Republicans getting their vote-supression machine ready

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/michaeltomasky/2010/oct/27/us-midterm-elections-2010-minnesota wrote: More false voter fraud allegations[/url]

I wrote yesterday about the oleaginous Norm Coleman and GOP warnings about voter fraud in Minnesota. And lo and behold, today we have a story at TPM that brings us news of the resolution of a case involving allegations made by the GOP of large-scale voter fraud in the self-same Minnesota in 2008.

Bottom line: initially, the GOP sent to the prosecuting attorney of Hennepin County (Minneapolis) allegations about 1,250 voters. In the end, the prosecutor's office, after investigating each, found that evidence supported filing charges in - ready? - 47 of those cases. TPM:

They claimed in November 2009 to have 800 additional individuals who were illegal felon voters," [prosecutor] Freeman said. "When they summited names to us in late February 2010, it was down to 451. We have processed that 451, and more than half of them were either not felons or not on probation when they voted. The rest of them we investigated more fully, and today we reported that the remaining cases presented sufficient support to charge, so we charged them."

Freeman said he made a commitment to get the cases taken care of before the 2010 elections. He noted that .00006 percent -- six-one-thousandth of one percent -- of the voters in Hennepin County had been charged with improperly voting.

"I think we've had a reaction from the right and the far right that there was significant voter fraud, and the fact is the facts show that there's not," Freeman said. "The right thing to do is to review and investigate claims of illegalities, that's my job and we do that. But Minnesota has a proud history of clean elections.

Voter fraud is itself a fraud. How many times does Acorn need to be cleared by prosecutors before people will believe this? Well, some people never will. And there are certainly instances of fraud; of felons voting, say, that should be prosecuted, as it's the law. But they're few and far between, and this story is alas fairly typical.

Meanwhile, on the other side of this coin, mysterious fliers appear in black communities round about now "informing" voters that if they have an outstanding traffic ticket, or haven't paid this month's gas bill, they can't vote. I have trouble sometimes imagining who this works on, but then again, humans exist in nearly infinite variety.

We cannot of course measure the number of people who don't vote because of such intimidation, but the amount of money and time Republicans put into these schemes tells us that they think it's worth the effort. I guess if I were a Republican, I wouldn't want black people to vote in large numbers either. But lying to people about democracy's most sacred rite is another matter.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/27/us/politics/27fraud.html wrote: intimidation and voter suppression[/url]. The Rand Paul curb stomping incident, seen this way, wasn’t just an expression of violence but a warning to those planning to hit the polls on Election Day.

In 2006, conservative activists repeatedly claimed that the problem of people casting fraudulent votes was so widespread that it was corrupting the political process and possibly costing their candidates victories.

The accusations turned out to be largely false, but they led to a heated debate, with voting rights groups claiming that the accusations were crippling voter registration drives and squelching turnout.

That debate is flaring up anew.

Tea Party members have started challenging voter registration applications and have announced plans to question any individual voters at the polls whom they suspect of being ineligible.

This has flown a bit more under the radar than in previous years, but it’s starting to elevate. Tea partiers in St. Paul, Minnesota are offering a $500 bounty for any voter fraud cases. In Texas, poll watchers have physically intimidated early voters. And throughout the country, allegations have been flying about voter fraud, including in Yuma County, Arizona, where the allegations proved without merit.

Publius Pundit, a supporter of the Republican challenger to Rep. Raul Grijalva, wrote that “voter fraud on a massive scale could be taking place,” claiming that 3,000 new voter registration applications were dropped off at once and 65 percent were invalid. (Neither of which, if true, would be evidence of fraud.) The blogger, Maria Carvajal, also noted the “statistical improbability” that most of the registrations were Democratic [...]

It appears the allegations are baseless. Mi Familia Vota, along with One Arizona, submitted about 3,000 requests to add voters to the permanent early voting list. They aren’t new registrations. Instead, already registered voters are asking to get an early voting ballot mailed to them every election cycle.

“Our goal was mainly signing Latinos up on the permanent early voting list. That way they become frequent voters,” Francisco Heredia, the Arizona state director for Mi Familia Vota, told TPMmuckraker. “We’re not telling people how to vote.”

The group only submitted about 300 new registrations, Heredia said. He also said that the requests were not submitted all at once, but on a weekly basis over two months.

Let’s make one thing clear: the goal is not to catch anyone for committing voter fraud. It has been well documented that there’s nobody to really catch. The goal is to intimidate poor, minority, or otherwise voiceless voters from the hassle of going to the polls. We’ve seen this with posters in minority-heavy precincts warning of immigration officials at the polls, or the wrong day put on voting fliers, or “Don’t Vote” campaigns on TV. And this plays into that. They want less people to vote, and they think that improves their chances.