The GOP Voter Fraud Fraud

[Pistarkle]

GOP elected officials’, Right Wing cable television news network and radio talk show political pundits’ talking point that there is a “voter fraud epidemic” IS A FRAUD . The “epidemic” fallacy is calculated to SUPPRESS the voting rights of Latinos, Blacks, Native Americans, college students, the elderly, minorities and the poor.

An article by the New York Times reported that “five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has TURNED UP VIRTUALLY NO EVIDENCE of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews”. The Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law’s investigation of voter fraud allegations nationally (by Republicans) found that “states like Missouri have overall voter fraud rates of 0.0003% in 2000, 0.0001% in 2004, 0.0006% in New Hampshire in 2004, 0.0004% in New Jersey in 2004, 0.000009% in New York in 2004. Salon.com reported the Loro Minnite, a professor of political science at Barnard College, who has spent the last 8 years studying the role of fraud in U.S. Elections, found that the “REPUBLICAN CRUSADE AGAINST VOTER FRAUD IS A STRATEGIC RUSE”. Minnie further found that “rather than protecting the election process from voter fraud – a problem that BARELY exists – the TRUE AIM of Republican efforts appears to be VOTER SUPPRESSION across the partisan divide.”

Salon.com, also, reported that on September 10, 240,000 Wisconsin voters WHO HAD REGISTERED BY MAIL SINCE 2006 found their voting status up in the air as the state’s attorney general J.B. Van Hollen – a McCain campaign co-chair – sued the state’s Government Accountability Board. In Michigan that same week, Macomb County GOP Party chairman James Caragbelli, allegedly told a reporter the he would use publicly available lists of foreclosed home addresses to “make sure people aren’t voting from those addresses.” In October, the Montana Republican Party challenged the eligibility of 6,000 voters in UNIVERSITY towns and heavily NATIVE AMERICAN counties. The Brennan Center for Justice reported that In Missouri in 2000, the Secretary of State claimed that 79 voters were registered with addresses at vacant lots, but subsequent investigation revealed that the lots in question ACTUALLY HOUSED VALID and LEGTIMATE residences. In a 1995 investigation into votes allegedly cast in Baltimore by deceased voters and those with disenfranchising felony convictions revealed that the voters in question were BOTH ALIVE AND FELONY-FREE. A 2005 attempt to identify SUPPOSED double voters in New Jersey MISTAKENLY ACCUSED people with similar names but whose middle names or suffixes were CLEARLY different. The Brennan Center investigation found that “other allegations of fraudulent voting often turn out to be the result of common clerical errors, incomplete information, or faulty assumptions. MOST ALLEGATIONS of voter fraud simply evaporate when more rigorous analysis is conducted.”

Voter suppression is a MAJOR threat to the basic tenants of our democracy. Why aren’t major cable news networks other than MSNBC conducting FAIR AND BALANCED, prime time exposes on this issue? FOX News covers it, but I’ve only heard the “voter fraud is an epidemic” side of their story!