Can you believe this one?

GOP Wants Moore Locked Up Over Noodle Bribe

The Michigan Republican Party has demanded that filmmaker Michael Moore be prosecuted for offering fresh underwear and and stale soup to college students in exchange for their promise to vote.

Comments

[TM Lutas]

What is the minimum monetary offer of compensation that is required to legitimately trigger the vote buying laws in your opinion. If the amount is $0.01 then Moore should be prosecuted. If it is higher, the question is what was the monetary value that Moore was offering and did it exceed your personal limit.

The law, as written, is that even a penny is a bribe and you just don't do it. We used to have pretty extensive operations of buying votes in urban areas among people who would sell their vote for a song, and usually did it for a bit of booze or a few bucks. We shouldn't ever regress to that level again, even if it's a joke.

So what's your personal limit before you admit it was vote buying?

[David Sucher]

TM.
I guess the issue for me turns on the question of "intention."
If you believe Moore was joking, then there was no intent to commit a crime and therefore no reason for prosecution.
If you sincerely believe that Moore was serious, then a different result.

[TM Lutas]

There is no intent value in the law, nor should there be. "I was only joking" is too much of an easy out. We worked very hard at getting decent anti-fraud habits in place and they've been eroding for decades. Bill Gates has enough money to send $10 to every voter in the US, asking them to vote a certain way as a joke. It's a pretty trivial amount compared to his total fortune and as a percentage of net worth, more expensive jokes have been staged in the past.

Should they hypothetical, joking Bill Gates be in jail? I think he should be. At what smaller scale of bribery does it start being funny? I don't think there is a factor that you can point to in order to mitigate Moore's culpability that I couldn't counter with a "not funny" scenario and ask you to draw a line that would be very unhealthy for honest civic involvement in politics, though you're welcome to try.

[David Sucher]

What do you mean that there is "...no intent value in the law, nor should there be." Huh?

The question of intent is absolutely central to both the criminal and civil law. Period. People live and die by their "intent." Take a pedestrian killed by an auto. With premeditated intent there can be first degree murder. Without it, perhaps not much more than a traffic ticket, if that.

[TM Lutas]

What I intended to say (and reading the previous post again, what I did say) is that in this particular law, intent does not matter. Some laws are like that, others take intent into account.

One does not offer a bribe by mistake, nor is there any issue of entrapment. Any citizen should know enough about our own history to know that vote buying was (and in some places still is) a serious problem, not joke fodder. Any sort of illegal inducements to vote are not only corrosive of our electoral system, they set a bad example internationally.

Again, I don't think that this stunt is likely to be effective enough to swing an election. It's a bad precedent and the only way to stop it is in the courts unless you think that Moore would listen to an honest and heartfelt appeal from the Republican party.

[David Sucher]

I do not know how the law is worded.

Do you have a cite so that we can examine it?

If nothing else, one must take seriously the alleged perp's intent to actually buy votes. Do you think Moore really intended to buy votes with "stale soup?"

[TM Lutas]

According to Slate it's a federal statute that Moore's violating (max penalty 5 years in prison and $10,000 in fines). It's in 1937i(c) specifically. There is no "except if you're joking" clause, nor is there any sort of "trivial" amount below which it's ok. According to other articles, they're not trying to get him for the federal violation but for violating a similar state law for which I couldn't find a reference but I'm sure is similarly humorless. That makes a bit more sense than the federal statute because they're going to county prosecutors and that's generally not where you go when you want to prosecute a federal law violation.

In a nutshell, Michael Moore's in violation of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and state law too and keeping him out of the pokey for the next 5 years is essentially Bush administration prosecutorial discretion. If Moore isn't charged under the federal statute, he'll have John Ashcroft to thank for his freedom.