Illegal Strategy
by digby
I wrote back in 2006 that I thought the Republicans would probably blame their losses on illegal immigrants illegally voting. It didn’t happen, but I figured that they’d eventually put it together since it’s such a perfect theme to piggyback on the work the Democrats already did in bringing attention to the holes in the voting system and perverting it to their own cause. And here we are.
Brietbart’s outfit (naturally) is on the case saying that a conspiracy between the “Soros Funded” SOS project (to elect decent Secretaries of State who enable rather than prohibit voting), the unions and millions of illegal immigrants to steal elections may tip races that otherwise would have gone to Republicans.
You can read the whole thing over there, but here’s the outline if you don’t want to soil your browser:
Here are the disconnected dots that are detailed below:
* First Dot: The SOS Project
* Second Dot: The SEIU’s Shenanigans
* Third Dot: 11 Million Illegal Immigrants
* Fourth Dot: The Fake ID Industry & Meg Whitman
* Fifth Dot: Voter Registration
* Sixth Dot: Union GOTV Strategies
* Seventh Dot: Early Voting
* Connecting the Dots
They illustrate the story with this picture, no caption, no explanation, as if it self-evidently proves their point:
You get the idea. This story is as old as the hills in American politics, of course. But the “illegal” voting theme has a particularly interesting history considering that it was heavily practiced by some of the most illustrious early members of the modern conservative movement. Here’s Rick Perlstein on the vote suppression effort in 1964, called “Operation Eagle Eye” in which Chief justice John Roberts’ predecessor, William Rehnquist, participated as a young man:
The “vote fraud” fantasies are tinged by deeply right-wing racial and anti-urban panics. I’ve talked to many conservative who seem to consider the idea of mass non-white participation in the duties of citizenship is inherently suspicious. It’s an idea all decent Americans should consider abhorrent. It is also, however, a very old conservative obsession–one that goes back to the beginnings of the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party itself.
Let me show you. Read this report from 1964, running down all the ways how Barry Goldwater’s Republican Party was working overtime to keep minorities from voting. The document can be found in the LBJ Library, where I researched my book Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus
John M Baley, Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, charged today that “under the guise of setting up an apparatus to protect the sanctity of the ballot, the Republicans are actually creating the machinery for a carefully organized campaign to intimidate voters and to frighten members of minority groups from casing their ballots on November 3rd.
“‘Let’s get this straight,’ Bailey added, ‘the Democratic Party is just as much opposed to vote frauds as is the Republican party. We will settle for giving all legally registered voters an opportunity to make their choice on November 3rd. We have enough faith in our Party to be confident that the outcome will be a vote of confidence in President Johnson and a mandate for the President and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey, to continue the programs of the Johnson-Kennedy Administration.
“‘But we have evidence that the Republican program is not really what it purports to be. It is an organized effort to prevent the foreign born, to prevent Negroes, to prevent members of ethnic minorities from casting their votes by frightening and intimidating them at the polling place.
“‘We intend to see to it that the rights of these people are protected. We will have our people at the polling places–not to frighten or threaten anyone–but to protect the right of any eligible voter to cast a secret ballot without threats or intimidation.’
I wrote about vote suppression until I simply couldn’t write about it anymore. But it’s all in the archives. This piece hits some of the highlights.
*And to those who insist that these stories of voter registration rolls being overrun with dead people and illegally registered names need to get a grip. Our system has always had a lot of extraneous names on the rolls. People move, people die, there are people registered who shouldn’t be. What study after study has shown is that in the last 50 years or so there has never been any systematic voter fraud, meaning people actually voting more than once or voting when they aren’t entitled to vote. The voter rolls themselves don’t affect elections. It’s the votes that count — and when it comes to manipulating the votes, it’s Republicans who have made an industry out of keeping legal voters from being able to cast votes and keeping legal votes from being counted.
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