Chris Potter takes on "voter fraud" both real and imagined. The setup:
That was the story we posted here, by the way. Potter continues:After all the talk on FOX News about voter fraud ... the pre-emptive lawsuits Republicans filed against state elections officials ... John McCain warning that the community group ACORN was "destroying the fabric of democracy" ...
After all that, the only election-fraud allegation to make waves was leveled against -- Rick Santorum.
So where was all that voter fraud? You'd think that if there was ANY Fox "News" would've said something by now.Before the elections, the gasbags on FOX and talk radio howled about voter fraud. Paid signature-gatherers were forging names on voter-registration forms, we were told -- and on Election Day, these phantom Mickey Mouses and I.P. Freelys would materialize at the polls. Democracy would lie in ruin. The complaints were picked up by bloggers; e-mails bombarded newspaper editors every hour.
It was creepy how people who'd never heard of ACORN were so willing to denounce it. Even creepier, though, was how quickly they stopped. Just days ago, McCain was worried about the fabric of democracy. Now his aides mutter about how much Sarah Palin spent on designer clothes. Never mind the mainstream press -- I'm hard-pressed to find a single allegation of fraud even on conservative Web sites.
And what's at Fox "News" now? John Lott is trying to replay the whole story with talk of possible future voter fraud in the Minnesota recount.
Take a look. He even adds the old standby:
With ACORN filing more than 43,000 registration forms this year, 75 percent of all new registrations in the state, Minnesota was facing vote fraud problems even before the election. Even a small percentage of those registrations resulting in fraudulent votes could tip this election.Yet no reports of any voter fraud from Minnesota during the election. Same old song.
To quote Potter:
Conservatives love to boast about their love of country, their unshakable belief that we have the world's most powerful democracy. But at the drop of the hat, they were willing to pretend the whole thing could be ruined by a handful of $8-an-hour temps. Suddenly, ACORN was the greatest threat to democracy since ... since ... Saddam Hussein's WMD.Another lie from the GOP.
While looking around the web at allegations against ACORN, I came upon the case of Nathan Sproul. Now, ACORN has been careless in the past (they are mostly kids, often pissed at the Republicans and the Bush administration), and they hired poor people and ex-cons to register voters. So they infrequently ended up with people who would go to the library and sit with the phone books and fill out voter forms. And ACORN turned them in. Now ACORN hires more people to call the people on the voter registration forms. They still turn in all the forms, but they flag ones that seem suspicious and fire people who turn in lots of suspicious forms (and turn the fired persons name over to the authorities). Note that ACORN is a community Organization that does voter registration as one of its activities. They lean left, but they are not affiliated with the Democrats specifically.
ReplyDeleteNathan Sproul is described as a “noted Republican strategist and political consultant for numerous campaigns (and a former leader of the Arizona Republican party). His consulting group also runs a voter registration effort, called “America Votes”. His consulting firm runs a voter registration effort, paid for, at least in part, by the Republican National Committee. He did so in 2004, and ran one again this year. In 2004, a fired employee accused his voter registration people of tearing up and/or throwing away the registration forms marked as democrat. Now my research here is far from comprehensive, but it appears that despite the fact registration forms were retrieved from the garbage, there was not enough evidence to convince either State Secretaries of State (in Oregon and Nevada, I believe) or the FEC or Justice Department to act on the accusations. Never the less, here is the exact situation that ACORN is accused of (tearing up registration forms), and payments are made by the RNC and this year also by the McCain campaign, and no one says anything.
But then we also know that in Florida in 2000, thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of ex-felons, who were permitted under the terms of Florida law to vote (based on how long ago they had gotten out of jail), were never the less stricken from the voter rolls by the Republican administration. McCain had some nerve talking about the threat to the fabric of democracy after eight years of Bush.
they have found that lying works.
ReplyDeletei think it is in part because a lot of people would never be so bold as to lie like they do and with such conviction and so can not believe that their party would lie to them.