US/president/election/2012/Jim Turner

thing type::incident thing type::allegation



About
On or about 2012-11-02, it was widely alleged that a Chapel Hill voter named Jim Turner had posted on Facebook that he had voted five times (which would have constituted voter fraud) for Barack Obama. The only evidence presented for this act, however, was a closely-cropped screenshot of his alleged post on Facebook and another composite shot of the post along with parts of Turner's Facebook profile page. There are at this time no known images showing the message in its original context.

Prediction, 2012-11-04 21:40
It seems very unlikely that this incident is as initially presented. However, there is one clear piece of evidence which should easily be uncovered by the investigation: was Jim Turner registered to vote in all of the locations he named, and do the voter records show that he voted there in this election?

It also seems very likely that the incident has to some extent been magnified, distorted, or perhaps wholly fabricated as a way of supporting popular belief in the need to combat voter fraud -- a popular US Republican cause -- and to make Democrats and Obama supporters look dishonest and stupid.

Update, 2012-11-06
It that Turner did not in fact vote illegally. He thought he was making a joke (or perhaps a sympathetic fib) in a private section of Facebook, where the humorous intent of the comment would be understood, but unknowingly was commenting in a very public area. (This is, if nothing else, an indictment of Facebook's sloppy user interface.)

History
A preliminary reconstruction of the sequence of events:

The Barracuda Brigade seems to have about this story on 11/2. It was then by examiner.com on 11/3 and subsequently spread to a number of other blogs

Examiner.com later (no timestamp) issued an update saying that "In a telephone call with Alicia Fix Luke of Barracuda Brigade, Turner's wife confirmed that he posted the message but claimed that he really didn't vote multiple times. According to Luke, she was "really rude" and hung up on her."

On 11/4, examiner.com that Turner was under investigation for voter fraud.

Turner was later cleared; he had posted the claim in what he believed was a private space on Facebook, where he believed its hyperbolic intent would have been correctly understood.

Some further research into the incident is collected in this Google Document.

Links

 * Jim Turner's Facebook profile