This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. The following was adapted from Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, And The Threat To American Democracy, by Rick Hasen, out today.
And they get away with it …
The MSM
Republicans declare massive voter fraud
…Democrats disagree
Now watch this cat video
The actual, irrelevant handful of fraudulent voters are Republicans. Some falsely declare residency at their vacation properties to vote against the school tax referenda. Others are just hotheads, like the Wisconsin dude who stood for Scott Walker twice. The most hilarious frauds are wannabe provocateurs in the O’Keefe mold, who promptly got caught, while seeking to film themselves proving how easy it is to vote illegally.
The Republicans will never give up on their fraudulent voter fraud campaign. Suppressing votes is an important part of their attempts to maintain power and control. They have to be challenged and fought every step of the way until they are out of power and small enough that the whole party can be drowned in a bathtub, to quote a Republican.
Spot on @greenman66. The saddest thing about the phony vote fraud claims is Democrats and the corporate media do a terrible job of pushing back against the nonsensical notion that voter fraud exists in anything close to a statistically significant level. Worse than this inability to fight the bogus fraud claims are Dems being unable or unwilling to fight for 100% participation in elections by supporting early voting nationally, allowing voting to weekends, demanding same day voter registration as a central tenet of free & fair elections, and statutorily instituting paper trails for all electronic voting mechanisms.
The importance of paper trails that allow for review of election results where electronic voting systems are used can help determine if the actual vote manipulation schemes which have been demonstrated to be the most effective way to prevent the type of vote fraud that actually manipulates election outcomes- changing the vote totals after the votes are cast but before the election outcome is announced.
Also prevented by lack of a paper trail is post-election ballot research. Sown ballot research by PhD candidates determined that two thirds of Nader voters voted for Democrats down ballot and surely would have voted for Gore instead of Bush if Nader had not been on the ballot. This research is not possible without a paper trail which contains all the voting choices of each individual voter, research that Republicans are completely & thoroughly opposed to.
Thank goodness for this. Though they’ll never stop trying, denying the vote to whole segments of the population…usually non-white…is a tactic they, and their ilk, have been using since the civil war. But with proponents like Mr. Kobach, I’m still surprised this goes anywhere. The man is dumber than a bag of hammers.
The GOP must steal elections. They otherwise will lose many of them.
There just isn’t any voter fraud except for the organized efforts of the RNC in some states. Republicans would like to make out that all minorities and poor people are criminals but they aren’t and the evidence is to the contrary.
Next they will be making up evidence like the Nazis did against Jews, gays, gypsies and union members.
Here in CO, we did have a well-publicized case of voter fraud committed by the head of CO GOP:
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick is currently doing an excellent 5-part podcast with Mr. Hasen discussing this problem.
Kobach has actually done some good – he helped a female Democrat get elected governor of Kansas.
The most fundamental right of all American is the ability to vote. It is what underpins our democracy and allows the people to control the direction of the nation, though our approval, or disapproval, of the representatives we elect to govern the nation. There should be no barrier between a citizen and their right to vote.
And, you can see the problem the Republican party has with this…allowing people to vote will, slowly but surely, remove them from power as they continue to pursue their agenda that benefits the white and wealthy members of society. Really, their pathetic attempts to extend their power through interfering with our fundamental right to vote is reason enough to remove them from office; the fact that they gleefully cut minorities and Democrats from the rolls just shows how little they value our democracy and the moral basis of the founding of our nation. History will look back on Republicans now the same way it looks at the white supremacists who cut off Reformation in the 1870s or that tried to stop the civil rights movement in the 1960s.
Yet there is no civil or criminal penalty for mass disenfranchisement. Secretary of state removes 50,000 latino-sounding names from the rolls on a pretext? Oops, I promise I won’t do it again.
Failed? Talk to any Trump voter, right winged publication, GOP controled State and look at the attempts of voter suppression. They dont have to prove fraud for them to act.
“bused-in Massachusetts residents illegally voted in the Granite State.”
The vast majority of bused-in Massachusetts residents stand on street corners, waving signs. There is a hearty get-out-the-vote contingent, and probably more preparatory canvassers than in most states. If I remember right it was the only state where the first Obama campaign was run on a nearly all-volunteer basis, with just a few paid top organizers.
However in 2016 I did hear of an organization recruiting to bus in Trump supporters; these people were promised per diems for their efforts.