The Republican "Voter Fraud" Fraud
There are few, if any, things one can do to undermine democracy that would be worse than denying citizens the right to vote. And yet this is precisely what the Republican Party is trying to do. They figure, if you can't win an election fairly, then steal it. This is something they cannot be allowed to get away with. All this shrieking and hand-wringing from Republicans about ACORN and illegal aliens committing voter fraud is ... well, trying to keep my PG rating, I'll say, balderdash.
As I've mentioned before, this is the very issue at the heart of the U.S. Attorney firing scandal, which has yet to be fully resolved. One of the USAs fired, David Iglesias of New Mexico, described it this way:
"I'm astounded that this issue is being trotted out again," Iglesias told TPMmuckraker. "Based on what I saw in 2004 and 2006, it's a scare tactic."
The Obama campaign has responded to this latest round of voter fraud accusations:
"With this voter fraud [investigation], we're seeing an unholy alliance of law enforcement and the ugliest form of partisan politics," Bob Bauer, an elections lawyer with the Obama camp, said on a conference call with reporters just now. Bauer compared the decision to launch the investigation with the US attorneys scandal, in which several US attorneys were fired for their unwillingess to pursue politically charged cases, including voter fraud, with sufficient aggression to satisfy the Bush administration.
Bauer released a letter sent to Attorney General Michael Mukasey calling on him to have the issue taken on by Nora Dannehy, the prosecutor he appointed to investigate the US attorney firings.
The U.S. Supreme Court has also weighed in on the Republican efforts to suppress the vote in Ohio:
The Supreme Court on Friday overturned a lower court’s order requiring state officials in Ohio to supply information that would have made it easier to challenge prospective voters. The decision was a setback for Ohio Republicans, who had sued to force the Ohio secretary of state, a Democrat, to provide information about database mismatches to county officials.
The fact is that the whole voter fraud scare is nothing but smoke and mirrors. It makes no sense if you think about it logically, but of course the Republican Party operatives who promote this are counting on people not thinking about it at all, but simply reacting emotionally to it. Dahlia Lithwick has an excellent article in Slate on the issue, in which she says:
Large-scale, coordinated vote stealing doesn't happen. The incentives—unlike the incentives for registration fraud—just aren't there. In an interview this week with Salon, Lorraine Minnite of Barnard College, who has studied vote fraud systematically, noted that "between 2002 to 2005 only one person was found guilty of registration fraud. Twenty others were found guilty of voting while ineligible and five were guilty of voting more than once. That's 26 criminal voters." Twenty-six criminal voters despite the fact that U.S. attorneys, like David Iglesias in New Mexico, were fired for searching high and low for vote-fraud cases to prosecute and coming up empty. Twenty-six criminal voters despite the fact that five days before the 2006 election, then-interim U.S. Attorney Bradley Schlozman exuberantly (and futilely) indicted four ACORN workers, even when Justice Department policy barred such prosecutions in the days before elections. RNC General Counsel Sean Cairncross has said he is unaware of a single improper vote cast because of bad cards submitted in the course of a voter-registration effort. Republican campaign consultant Royal Masset says, "[I]n-person voter fraud is nonexistent. It doesn't happen, and ... makes no sense because who's going to take the risk of going to jail on something so blatant that maybe changes one vote?"
That doesn't stop the McCain-Palin campaign from trying to use ACORN as a boogeyman to whip up anger on the right. Plus, it goes hand in hand with their demonization of illegal aliens. Anonymous Liberal puts it in perspective:
Some suggest that this willing army of criminals might be recruited from the ranks of illegal aliens or unnaturalized citizens, people who are not eligible to vote. That's nonsense. Illegal aliens live in constant fear of being discovered and deported. Good luck getting an illegal alien to submit a registration form much less actually go to a polling station. And legal residents have very similar fears. Voter fraud is a deportable offense. These folks value their immigration status more than anything in the world and would never risk it in order to cast a vote.
And now the right-wing fringe is acting on the provocation from McCain and Palin by threatening and vandelizing ACORN offices. These kinds of tactics deserve to wind up on the trash heap of history. There's nothing honorable or American about it.
