cinco de mayo: ALREADY DEBUNKED, VOTER FRAUD IS ALMOST NON-EXISTENT

Desperate Republicans are disenfranchising voters across the country in their efforts to suppress the vote that they figure would go to the Democrats.

Frankly, I am a lot more worried about election rigging on the part of Republicans by tampering with the computers, tallying results, gerrymandering and instituting voting requirements that are unnecessary and disenfranchise minorities. The question also is if this undue burden of proof of ID requires the voter to actually pay a fee…which is clearly unconstitutional.

To hear these Republican-Teahadists you would think that we are living in a banana republic with widespread voter fraud happening left and right. Yet, they offer no empirical data, no proof that such fraud is taking place. I am not convinced and neither should you.

If you care to do your homework on this there are many sources you can check; a good one is the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law which has been investigating voter fraud allegations nationally (by Republicans) and have 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 and without much ado, Wisconsin elections have been investigated. What did they find?

Republican-Teahadists don’t love neither DEMOCRACY nor THE CONSTITUTION as they claim. They are ideologues, fanatical right wing extremists who don’t care about the American people and even less about the country that gives them sustenance, security and wealth. They are by the nature of what they are doing nothing more than traitors.

If you want to talk about voter fraud, let’s then bring up the elections of 2,000 where an incompetent, arrogant and inarticulate charlatan was handed down the Presidency by one Supreme Court Justice. Bush didn’t win those elections, you know it and I know it. Does “HANGING CHARDS” mean anything to you?

But using common sense and logic is always helpful. Just think that “Voting Fraud Not Worth It Slate's Christopher Beam wonders why anyone would bother. "Perhaps the strongest evidence against claims of widespread voter fraud is that it would make no sense," writes Beam. "You'd first have to recruit a large number of voters willing to cooperate, each of whom would risk five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Then you'd have to get them all registered, which would require fake IDs and mailing addresses ... The more people involved in the scheme, the more likely someone slips up." Beam adds that "for large organizations, there are much better, safer, more efficient ways to steal an election" than by gaming the registration process.

· How Do We Define Fraud? Adam Serwer, writing at The Washington Post, points out that "conservatives helped assemble the myth that now-defunct community organizing group ACORN 'stole elections' by blurring the distinction between voter registration fraud--which is as easy as filling out a registration form incorrectly--and the actual act of casting a fraudulent ballot." But, says Serwer, "while the voter fraud panic is mostly hype, voter suppression is a very real phenomenon."

Then after you have come to some conclusion, ask yourself what would the impact of these Republican efforts be? The Brennan Center for Justice reports that:

“Burdensome photo ID or proof of citizenship requirements for voting could block millions of eligible American voters without addressing any real problem. Although most Americans have government-issued photo ID, studies show that as many as 12% of eligible voters nationwide do not; the percentage is even higher for seniors, people of color, people with disabilities, low-income voters, and students. Many of those citizens find it hard to get such IDs, because the underlying documentation (the ID one needs to get ID) is often difficult to come by. Those difficulties will increase substantially if documentary proof of citizenship is needed to vote or to obtain the identification required to vote.”

“The New York Times (Oct 10th, 2011) underscored an important fact that so many legislators have willfully ignored: "There is almost no voter fraud in America." “Indeed, The Department of Justice investigated over 300 million votes cast between 2002 and 2007 and found no cases of voter impersonation fraud. In Texas, where Governor Rick Perry used a highly unusual procedural maneuver to accelerate passage of a bill requiring a government-issued photo ID to vote, the state Attorney General found no cases of voter impersonation fraud. Zero.
Nonetheless, under the guise of fighting "voter fraud," legislators instead limited voters' access to democracy. An unprecedented wave of restrictive laws added burdens to virtually every aspect of the voting process in fourteen states. A sampling of such ill-considered measures include:

Florida: onerous regulations now make voter registration drives virtually impossible;
Kansas: voters must show proof of citizenship when registering to vote and then show government-issued photo ID when voting;
Maine: Election Day Registration, which had been in place since 1973, has been eliminated;
Ohio: voters can no longer cast a ballot on the Sunday before Election Day; and
Texas: students' state university-issued IDs are not acceptable for voter identification purposes.

Combined, these suppressive measures disproportionately affect the young, elderly, disabled, low-income, minority, and working voters. Moreover, these regressive laws, especially those requiring government-issued photo ID, are expensive to implement.
At a time when many state legislatures are facing unprecedented budget constraints, legislators should turn their attention and direct scarce resources toward matters of actual relevance to their constituents, instead of wasting millions of dollars to combat a nonexistent problem.
Want to tell Attorney General Eric Holder and the Department of Justice to protect every citizen's right to vote? Take action here!”

About 20 states are pushing laws of this sort, apparently because Republican reps in Congress fear that even their gerrymandered districts don’t guarantee reelection, and Wisconsin just passed a poll-ID law with new residency requirements designed to thwart the recall elections. That last bit will likely fail constitutional muster right off. Other parts of the law that are more restrictive than the poll-ID laws already existent in 4 states may be tossed by the courts later.

The Republicans really need these laws to suppress the voters who are poised to toss them. That’s why these measures are so partisan.”