Saturday, September 29, 2012
Presidential politics Republican vote fraud emerges in multiple states
Posted by Max Brantley on Sat, Sep 29, 2012 at 6:24 AM
As Salon asks, where's the rightwing outrage at growing evidence of massive vote fraud in the work of a Republican consultant with an unsavory past (trashing Democratic voter registrations). The game includes the filing of bogus address changes for voters in important swing states like Florida. When the real voters go to the polls, their vote can be challenged because of a discrepancy in the address they present at the polls and what the changed record shows. Challenged votes often don't get counted. Ask Republican Rep. Tim Griffin about this. Rove's boy can explain.
Acorn, you say? Nothing they did came to any voting consequence. A handful of thousands of canvassers being paid by the piece submitted false registrations, which were caught and not entered on voter rolls. No illegal vote came of it. This Republican scheme, however, has the potential, in addition to registering dead people, to disenfranchise voters.
Where's wingnut Nate Bell and other reactionary Repubicans who ceaselessly beat the drum for vote integrity and voter ID laws (which wouldn't stop this kind of deceit)? Writes Salon:
So far, there’s been literally zero mention on leading conservative blogs and media outlets. While it’s been less than 24 hours since news that the RNC had dropped the firm broke, considering the breathless way these outlets have covered voter fraud schemes involving Democrats, one would expect at least a mention. But a search on Strategic Allied Consulting or Nathan Sproul turns up zero results on the Weekly Standard, the National Review, RedState, the Breitbart sites, Michelle Malkin, Hot Air and other leading conservative blogs that have written about voter fraud. Fox News has also been silent on the issue, according to a transcript search.
The LA Times reports that the operation was engaged by the Republican Party to work in seven swing states — Florida, Colorado, Virginia, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio and Wisconsin. Here's the problem:
Most were changes in current registrations filed in the names of real voters, but signatures were spelled differently than the applicants’ names. Fake house numbers were given, and date of births did not match the names. The biggest red flag was that most of the forms were missing Social Security numbers.... But if fraudulent forms changing the addresses of actual voters are inadvertently processed, they could create obstacles at the polls. If someone’s address is changed within the same county, they could still cast a ballot once poll workers were able to establish that the voter was in the correct precinct.
...“It’s another step the clerk, the poll worker and the voter would have to go through in order to cast a vote,” Davis said.
Things would get more complicated if a voter’s address has been changed to another county. If that were the case, the voter would be forced to cast a provisional ballot, which would be evaluated later in the week by a local canvassing board.
More than 2,000 provisional ballots were cast in Florida in 2008; less than half of those ballots were ultimately counted, according to University of Florida election law professor Daniel Smith.
One thousand ballots not counted. Think that matters? Ask Al Gore.
A nationwide, Republican-financed scheme has produced hundreds of bogus voter registrations in critical states. Fox News? Hannity? Limbaugh? Anybody? Could we suggest the same fate for the Republican National Committee that Acorn met?
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