Repugs Fan Voter Fraud Hysteria While Committing Election Fraud Behind the Scenes

The examples of both false accusations against Democratic voters and accurate cases of fraud by repugs are coming fast and furious.

Karoli at Crooks and Liars:

If you can't win the vote fairly, suppress voters. This has been a Republican tactic for years, and it's running rampant in Wisconsin. While polls are showing Russ Feingold at a shocking disadvantage to his teabagger opponent Ron Johnson, the GOP and Americans for Prosperity are working behind the scenes on a voter suppression scam that is on a far wider scale, but no different than Republicans have used for years.

Here's how it works: A mailer is sent to registered voters. Any mailers returned by the post office are put in a database and those voters are submitted to be purged from voting rolls. Of course, the targets are never Republican voters. They're Democrats, and generally minority voters in particular. Here's a better explanation from the Brennan Center for Justice:

Voter caging is the practice of sending mail to addresses on the voter rolls, compiling a list of the mail that is returned undelivered, and using that list to purge or challenge voters registrations on the grounds that the voters on the list do not legally reside at their registered addresses. Supporters of voter caging defend the practice as a means of preventing votes cast by ineligible voters. Voter caging, however, is notoriously unreliable. If it is treated (unjustifiably) as the sole basis for determining that a voter is ineligible or does not live at the address at which he or she registered, it can lead to the unwarranted purge or challenge of eligible voters. …Moreover, the practice has often been targeted at minority voters, making the effects even more pernicious. [Brennan Center, “A Guide to Voter Caging,” 6/29/07]

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One Wisconsin Now has uncovered this plot with evidence, but don't assume this is limited to Wisconsin. I guarantee you it isn't. They are targeting as many states as they can, but particularly swing states. Expect Ohio, Pennsylvania, Nevada, Colorado, Arizona just to name a few to have the exact same operations afoot.

Voter suppression undermines democracy. It is a bully tactic to disenfranchise minority and young voters. If you're as angry about this as I am, consider visiting Save Wisconsin's Vote and taking action.

Read the whole thing.

From Talking Points Memo:

Remember the dire warnings and shrill allegations of voter fraud surrounding the 2008 election? That ACORN would steal it, that the New Black Panthers were intimidating voters, that fraud across the county would be "rampant?"

They never panned out. ACORN no longer exists. (Although that hasn't stopped 20 percent of the American public from believing they'll try to steal the election.) The DOJ found that the New Black Panthers incident was isolated -- although that case found new life in allegations against the Justice Department itself (more on that below). A five-year effort by the Bush DOJ to weed out fraud, an effort the Obama team said was designed to suppress minority voter turnout, turned up "virtually no evidence."

Voter fraud "exists, and anyone who denies it has no credibility," J. Christian Adams told TPMmuckraker recently. "But it doesn't affect the outcome of elections as much as people say. I don't think that if there's 100 or 1,000 dead voters in, let's say, Texas ... I don't think it's going to affect the outcome of statewide elections."

And yet, with all the evidence against them, the fearmongers of voter fraud -- a mantle most recently taken up by the tea party -- soldier on.

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Other cases trumpeted by the right have similar racial undertones. In Harris County, Texas, a tea party offshoot called True The Vote and the Republican registrar of voters have accused a low-income voter registration program of falsifying thousands of applications in an effort to conduct "an organized and systematic attack." True The Vote says they found the alleged fraud by scouring voter registration records in districts with a high number of households with six or more registered voters -- which also happened to be the predominantly poor, black voting districts. True The Vote is now advocating for proof of citizenship to be required at the polls. And the Tea Party Nation has told its members to "steal their good idea."

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Amidst the fears, voting experts say they want to make sure that those who become poll watchers know the rules of the polling place so legitimate voters are not unfairly challenged.

"We just want to make sure that everyone is clear on the rules -- that voters know their rights, that these groups know what they are and aren't allowed to do," said Tova Wang, Senior Democracy Fellow at Demos.

"Every single election there are these allegations of voter fraud that turn out to be mostly untrue and every year we find that there might be a very small handful of voter fraud cases but nothing on the order of what is alleged," Wang said.

Read the whole thing.

Reachel Slajda at TPMwith the details of the outrageous Texas case:

The events over the last month in Harris County, Texas offer a crystal-clear example of how voter fraud allegations work, with a Tea Party group alleging fraud, a minority registration group alleging suppression and defamation, the county registrar declaring war and the state Dems jumping into the fray with a lawsuit of their own.

The Tea Party group even went so far as to claim that the headquarters of the voter registration group is the "New Black Panthers' office."

What happens in Harris County is important for the rest of the country: Harris is the largest county in Texas. Experts say that if enough of the eligible voters there register to vote, and then vote in 2012, it could change the way Texas votes in 2012. With 34 electoral votes, that could change the outcome of the election itself.

Read the whole thing.

And finally, also from TPM, proof that individual voter fraud is committed by rebpugs who know better:

The Republican nominee for the top job overseeing Indiana's elections has a bit of a voting problem himself.

For one thing, Republican Secretary of State nominee Charlie White moved out of Fishers, Indiana, six months before stepping down from his post on the town council there. The town attorney has ruled that White's disputed town council votes from that interim period will still stand.

But according to the Indianapolis Star, White's troubles don't end there. He is reportedly being probed for committing voter fraud because he registered to vote with his old address, and voted in the primary in his old district.

White had served on the Fishers Town Council for 10 years, including the time between his move from Fishers last March, until his announcement of the move and resignation in September.

Since then, local Democrats have been putting pressure on him to call off his Secretary of State campaign. And the Dems want a probe to look at White's failure to report his change of address when registering to vote. State Democratic party chair Dan Parker alleged that this constitutes voter fraud since White voted in his old precinct.

Read the whole thing.

Educate yourself. Find out how your state law both protects and encourages voting. Volunteer to work the polls, either officially as an election official or unofficially as an observer to catch voter intimidation.

This is the core of American democracy. Every person prevented from voting diminishes the democracy and civil rights of the rest of us.