If there is no evidence of voter fraud, they’ll just have to manufacture some
by digby
Considering my earlier post about post-truth politics and the culture of mendacity, here’s a report to curl your hair from Think Progress:
As it is more likely that a person will be struck by lightning than that they will commit in-person voter fraud, proponents of voter ID laws have had trouble coming up with enough fraud examples to justify potentially disenfranchising hundreds of thousands of low-income and minority voters. True the Vote is hoping to change that by policing elections with untrained poll watchers heavily recruited from Tea Party events. These poll watchers will record common irregularities like mismatched addresses, typos, or dual registration errors as “fraud” to create the false impression that voting restrictions are justified:
As one strategy, the group buys voter rolls from states and counties, then disseminates the lists to thousands of largely unsupervised volunteers, who are urged to submit to election officials names from the rolls that may be improperly registered.[…] True the Vote encourages recruits to “build relationships with election administrators” because “they control the access to the vote,” as [elections coordinator] Ouren told a gathering in Houston.
In 2010, the group was able to get a list of voter registration data from Republican Harris County registrar Leo Vasquez, who reportedly refused the same to the Democratic Party, for which the party sued. When the King Street Patriots submitted to him their list of fraudulent actions they claimed to see at the polls, Vasquez accepted them without verification and held a press conference with Engelbrecht asserting Harris County polls were “under a systemic and organized attack.”
As ThinkProgress has documented, these purge lists are often riddled with errors and frequently disenfranchise legitimate voters. But volunteer voter purges are just one part of the multi-pronged strategy True the Vote will use, in the courts and at the polls, to influence the November election — and, if they can, every election to come.
It’s not as if we weren’t warned. Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation wrote this in January of 2011:
The second thing that must be a Tea Party priority is stopping voter fraud. Liberal hero and man voted most likely to be an ACLU board member, Joseph Stalin, once said, “it’s not who votes that counts, it is who counts the votes.”
In this past election, the left made a concerted effort at voter fraud. This fraud effected elections. Now, in many areas, for a conservative to win, not only do they have to have a majority, they have to have a fraud proof majority.
At Tea Party Nation we have received a lot of information about what happened and will be making some of the news public in the next few weeks. What is very disturbing was a pattern of “test marketing” certain types of fraud. Certain types of voter fraud that we saw in limited amounts in 2010, we will see across the country in 2012.
The Tea Party movement must united across the country and work to eliminate voter fraud. In some states it will be easy. In socialist states like California or corrupt, I mean Democrat controlled states, like Illinois, it will be very tough. If we are going to win, we must. If we do not eliminate liberal voter fraud, our votes won’t matter because they will not be counted.
Stopping voter fraud is going to be a major project for Tea Party Nation this year.
In Texas, there is a group that is doing an outstanding job of fighting voter fraud. The group is called True the Vote. What they do can be taken and duplicated in almost any state or locality. On January 15th, they are going to have a conference in Houston, TX. They are going to talk about what they did and how you can work in your community to prevent voter fraud. The cost is $50. If want more information, visit their website, Kingstreetpatriots.org.
Stopping voter fraud must be a top priority for us this year. The left knows it cannot win free and fair elections. They can only win by cheating. We must stop them now or Chicago style elections will become the norm for the United States. We must stop this fraud, while we still can.
These people did a test run in Wisconsin and it was fruitful:
Wisconsin’s election to recall Gov. Scott Walker (R) was the most recent test drive for True the Vote’s vote suppression project. During the June recall election, a voting hotline received numerous calls from college students claiming True the Vote “poll observers” challenged their right to vote. These poll observers exploited a provision in the state’s new GOP-sponsored voter ID law to claim it was illegal for students home for the summer to vote in local precincts if they had been home for less than 28 days. Others were hassled for proof of residency.
Minority voters in Wisconsin also reported harassment by True the Vote’s white poll watchers, who took notes and watched as the predominantly black line of voters cast their ballots. When Walker survived the recall election, True the Vote congratulated their poll watchers on “a victory of their own making.”
Yes, these people do live in an alternate universe, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of doing what they set out to do, which is disrupt voting and possibly construct a false narrative of voter fraud with the help of compliant election officials.
Hopefully they are more bluster than anything else, but keep in mind that all these groups have friends in very high places.