matter how many hours they have to drive to do it. As someone who has done it, it kinda sucks.

 

[parocks]

I'm hoping right after the debate on Wednesday, we find out that Ron Paul actually won Maine like Rick Santorum won Iowa. I think Super Tuesday will be real interesting because Ron Paul can win Alaska, Idaho & Vermont. If Romney, Gingrich, Santorum & Paul split a bunch of states on Super Tuesday, the talk of a brokered convention gets REAL and VERY REAL, real quick.

There's no rumblings of Ron Paul actually won Maine anywhere. The Ron Paul campaign could have evidence of something. I don't know. But there's nothing floating out there that people know about that could erase the approx 160 vote margin between Romney and Paul (just counting Washington) or the 115 or so margin (including Hancock and Kennebec).

We didn't try very hard in Washington County. We might've tried hard. But not very hard. And it was clear we had to work very hard to win. Even if that was risky.

We could still win Maine. But if we weren't willing to work very hard in Washington County, there's no reason to think we'd be willing to work extremely hard to win Castine. About 1% voted in Washington County. We would need 10% to vote in Castine. And Castine is more Romney country than Wash Co is. Castine is somewhat similar to places in the Penobscot Bay area like Rockport, Camden, Blue Hill, Bar Harbor.

We'd need more caucuses. Find towns who haven't caucused, find a Ron Paul supporter in those towns, and have them call a caucus. The official campaign does not seem too interested in this. Delegates are the priority of the official campaign at this point.

But those would be the 2 - Castine and other caucuses. And the Maine GOP would have to decide to count those caucuses, like they traditionally do. A tremendous amount of Extra GOTV would be required, and we don't like to do that. We definitely should change our opinion of extra GOTV.

 

[parocks]

Nah, not really. But I don't see why anyone who wants an accurate election immediately destroys evidence that would help with accuracy. Not to mention, the caucus that was canceled and the second one which was stated would not be counted at all. (I don;t care how much snow predicted, they could have postponed.) I may have called it fraud at some point, but I'll also go with incompetent and highly suspicious.




That is closer to what I am saying, and when you match that up with their behavior and words, it makes it seem even more likely.

I *am* starting to think vote fraud is real, and also happening. It's a tough pill to swallow. It is obvious that the GOP leadership is against Paul. They make that known whenever they can. What a shame. They pretend they want people to choose, but they really want to choose for themselves. They are getting exposed and if they are in favor of free and fair elections, they sure don't act like it.

The whole thing was "shady", before the "error filled" results were released on the 11th.

Traditionally, there is no window for the Presidential Preference Poll to be taken in. That window - supposedly between the 4th and the 11th - was new this year. When I heard that, I thought, that sounds "shady". I didn't think "that WAS Fraud". But the window seemed to have been created to benefit someone, and it certainly wasn't Ron Paul. Most likely Romney.

Traditionally, the results are not kept secret. The caucus takes place and the results are released. And this is done pretty soon after the caucus, and the results roll in, caucus day after caucus day. If there's a mistake, it's corrected, in time. But there's no real hurry to correct errors, because the process is known to last until March. The first instinct when they say "we're going to change the process from an open one to a secret one is "so they can commit fraud".

The theory was "lets make this big announcement to attract attention". Unless the plan all along was to embarrass the Maine GOP by releasing a really sloppy error filled set of results, and attract attention that way, there was no way that some one time announcement would've been as big an attention getter than the slow, horse race style release of results. Every single day, people would be checking back in to see the latest totals. Would we rather have known where we were at after Feb 4? Absolutely. But we deleted all the results right off the Maine For Ron Paul facebook page.