772 search results for ""voter fraud""

The Poors: Leaded and unleaded
by Tom Sullivan

Once again, our vigilant T-party politicians are on the alert for the theoretical possibility of crimes by the Poors. Courtesy of Charlie Pierce comes the next wave of imaginary dirty tricks perpetrated by the Poors on honest, decent Americans. Landlords, in this case:

Holt is Maryland’s secretary of housing, community and development, and he is wise to the ways of America’s crafty poor people. Holt is seeking to “relax” Maryland’s lead-poisoning law in order to take the jackboot of regulation off the necks of the state’s landlords. And nothing gets by Kenneth Holt.

From the Baltimore Sun:

Kenneth C. Holt, secretary of Housing, Community and Development, told an audience at the Maryland Association of Counties summer convention here that a mother could just put a lead fishing weight in her child’s mouth, then take the child in for testing and a landlord would be liable for providing the child with housing until the age of 18.

Pressed afterward, Holt said he had no evidence of this happening but said a developer had told him it was possible. “This is an anecdotal story that was described to me as something that could possibly happen,” Holt said.

Thank heavens these public servants are always on high alert for the possibility of widespread voter fraud (or was it the widespread possibility?) and other dangers for which they never seem to produce evidence. Bigfoot might steal their Wheat Thins. The Poors might counterfeit the governor’s power bill.
Prisoners might hide tiny revolvers in their beards. “Just because we haven’t found the example doesn’t mean they aren’t there” was good enough to argue last year before the Supreme Court.

Pierce continues:

Republican audiences are perfectly willing to buy the notion that clever moms are having their children suck on lead weights to stick it to their landlords and get something for nothing. Within the Republican Party, there is a relentless search for solutions to problems that do not exist, and an equally relentless search for suckers in the general public.

Monorail. Monorail. Monorail.

Having “a Republican argument”
by Tom Sullivan

It could be weeks before U.S. District Judge Thomas Schroeder rules on whether North Carolina’s House Bill 589 violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act. The NAACP and the U.S. Department of Justice filed suit alleging that the law discriminated against racial minorities, the elderly and young people. In addition to requiring photo IDs for voting, H.B. 589 eliminated same-day voter registration, out-of-precinct provisional voting, preregistration for 16- and 17-year-olds, and reduced early voting from 17 to 10 days. (In advance of the trial, state legislators loosened the ID requirements.)

At Plum Line, Greg Sargent spoke with Chris Brook, one of the ACLU attorneys on the case, about “the mother of all voter suppression bills”:

PLUM LINE: What is the case against the North Carolina law?

BROOK: It makes it more difficult for all North Carolinians to vote, but in particular for racial minorities in our state. Beyond that, the legislature knew full well, when they passed this raft of voting restrictions, that it would make it more difficult for African Americans to vote. Yet they plowed forward despite that fact. We’re challenging these measures pursuant to the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution as well as Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act.

PLUM LINE: The judge in this case is trying to determine whether the impact of the law is discriminatory or merely inconveniencing. It seems like proving discrimination is a high bar.

BROOK: There’s grounds for optimism, because over the course of the trial, we were able to put on a strong case featuring dozens of North Carolinians who were disenfranchised in 2014. These restrictions are not mere inconveniences. They resulted in many North Carolinians not being able to vote.

More than 1,000 North Carolinians cast out-of-precinct provisional ballots in 2014 that previously would have been counted and were not counted. Approximately 11,000 North Carolinians registered to vote during the same-day registration window in 2014. They were not able to participate. This is something that has kept North Carolinians from voting.

In a narrow ruling this week, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit found Texas’ SB 14 voter ID requirement violates Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in that it “produces a discriminatory result that is actionable because [it] . . . interact[s] with social and historical conditions in Texas to cause an inequality in the electoral opportunities enjoyed by African-Americans and Hispanic voters.” North Carolina’s H.B. 589 court could face a similar ruling.

The Fifth Circuit did not affirm that the law was passed with discriminatory purpose or that it constitutes a poll tax. Discriminatory purpose is tougher to prove, even if it’s obvious.

Election Law Blog’s Rick Hasen:

Particularly interesting in this analysis is the question whether Texas’s explanations for why it needed its law (antifraud, voter confidence) were tenuous. The trial court found that they were because the evidence did not support the need for voter id for either of these purposes, and this factor worked in favor of finding of a Section 2 violation.

In upholding the Section 2 claim, the court observed:

While increasing voter turnout and safeguarding voter confidence are legitimate state interests, see Crawford v. Marion Cnty. Election Bd., 553 U.S. 181, 191 (2008), the district court found that “the stated policies behind SB 14 are only tenuously related to its provisions,” Veasey, 71 F. Supp. 3d at 698. While in-person voting fraud is rare and mail-in fraud is comparatively much more common, SB 14’s voter ID restrictions would only combat the former. Id. at 639–41, 653.

[…]

The district court also found “no credible evidence” to support assertions that voter turnout was low due to a lack of confidence in elections, that SB 14 would increase public confidence in elections, or that increased confidence would boost voter turnout. Id. at 655. Two State Senators and the Director of the Elections Division at the Texas Secretary of State’s office all were unaware of anyone abstaining from voting out of concern for voter fraud, and the Director testified that implementing the provisional ballot process might undermine voter confidence. Id. The district court also credited testimony that SB 14 would decrease voter turnout. Id. at 655–56. According to a well established formula employed by political scientists to assess individuals’ likelihood of voting in an election, increasing the cost of voting decreases voter turnout—particularly among low-income individuals, as they are most cost sensitive. Id. at 656. Further, the district court dismissed the argument that increased turnout during the 2008 presidential election was demonstrative of increased voter confidence in two states that had recently passed voter ID laws. Id. at 655. Instead, it found that the increased turnout, nationwide, was due to President Obama’s candidacy. Id. Finally, the court also found that public opinion polls—which found high levels of support for photo ID requirements—were not demonstrative that SB 14 itself would promote voter confidence. Id. at 656. The district court discounted the polls because they did not evaluate whether voters supported SB 14 when weighed against its attendant effect on minority voters. Id.

The same “confidence” assertion the district court in Texas rejected is one prime rationale behind most of these laws nationwide, as well as in North Carolina. In July closing arguments in North Carolina, the Winston-Salem Journal reported:

Schroeder asked Farr [one of the state’s attorneys] what the justification was in making the election law changes. State Republican legislators said publicly they wanted to restore public confidence in the election system and stamp out potential voter fraud.

There is no evidence of widespread in-person voter fraud in North Carolina or nationally. An expert for the plaintiffs testified that North Carolina had only two verified cases of voter fraud out of 35 million votes cast in primary and presidential elections between 2000 and 2014.

My wife calls this having “a Republican argument.” That is to say, a disingenuous one. It’s where your opponent abandons rules of evidence and logic and instead argues by assertion or by exaggerated fear of what “might be” happening undetected.

It is to argue, for example, that eliminating public assistance to the rich through tax cuts, credits, and direct incentives (that fund their fifth home, new yacht, or airplane upgrade) will kill their incentive to work hard and “create jobs.” But public assistance to the poor — you know, for food — eliminates their incentive to work.

It is to argue after every mass shooting that we need no new gun laws criminals will simply ignore; we just need to enforce laws already on the books. Except when it comes to voting restrictions, we need new laws on top of those they complain the state is already not enforcing.

It is people arguing that we need to restore public confidence in the election system after they’ve spent decades trying to undermine it to build public support for restoring Jim Crow.

Next up: competency tests.

Omission accomplished
by Tom Sullivan

Since elections that gave the GOP control of North Carolina’s legislature (2010) and governor’s mansion (2012), creating jobs hasn’t exactly been Job One. But keeping theirs has. That has meant election changes from soup to nuts, or rather, from gerrymandering to photo identity cards. The cherry on top? Voter registrations state agencies must offer clients by the National Voter Registration Act dropping by 50 percent since Gov. Pat McCrory took office. Plus regular voter fraud snipe hunts designed to generate public support for even more election “reforms.”

For all their amateur data-sleuthing, what the state’s voter fraud vigilantes lack in quality, they make up for in quantity. Yet documenting non-anecdotal cases of fraud has proven difficult. Finding real victims of the voting restrictions they advocate, less so, as the Institute for Southern Studies found:

Jerome Roberts and his daughter Diana battled nearly unbelievable odds to become U.S. citizens. And one of the first things they wanted to do after becoming naturalized was to cast votes in North Carolina’s 2014 elections.

In the 1990s, they had fled their native Liberia during the West African country’s deadly civil wars, which claimed the lives of both of Jerome’s parents. After living in a U.N. refugee camp in Ghana for several years, the family was moved in 2000 by the U.S. government to a resettlement in Charlotte, where Jerome has worked as a service technician for the city for eight years.

They were excited about voting as full citizens in their first general election in November 2014. And then?

On the morning of the elections, Jerome picked Diana up from high school, where she was an 18-year-old in her last semester, and they headed to their precinct at Druid Hills Academy. When they arrived, however, they discovered that Diana — despite being a naturalized citizen, and a registered voter since September — had been flagged as a potential non-citizen by state election officials. According to state law, only naturalized citizens can vote.

Diana was apparently on a list of 1,454 names the N.C. State Board of Elections gave to local election officials shortly before the 2014 elections, identifying registered voters whose “citizenship status was in question.” More than 300 names had been sent to Mecklenburg County.

According to Jerome and Diana, their voting experience went downhill from there. A poll worker told them to wait while precinct officials “called downtown” to address Diana’s citizenship status. They waited more than two hours, to no avail. In the meantime, Jerome — unfamiliar with the voting process — asked the same poll worker for help understanding his ballot; according to Jerome, she became impatient and dismissive, saying, “We can’t help you.”

In the end, Jerome cast a ballot, but Diana, frustrated and tired, did not. Asked if she planned to try again next election, she said no. Jerome added, “Is this how people vote in this country? Because these are the things that make people not want to vote.”

As President George W. Bush once said of his administration’s custom-designed fiasco, “Mission accomplished.”

The selling of “Hillary fraud”
by Tom Sullivan

With Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race, you knew the “Clinton Rumors” would be back with a vengeance. Along with the chain emails from your dad. David Mikkelson has been collecting them at Snopes.com since the 1990s:

As he did in 2007, Mikkelson has seen a recent uptick in interest in Clinton rumors. The popular one recently was that Clinton was fired from the Watergate investigation. “It’s everything that people want to believe of her,” Mikkelson said — “she’s a liar, she’s corrupt, she’s unethical — all in one piece.” It is also important to note: This rumor is false.

Somebody once said they’ll keep doing this stuff as long as they think it works.

A few days ago we had a media blitz over Clinton Cash written by Peter Schweizer, a former Bush speechwriter and Breitbart.com contributor. The pattern is familiar:

Schweizer explains he cannot prove the allegations, leaving that up to investigative journalists and possibly law enforcement. “Short of someone involved coming forward to give sworn testimony, we don’t know what might or might not have been said in private conversations, the exact nature of the transition, or why people in power make the decision they do,” he writes. Later, he concludes, “We cannot ultimately know what goes on in their minds and ultimately provide the links between the money they took and the benefits that subsequently accrued to themselves, their friends, and their associates.”

So then, nothing. Yet again.

This morning at the New York Times we have “Cash Flowed to Clinton Foundation as Russians Pressed for Control of Uranium Company” about Canadian mining financier Frank Giustra. You remember the Times. From the run-up to the Iraq invasion? Or maybe Judith Miller?

Bullshit sells. America buys. (“Oh, McFly, your shoe’s untied.”)

Just yesterday, Michael Tomasky blasted:

While I’m at it with the irony quotes, I might as well drape some around that adjective “investigative” too. The Times, it seems, has decided to debase itself by following the breadcrumbs dropped by this former adviser to Sarah Palin because Schweizer devotes a chapter to Giustra and Kazakhstan, which the Times reported on back in 2008, and the Times plans to follow up on that.

I remember reading that Times story at the time and going, “Wow, that does look bad.” But then I also remember reading this Forbes (yes, Forbes!) debunking of the Times story, which was headlined “Clinton Commits No Foul in Kazakhstan Uranium Deal.” By the time I finished reading that piece (and please, click through and read it so that you are forearmed for the coming Times hit job), I was marveling to myself: Golly, that Times piece looked so awful at the time. But it turns out they just left out some facts, obscured some others, and without being technically inaccurate, managed to convey or imply that something skuzzy happened where it in fact hadn’t. How can a great newspaper do such a thing?

How indeed? But throw enough smoke bombs into newsrooms and people will believe there must be a fire. Maybe, might be, and possibly are the stock-in-trade of rumor mongering. It works. Look how well it has worked for Hans von Spakovsky & Co. in convincing the people of River City that they’ve got trouble with a a capital “V” that stands for voter fraud, and that he’s just the guy to sell them a boys’ band photo ID laws to fix it.

By the way, it was former president Bill Clinton who explained how this stuff works to The Daily Show‘s Jon Stewart in August 2004:

STEWART: Is it – has it gotten to the point – do you believe that politics has gotten so dirty and so – that these kinds of tactics have become so prevalent – that this is the reason half the country doesn’t vote, or, this is the reason we don’t get, maybe, the officials that we deserve?

CLINTON: No, I think people do it because they think it works.

STEWART: That’s it. Simply a strategy?

CLINTON: Absolutely. And as soon as it doesn’t work, they’ll stop doing it. So I think Senator McCain, whom I admire very much, made a mistake not bashing the Bush campaign over the attacks on his service. They implied he betrayed the country when he was a POW and he made a huge mistake in not bashing them for that calling operation saying he’d adopted a black baby. It was blatantly racist. They’ll do this stuff as long as they think it works.

Judging by the headlines, it’s still working. “Oh, McFly, your shoe’s untied.”

Revisiting LBJ’s “We Shall Overcome” speech

by digby

I wrote a piece for Salon today about the 50th anniversary of Lyndon Johnson’s “We Shall Overcome” speech in which he exhorted the congress to pass the voting right act:

Johnson gave that speech 50 years ago almost to the day. The Voting Rights Act was passed and many more African-Americans and other racial minorities were able to participate in our democracy as full citizens. It resulted in such a sea change in American politics that the regional coalitions that formed the two parties in Johnson’s time have switched places. Ironically, today practically the only Southern Democrats are African-American and the Northern Republican is as rare as an albino elephant. There are very few conservatives in the Democratic Party and you’d have to waterboard any Republican to make him admit to being the “l” word.

But one thing has continued: the reactionary right’s relentless quest to deny African-Americans the right to vote. In fact, after having calmed down a bit for a few years, they are more aggressive about it than ever, passing voter ID laws designed to make it difficult for people to vote. And while they will caterwaul 24/7 that there is no racist intent, America’s history proves otherwise, particularly since there is no evidence that their alleged “concerns” over voter fraud have any basis in fact. Just this week, the state of Ohio had to reluctantly announce that yet another waste of taxpayer’s money has proved that there is no systematic “voter fraud” in the state:

Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted has been on a mission to weed out purported voter fraud in the state since he took office in 2011. After launching an investigation into what he called an “expanding loophole” allowing non-citizens to vote in Ohio and potentially decide elections, he announced Thursday that 145 non-citizens were registered to vote illegally in 2014, amounting to just .0002 percent of the 7.7 million registered voters in the state. Husted’s office would not provide any information about the 27 people it referred to the Attorney General’s office for further review.

But in 2013, his office sent 17 potential cases — .0003 percent of total ballots cast in the state — to the AG who eventually referred them to county prosecutors. Most reports of voting irregularities were dropped by the county prosecutors because the “voter fraud” problems were determined to have been caused by simple mistakes and confused senior citizens, according to a Cleveland Plain Dealer investigation. Voter fraud in Ohio is a fifth-degree felony and could carry up to a year in prison. But of the cases referred to prosecutors’ offices in 2013, most irregularities were caused by voter confusion or mistakes made by elections officials and not deliberate attempts to commit fraud, the investigation found.

For example, Cuyahoga County looked into 15 cases referred from Husted’s office and chose not to pursue criminal charges against any of the individuals, concluding that the voters were confused about the “Golden Week” during which people can both register to vote and also cast their absentee ballot.

He did find two non-citizens who registered to vote, so all that work was surely worth it. No word on how much all this cost the state but evidently there is no limit on how much time and money can be spent by frugal, small government, liberty lovers on these quixotic scavenger hunts for the Sasquatch of the electorate: the fraudulent partisan voter.
[…]
Fifty years ago brave civil rights activists in the streets and a president and other officials who knew the moment for change had arrived put justice and equality ahead of a property owner’s right to discriminate and the state’s right to deny the vote to their citizens. It was a radical move, necessitating a serious challenge to federalism. Unfortunately, the story did not end there. Millhiser reminds us at the end of his piece that Johnson and company may have been radicals in their time but today the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts overturned much of the Voting Rights Act in 2013 and Sen. Rand Paul, who lugubriously proclaims that liberty is never harder for him than when his philosophical integrity forces him to support the constitutional rights of racist property owners over everyone else’s, is running for president.

Those people are radicals of a different sort and they stand ready to overturn and subvert progress wherever they find it.

read on…

Maybe night vision goggles?
by Tom Sullivan

The voter fraud frauds are at it again:

LINCOLN, Neb. (AP) — Supporters and opponents of a Nebraska voter identification bill packed a public hearing Friday for a fierce debate over the measure.

The Legislature’s Government, Military and Veterans Affairs Committee heard heated arguments on a bill by Sen. Tyson Larson of O’Neill. The legislation would require voters to show a driver’s license or state identification card at a polling place. Fifteen other states have such a law.

[snip]

Doug Kagan of Nebraska Taxpayers for Freedom testified in support of the measure, saying it protects the sanctity of the system and compared voter ID laws to a vaccination preventing polio.

Because America’s Most Sanctimonious don’t want their elections tainted by diseased Others — infected with too much poor, too much melanin, or too much not-one-of-us.

Talking with a newly minted ex-Republican over the weekend, I recounted attending a 2013 “boot camp” for training T-party sleuths how to purge voter rolls. I wrote at the time that,

… they emphasized the need for getting dead and inactive voters off the rolls because of the possibility of widespread voter fraud — or was it a widespread possibility? — for which they never seem to produce evidence. Basically, T-partiers are convinced that if they lose an election it must be because their opponents cheated. What else could it be? Zombies? Bigfoot?!

Much of the day focused on dead and inactive voters who remain on the rolls (by law) too long for the T-party’s liking. So they employ crowd-sourced data-matching to get voters removed. Two women described perusing the MLS listings for homes for sale and foreclosures. Then they drive by, taking geocoded photos of the properties and any empty houses they find to prove to the local Board of Elections that people registered there no longer live there. They scour the daily obituaries for the freshly dead, then take the notices down to the local Board of Elections and try to have them removed from the voter rolls.

Of course, Board of Elections professionals could do all this with enough manpower and enough money from enough taxes … oh, right.

Not once in seven hours, I told my new friend, did anyone suggest expanding the franchise or registering new voters and encouraging them to exercise their right to vote. It was utterly defensive, aimed at keeping the imagined, invisible hoards of THEM  from casting ballots.

Her eyes grew wide in shock as she said, “That’s so sad.”

Underground railroading


by Tom Sullivan

On Friday, we were in Greensboro, NC when the International Civil Rights Center & Museum was open. We’d been meaning to stop in for years. We even managed to get through the tour of the old F. W. Woolworth lunch counter without crying. (OK, barely.) The word unequal kept coming up in the tour. That and the funeral earlier of a black friend had me mulling over how many white people still resent sharing the country with Others they consider unequal.

Demographic shifts are bringing them kicking and screaming to the realization that they must.

Losing power is very personal for people on the right. Both left and right talk about taking “their country” back, but it seems much more personal for conservatives. In their America, it seems, there is no we, just i and me.

One place you hear it is in their rhetoric about voter fraud. It is a very personal affront to them that the power of their votes might be diminished by the Other. Every time someone ineligible casts a fraudulent ballot, they insist, it “steals your vote.” Your vote. They have convinced themselves that there are thousands and thousands of invisible felons stealing their votes every election. Passing more restrictive voting laws is a matter of justice and voting integrity, of course. What other motivation could there be for railroading eligible poor, minority, and college-age voters?

The Others they suspect of this heinous activity are people who do not believe as they do nor vote as they do. Voter fraud itself is a code word, the way Lee Atwater used “forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff.” It’s “much more abstract,” as Atwater said. The issue is not really whether the invisible “those people” are voting illegally or not. It is that they are voting at all. Sharing in governance, sharing power, is a privilege for deserving, Real Americans, not for the unwashed Irresponsibles. That Others do so legally is just as much an affront. Right now they’re targeting the invisible Others. Restricting voting to Real Americans comes later, I guess.

Being a racist in the South in 1954 may have been de rigueur, but as Atwater said about the N-word being unacceptable by the late 1960s, being racist today is terribly unfashionable. Not even racists want to see themselves as racists.

Racism itself might not be as dead as conservative pundits insist. It has just been driven further underground. Some have so thoroughly convinced themselves that political animus towards the poor and minorities is not racist, that if liberals even raise the subject, it must be liberals who are the racists. I guess it is a kind of progress that people work so hard at painting themselves as anything but.
During early voting here, a Republican electioneer got into my wife’s face and accused her of being a racist for offering sample ballots and Democratic materials to black voters.

In a conversation overheard recently, two conservative men were discussing their dislike for Barack Obama. It wasn’t that he was black, no. They had no problem with a black president even. It was that Obama’s actions as president were so radical, so in your face and overreaching. One got the distinct impression that his doing anything at all made him radical.

So it goes.

Lies we tell ourselves
by Tom Sullivan

America has lost faith with itself.

Grazing on the Net this morning, one story after another pops up where a common thread is the lies we tell ourselves and the ugly truths about ourselves we struggle to hide.

Paul Krugman:

According to conservative dogma, which denounces any regulation of the sacred pursuit of profit, the financial crisis of 2008 — brought on by runaway financial institutions — shouldn’t have been possible. But Republicans chose not to rethink their views even slightly. They invented an imaginary history in which the government was somehow responsible for the irresponsibility of private lenders, while fighting any and all policies that might limit the damage.

Matt Taibbi (on securities fraud at Chase and collusion between the company and the Justice Department to cover it up):

When [Alayne] Fleischmann and her team reviewed random samples of the loans, they found that around 40 percent of them were based on overstated incomes – an astronomically high defect rate for any pool of mortgages; Chase’s normal tolerance for error was five percent. One mortgage in particular that sticks out in Fleischmann’s mind involved a manicurist who claimed to have an annual income of $117,000. Fleischmann figured that even working seven days a week, this woman would have needed to work 488 days a year to make that much. “And that’s with no overhead,” Fleischmann says. “It wasn’t possible.”

But when she and others raised objections to the toxic loans, something odd started happening. The number-crunchers who had been complaining about the loans suddenly began changing their reports. The process she describes is strikingly similar to the way police obtain false confessions: The interrogator verbally abuses the target until he starts producing the desired answers. “What happened,” Fleischmann says, “is the head diligence manager started yelling at his team, berating them, making them do reports over and over, keeping them late at night.” Then the loans started clearing …

“That’s the thing I’m worried about,” she says. “That they make the whole thing disappear. If they do that, the truth will never come out.”

The Guardian, wondering if a Republican-controlled Senate will even release its long-delayed torture report:

Torture is so endemic to the prosecutions undertaken by the US military commissions that the military designed and built a special courtroom just to limit any outside access to unredacted testimony given at the commission: court and legal observers are relegated to “censorship chambers” attached to the courtroom, where they can only view the proceedings behind soundproof glass with a 40-second audio delay.

And just to make certain that no one will hear if the defendants or their lawyers mention torture outright, the military judge and commission’s security officer have a button to unilaterally cut that audio feed when they believe discussion might veer into dangerous territory. When the government can silence the truth about its own crimes in a single click, it’s the very negation of justice.

Frank Schaeffer on the midterm elections:

The Republican Party base is white evangelicals. So it’s no wonder that GOP lies about the country, the economy and the president worked. The folks who base their lives on religious mythology have spent lifetimes being trained to believe lies. On Tuesday they won. Lies won.

I opened an April op-ed on the propagation of the “voter fraud” fiction with this quote from retiring Wisconsin State Senator Dale Schultz, the sole Senate Republican to oppose early voting limits:

“It’s just sad when a political party has so lost faith in its ideas that it’s pouring all of its energy into election mechanics. I am not willing to defend them anymore.”

It’s getting sadder when I’m quoting the Bible in a blog post two days in a row.

God shall send them strong delusion, that they should believe a lie:
That they all might be damned who believed not the truth, but had pleasure in unrighteousness.
2 Thessalonians 2:11-12, KJV

Where’s Samuel L. Jackson when we really need him, my brothers, to save us from the tyranny of evil men?

And just like that


by Tom Sullivan

Seems like we visited this just this morning …

And just like that, James O’Keefe convinces more rubes they’ve seen proof of a crime wave when they have not:

North Carolina election officials repeatedly offered ballots last week to an impostor who arrived at polling places with the names and addresses of ‘inactive’ voters who hadn’t participated in elections for many years.

No fraudulent votes were actually cast …

Again.

Professional voter fraud frighteners like Hans von Spakovsky and James O’Keefe expect Real Americans™ to believe that while they’re having their Election Day coffee, “Others” are headed to the polls not to do their patriotic and civic duty, no, but to participate in a nationwide crime spree unparalleled in the annals of American criminology.

The Frighteners expect you to believe that thousands, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of these Others – you know who they mean – go to the polls on Election Day determined instead to commit felonies punishable by up to 5 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for each offense by impersonating dead or fictitious voters. With nothing, nothing to stop them.

Makes you want to rush right out and run stop lights, doesn’t it?

.

Seeing is believing?


by Tom Sullivan

Rachel Maddow this morning has a Washington Post op-ed about the biennial fear fest that so conveniently comes on the heels of Halloween. This year’s popular ghoulies: “Ebola, the Islamic State, vague but nefarious aspersions about stolen elections and a whole bunch of terrifying fantasies about our border with Mexico.” Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.), for example, claimed “at least 10 ISIS fighters” were captured sneaking into Texas from Mexico. No one has seen them, but that is no proof they don’t exist.

About those “vague but nefarious aspersions”:

And in the conservative media, there is even more to worry about. Conservative blogs lost their minds recently over a surveillance video showing a Latino man delivering completed ballots to an elections office in Maricopa County, Ariz. Ballot stuffing! Blatant fraud! Caught red-handed! 

Actually, delivering other people’s ballots to elections offices is perfectly legal in Arizona. Even Republicans have asked Arizonans to bring their early ballots to campaign events this year, so they could be collected and dropped off at polling places. But when the person doing the same thing was Latino, the blogs made it seem like the guy was hiding under the bed, ready to grab your foot if you got up in the night.

The “voter fraud” fraud works like that, and from some of the same con artists who told repeated lies until two-thirds of the country believed Saddam Hussein was involved in the September 11 attacks and had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons. Even after nothing was found, people believed. Because they’d become complicit in perpetuating the fraud. In the Arizona video, like James O’Keefe’s videos, the eyes believe they saw something they didn’t. It reminded me of this sleight-of-hand demonstration where Teller of Penn and Teller describes how people trying to read others’ intentions “aid and abet the trick”:

“Believe none of what you hear, and only half of what you see.” ― Benjamin Franklin
“People say believe half of what you see. Son, and none of what you hear.” ― Marvin Gaye