VOTER FRAUD FRAUD

    When something is statistically acceptable and legislators use their positions to mess with it, something else must be afoot. That seems to be the case with voter fraud legislation. Compellingly suspicious is that the origin of legislation is entirely the work of one political party. Absolutely revealing is the crowing on the part of a senior Republican in Pennsylvania that the passage of voter fraud legislation will win that state for Governor Romney.
    Never mind that studies of voter fraud have all revealed that it is extremely rare. And for good reason. A single vote on the part of an individual can hardly affect an election and the risk is five years in prison and $10,000 fine. How much easier and safer it would be to get a member of the opposition drunk so that person’s vote doesn’t get recorded. Enough studies have been made to put this subject to bed, yet it has become a major, troubling issue in this campaign year. A representative paper by the Brennan Center of Justice can be found on:

www.brennancenterofjustice.org/content/resource/policy-brief-on-the-truth-about-voter-fraud

    The object, of course by the perpetrators (one cannot honestly say legislators) is to cut out of the voting population a segment that can normally be counted on to vote for the opposition. The method is to require all voters to furnish state issued photo i.d. at the voting sites.  Of course a driver’s license will do. So there are troglodytes among us who say “What’s the big deal? Everyone has a driver’s license.” Not so. There are millions who don’t, and requiring those voters to provide a photo i.d. is implicitly illegal in that it costs money to get an i.d. as well as imposing an unnecessary hardship; money for transportation and money for the i.d. That by any definition is a targeted poll tax.

    Many schemes are in play to affect voter outcome. A notorious one, for which voting administrators ought to be prosecuted, is supplying insufficient voting machines in areas that have high opposition voting populations. Discouraging voting by making people wait in lines for hours is patently a form of voter fraud practiced by some in state governments.

    But the most shameful is voter fraud fraud that is practiced by legislators.They know that voter fraud is virtually non-existent. They cannot back their bills with data.  Their intent is transparent. They know the laws will ultimately be declared illegal, but they are doing it anyway, and the Republican governors of those states where bills have been passed, to their eternal disgrace, are signing on.

    Much of the mischief is arguably traceable to Senator Mitch McConnell’s statement on the Senate floor at the onset of this administration that the main goal of the Republicans is to ensure that Barack Obama doesn’t get another term. The record of minority performance in the Senate ensuing months and years, and in the House since Republicans gained the majority shows that he surely meant it, what with kneecapping the president at every turn with  endless filibusters, and outright blocking of needed legislation, such as  the Jobs Bill.  But that was only one facet of the “War against Obama.” Voter fraud, the astonishing birther claims that never go away, the hypnotizing House obsession with women’s rights, are all facets of McConnell’s astonishingly provocative vow, put into practice.