771 search results for ""voter fraud""

Destabilizing the fundamental mechanism of democracy


by digby

Boy, I sure am hearing a lot of complacency among liberals right now about the awesome superiority of the Obama GOTV operation and the lousy GOP effort by comparison. That may be true, although there’s some reason to believe that the right has organized pretty well outside the presidential campaign.

But this sort of thing is designed to delay voting for legitimate voters in the hope that it will create chaos at the polls and force people to give up.  If it’s close it will serve as fodder for their predictable claim that the vote was stolen and/or to contest the results:

A new ThinkProgress investigation has found that in Iowa, Romney poll watchers are being trained to watch for voters who show up without a photo ID, even though no voter ID law exists in the state.

In a training video for Romney poll watchers in Iowa, the narrator tells volunteers to be on the lookout for anytime “a voter fails to show a voter ID and they are still permitted to vote.” If that happens, he says, “alert the legal team so they can handle the problem.” The text of the campaign’s slide, however, says something contradictory, instructing volunteers when poll workers should check the voter’s ID. Despite the mixed messages, the slide ends with: “If an election worker is not checking photo ID, please call the legal hotline immediately.”

NARRATOR: Naturally, you’re probably wondering what irregularities may come up throughout the day. We’ll walk you through some quick examples. First, there may be an instance where a voter fails to show a voter ID and they are still permitted to vote. If you notice this, use the legal help button to alert the legal team so they can handle the problem and you can get back to checking voters.

This video is part of Romney’s massive nationwide poll-watcher effort on Election Day. The campaign is training 34,000 volunteers to fan out in swing states across the country and monitor for voter fraud. Romney personally touted Project ORCA in a video released Wednesday evening, telling poll watchers that they’ll “be the key link in providing critical, real-time information to me.” Because of the program, Romney said, “our campaign will have an unprecedented advantage on Election Day.”

The “critical, real-time information” is unlikely to be about which Grandmas haven’t been taken to the polls yet, I’m afraid. They are looking for ways to gum up the works and create a voter fraud narrative.

The Republican Party had convinced itself that the Reagan election ushered in a thousand year reign and that Democrats simply could never win again.  When that proved to be false in the 90s they started this scheme to destabilize and delegitimize the people’s choice — the most fundamental mechanism of our democracy.  First they tried to force Clinton to resign from office through a series of trumped up scandals and then impeached him for a personal indiscretion. The following years brought the debacle of the 2000 election, unprecedented gerrymandering in out years, the politicization of the Department of Justice voting rights division, the firing of Attorneys General who refused to interfere in elections and prosecute bogus voter fraud issues, the institutionalization of “voter ID”, and now this. Another close presidential election will further put their plans to the test.

One can only hope that the Democrats are prepared for how the nation will react in an era of extreme polarization. After all, if Republicans already believe that President Obama is a hardcore socialist muslim backed by the powerful vote-stealing Black Panthers so it’s fairly sure that they will see any contested election in that light.  And the rest of use will see this plan at work and be gaslighted by the press and the political establishment just as we were last time. The fact is that the system has already been successfully destabilized. On purpose.  By the right. And I’m not sure how we fix it.

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How accurate will those polls be?

by David Atkins

With the state-by-state polls showing narrow but substantial leads for Obama, conservatives in the media have taken to attacking poll averages as unreliable. But how unreliable might they be? John Sides at The Monkey Cage has the details:

How trustworthy are this year’s presidential polls? On Monday, November 5, will they be able to tell us who is likely to win the election? We’ll know soon enough, but in the meantime the historical record provides some important context. This record suggests three things:

1) The polls have been fairly accurate. (Adverbs are always a bit subjective, so see what you think after you read the post.)

2) To the extent that they miss, they do so by over-estimating the frontunner’s vote.

3) The reason they miss is not because of late movement among the undecideds but because of “no-show” voters who tells pollsters that they will vote but then don’t.

They don’t miss much:

In very close elections, the polls are still quite close to the actual outcome—missing by 1-2 points at most. They slightly underestimated Gore’s share of the vote, for example. Of course, in a close election, 1-2 points is consequential. But it’s not reasonable to expect polls to call very close elections right on the nose…

The attack on polling itself is just another Republican attack on science that conflicts with their preferred worldview. They’ve filled their supporters’ heads with the line that all the pollsters but Rasmussen are in the bag for Obama, and that Democrats are engaged in invisible, massive voter fraud. So rather than shatter their illusions, a rejected Obama lead in the polls will become a rejected Obama margin on election day, with a different conspiracy theory narrative neatly aligned to fit the event.

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What if it’s really close?

by digby

As I watch the polls get closer I have to say that I’m getting more and more worried that a narrow Obama win will be viciously contested, both legally and in the court of public opinion. All you have to do is listen to the incoherent babbling of John Fund — who has made a second career out of perpetuating the voter fraud myth — to see that they are working themselves into a lather.

This Chicago scandal to which Fund refers was investigated 30 years ago. Historically it’s certainly true that the big city political machines manufactured votes — but he could have just as easily have brought up Tammany Hall. The problem with Fund’s thesis is that there are no more big city machines capable of delivering such results today. And in any case, Voter ID would do nothing to stop it, regardless. Today, whatever institutional support the Democrats had just for voter outreach and registration — an entirely different thing — it was pretty much eliminated with ACORN (thanks to the Democrats’ own self-destructive impulses.) Even he can’t provide much of an argument other than “we need to police this just in case.”

But that’s not the point of this. We know this whole psuedo-scandal is designed to suppress the Democratic vote. They’ve been doing this for centuries in one way or another. (A future supreme court justice was even once part of the scheme.) But as Jane Mayer points out in this article in the New Yorker, our old friend Hans Von Spakovsky has been the driving force behind the recent legislation and other political activity around the issue. She documents many of his outright lies. This is just one example:

Von Spakovsky recently sat down with me in a conference room at the Heritage Foundation, wearing rimless eyeglasses and a sports jacket with a crisp white pocket square. In our conversation, and in later phone calls and e-mails, he expressed himself with lawyerly reserve. He said of True the Vote and its affiliates, “They’re doing a great job.” Earlier this year, he noted, the Pew Center on the States found that more than 1.8 million people who had died were still registered to vote in America, and that 2.75 million people were registered to vote in multiple states. How many of these errors translate into fraudulent votes? “It is impossible to answer,” he said. “We don’t have the tools in place.” But he cited a 2000 investigation, by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, of voting records in Georgia over the previous two decades; the paper reported that it had turned up fifty-four hundred instances of dead people being recorded as having voted. “That seems pretty substantial to me,” he said.

He did not mention that the article’s findings were later revised. The Journal-Constitution ran a follow-up article after the Georgia Secretary of State’s office indicated that the vast majority of the cases appeared to reflect clerical errors. Upon closer inspection, the paper admitted, its only specific example of a deceased voter casting a ballot didn’t hold up. The ballot of a living voter had been attributed to a dead man whose name was nearly identical.

And don’t forget our pals the Republican National Lawyers Association, which is mobilizing lawyers across the land to contest the vote count if the vote is close. As Von Spakovsky says ominously in the Mayer interview:

With legions of citizen watchdogs on the lookout for fraud, voters confused about the documents necessary to vote, and the country almost evenly divided politically, von Spakovsky is predicting that November 6th could be even more chaotic than the 2000 elections. He will play a direct role in Virginia, a swing state, where he is the vice-chairman of the electoral board of Fairfax County. Joining us at the conference table at the Heritage Foundation, John Fund, von Spakovsky’s co-author, told me, “If it’s close this time, I think we’re going to have three or four Floridas.” Von Spakovsky shook his head and said, “If we’re lucky only three or four.” If there are states where the number of provisional ballots cast exceeds the margin of victory, he predicts, “there will probably be horrendous fights, and litigation between the lawyers that will make the fights over hanging chads look minor by comparison.” Pursing his lips, he added, “I hope it doesn’t happen.” But, if it does, no one will be more ready for the fight.

Here’s a sample post from the Republican National Lawyers Association today:

Vote Fraud Dilutes Legal Votes
Mon, Oct 22 2012 4:07 AM

“Voter fraud drives honest citizens out of the democratic process and breeds distrust of our government. Voters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised.”

Pop Quiz: Who said this?

If you think it’s a voter ID activist or conservative organization, think again. It actually was from the United States Supreme Court’s per curiam opinion evaluating the Arizona voter ID law in 2006.

This is one of the important points that John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky mention in their insightful new article published in USA Today.

Instead of stooping to the level of the left which employs incendiary rhetoric on the voter ID issue, von Spakovsky and Fund discuss the facts and intelligently respond to arguments by voter ID opponents like News21 and the Advancement Project.

What are those facts about vote fraud that they present?

They cite a nonpartisan group’s study about the poor records kept on our voter rolls:

Pew Center on the States found one in eight voter registrations were inaccurate, out-of-date or duplicates. Nearly 2.8 million people were registered in two or more states, and perhaps 1.8 million registered voters are dead.

They cite polling data:

64% of Americans think voter fraud is “very” or “somewhat” serious. Blacks (64%) and those earning under $20,000 a year (71%) agreed.

They offer recent examples of vote fraud:

Three non-citizens were arrested in Iowa last month for voting illegally in the 2010 general election and 2011 city election. A Democratic nominee for Congress resigned in Maryland last month after allegations that she had voted in two states at the same time.

So that’s three illegal votes. The RNLA is collecting stories from around the country which purport to document voter fraud. (They are, in fact, just news stories about claims of voter fraud.) In fact, I’m willing to stipulate that there have been oh — a thousand instances of voter impersonation fraud around the nation in the past two elections. Two thousand even. But the fact that this means some Republicans will feel “disenfranchised” if their candidate loses is not reason enough to keep millions of eligible citizens from voting at all. Not to mention that there’s no real evidence that any illegal votes turned an election.

But note the legal argument contained within that post: the votes of legitimate voters will be “diluted” by fraudulent votes. Recall that the argument Republicans used successfully in 2000 was that legitimate voters would be “disenfranchised” by the counting of “illegal” votes. It sounds as though they are dusting it off the shelf in anticipation of a close election.

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An election, delegitimized

by David Atkins

No matter who wins re-election, look out below:

PPP polls over the weekend found:

-In Ohio 62% of Republicans think Democrats will engage in voter fraud to make sure that Barack Obama wins. 50% of the Democrats think that the GOP will engage in voter fraud to ensure a Romney victory.

-In Florida 60% of Republicans think Democrats will engage in voter fraud to make sure that Barack Obama wins. 55% of the Democrats think that the GOP will engage in voter fraud to ensure a Romney victory.

-In North Carolina 69% of Republicans think Democrats will engage in voter fraud to make sure that Barack Obama wins. 51% of the Democrats think that the GOP will engage in voter fraud to ensure a Romney victory.

Note that the margin of Republicans who believe in fraud is much higher than for Democrats.

But if the entire kit and kaboodle comes down to Ohio, neither side is going to believe it was won legitimately.

Difference is, Democrats will roll over and sigh in resignation while Republicans will go on speaking about “your President” and stocking up on guns and ammunition.

The divides in this country are going to get much worse before they get much better. The Village will decry this, but it is as it should be, and how it has always been. We’ve even had a civil war over it. There are huge issues at stake, with the lives of millions in the balance regarding climate, healthcare and a host of other concerns.

And with respect to the biggest regional divide, the Slave States vs. the Free States, things haven’t changed much in the last 200 years.

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Dispatch from Conservative Bizarroworld

by digby

Elections expert Richard Hasen poses an important question:

What if President Obama wins re-election and Republicans don’t believe it?

The question isn’t far-fetched. For several weeks, we have seen Republicans challenge the veracity of a number of election-related facts, and the outcome of the presidential election may be no different.

First, some Republicans claimed that public opinion polls were all skewed to show an Obama lead. As Slate reported, 71 percent of self-identified Republicans and 84 percent of Tea Partiers believe in the skew. Republicans confidently claim that the polls are oversampling Democrats, not realizing that these are self-reported party identifications, which rise and fall with candidates’ support.

Distrust of the polls is not a new phenomenon, and it is not confined to Republicans. As Nate Silver pointed out, when Democrats were behind in 2004 they believed the polls were skewed toward Republicans. Fortunately, the Romney debate performance last week apparently was enough to “unskew” the latest numbers.

Last week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued a relatively rosy jobs report, which not only reported better-than-expected hiring for September but also upward revisions for earlier months. Soon thereafter, a number of Republicans, including former General Electric CEO Jack Welch, questioned whether or not the numbers were accurate. Welch tweeted: “Unbelievable jobs numbers … these Chicago guys will do anything … can’t debate so change number.” What evidence did Welch have? Nada.
[…]
All of these conspiracy theories—like the earlier birther controversies—indicate that if we are unlucky enough to have a very close election in November in which President Obama ekes out a victory, we can expect Republicans to question the election results, too. We’ll have the Fraudulent Fraud Squad telling us that Democrats used voter fraud to steal the election. Hucksters like John Fund will point to “bizarre” anomalies in vote totals from Democratic areas and tout new conspiracy theories. Social media will likely fan the flames.

I have never been a believer in “poll-skewing” theories, but I cut the 2004 Dems a little slack because of the results of the 2000 election. When you see a dubious result like that you can be forgiven for being skeptical for a while. As the article points out, the “skepticism” on the right, on the other hand, has morphed into full-fledged delusion.

But then, this was the one of the goals of the Vote Suppression movement. It’s true that they want to keep Democratic partisans from voting. But they also need to feed the bedrock conviction that no Democrat can be legitimately elected. They did this going back to Clinton, when Dick Armey famously declared, “Clinton is not my president” and continued when they became rabid dogs in defense of Bush’s dubious victory in 2000. Obama won too big for them to create doubt about the legitimacy of the vote, so they came up with this birther nonsense to allow these wingnuts to believe that the president himself wasn’t a legitimate candidate.

I don’t know what to do about this. We’re dealing with a large number of people, including some of our society’s wealthiest magnates, who are living in an alternate universe.

For instance:

TUCHMAN: Paul Ryan has said it himself that he believes there is media bias against the GOP ticket. And at these rallies, a widespread belief that presidential preference polls are part of that conspiracy.

TUCHMAN (on camera): Do you think the pollsters want the Obama ticket to be in front?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: I do.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE #1: I think they’re shaping them for Obama. I mean, the media, the liberal media, and whatever they can to help him.

TUCHMAN: Do you think that the polls that have shown that Obama is in the lead are inaccurate?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Yes, I don’t believe those. I don’t believe them. I know they had a poll that said that the polls were wrong. They had a poll that said the polls were wrong. So I don’t — I don’t believe that.

TUCHMAN: Do you believe the poll that said the polls were wrong?

UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: No. I don’t believe any of it.

TUCHMAN: It’s easy to bash polls and pollsters. And not at all unusual. But it becomes more complicated when new polling comes out that indicate your candidate is in front.

(Voice-over): That’s what happened the middle of our day with Ryan, when a Pew Research poll showed the Romney-Ryan ticket in the lead.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE#1: Everybody says that the polls are skewed in one way, you know? So.

TUCHMAN (on camera): A recent poll has come out that shows Romney in front. How do you feel about that poll?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE#1: Well, he got a good bump, you know, out of the debate.

TUCHMAN: So you’re saying you believe that poll?

UNIDENTIFIED MALE #1: Yes.

A lot of people aren’t even aware that they’re being self-serving. They think it’s self-evident that Democrats cannot legitimately be elected because everyone says that the US is a conservative country. And that’s just the one’s who watch the mainstream news. Those who are tuned into the right wing media hear that Democrats are all radical leftists if not full-fledged communists. And they don’t know a single person who is a radical leftist of full-fledged Communist so how could any of them possibly win without cheating?

This is a huge problem for our democracy, but unless some people on the right decide that it’s a problem for them I doubt there’s anything we can do to change it. Conservative bizarroworld has always been a feature of American life, but now they’re making a huge profit at it. It’s hard to see what mechanism will change that.

Update: When I say that conservative bizarroworld has always been a part of American life, this has always been ground zero:

Eight of eleven states in the former Confederacy have passed restrictive voting laws since the 2010 election, as part of a broader war on voting undertaken by the GOP. Some of these changes have been mitigated by recent federal and state court rulings against the GOP, yet it’s still breathtaking to consider the different ways Republicans have sought to suppress the minority vote in the region…

The consequences of these changes will be to make it harder for growing minority populations to be able to cast a ballot in much of the South and to make the region more segregated politically at a time when it is becoming more diverse demographically. “The net effect is that the potential for any coalition to exist in the Democratic Party of moderate-to-progressive whites and African-American voters is pretty much decimated,” says Crayton. Obama is betting he can once again turn out such a coalition in states like Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, but that task has become tougher in 2012. The outlook for state and local Democrats in the region is far bleaker.

The regression in the South today when it comes to voting rights is eerily reminiscent of tragic earlier periods in the region’s beleaguered racial history. “After Reconstruction, we saw efforts by conservative whites in Southern state legislatures to cut back on opportunities for black Americans to cast a ballot,” says Crayton. “It’s hard to dismiss the theory that what we’re seeing today is a replay of that scenario.”

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GOP vote suppression: the fringe and the establishment sittin’ in a tree

by digby

This little tid-bit should be of interest to mainstream reporters who are following the “Voter Fraud” stories but I suspect it’s going to fall under the radar:

Conservative activist James O’Keefe plotted a potential voter fraud sting of the Service Employees International Union in 2010 in Massachusetts — a sting that, had it been carried out, could have been funded by Rick Santorum patron Foster Friess.

The plot is elaborated on and eventually ruled out in an email chain started by conservative writer John Fund, who emailed Republican National Lawyers Association executive director Michael Thielen that the union was “contracting for buses on election day.”

“If you’re black or brown they’ll rope you in and take you to the polls, registration can be worked out,” Fund wrote, per his “Boston source.” His email was forwarded on to others, forming the basis for the plans.

The email exchange, parts of which may be missing, is below. Read from the bottom. The last email is from James O’Keefe to associates Stan Dai and Nadia Naffe, who later filed harassment charges against O’Keefe.

Others on the thread include Heather Higgins, the founder of the conservative Independent Women’s Voice and the late Andrew Breitbart.

Naffe told BuzzFeed she flew to Boston to investigate, but that they never uncovered anything of interest and the project fizzled.

This is a perfect illustration of the conservative establishmentand the lunatic fringe working hand in glove. O’Keefe and Breitbart proved beyond a doubt that they were both unstable and dishonest. Fund is a longtime Villager, undoubtedly considered quite a decent fellow by the likes of Dana Milbank since he’s “been around town” for years. The Republican National Lawyers association has been engaged in Vote Suppression since the 1980s, when they were engaged by the GOP to game the system in the wake of the Jesse Jackson campaign which registered many new voters. Foster Friess is just one of the dumb as dirt zillionaires they tap for whatever hare-brained scheme they come up with.

There are always the Floyd Browns and the David Bossies and the Andrew Breitbarts out there doing the dirty work. And they are always financed and directed by establishment characters like Wall Street Journal editors, wealthy ideologues and conservative institutions. Toss in Fox News and you’ve got a very efficient propaganda machine that works constantly to infect the public with lies. And it often works. A good many people in this country believe that African Americans and illegal aliens are stealing elections and that half the country is on welfare. That’s quite an achievement.

Recall that this conservative Vote Suppression effort has been underway a long time. Since the 1960s. And in the 80s they went national. But it was after 2000 that they realized they were going to need it if they planned compete. I wrote about Karl Rove speaking to the Republican National Lawyers Association back in 2007:

QUESTION: The question I have: The Democrats seem to want to make this year an election about integrity, and we know that their party rests on the base of election fraud. And we know that, in some states, some of our folks are pushing for election measures like voter ID.

But have you thought about using the bully pulpit of the White House to talk about election reform and an election integrity agenda that would put the Democrats back on the defensive?

ROVE: Yes, it’s an interesting idea. We’ve got a few more things to do before the political silly season gets going, really hot and heavy. But yes, this is a real problem. What is it — five wards in the city of Milwaukee have more voters than adults?

With all due respect to the City of Brotherly Love, Norcross Roanblank’s (ph) home turf, I do not believe that 100 percent of the living adults in this city of Philadelphia are registered, which is what election statistics would lead you to believe.

I mean, there are parts of Texas where we haven’t been able to pull that thing off.

(LAUGHTER)

And we’ve been after it for a great many years.

So I mean, this is a growing problem.

The spectacle in Washington state; the attempts, in the aftermath of the 2000 election to disqualify military voters in Florida, or to, in one instance, disqualify every absentee voter in Seminole county — I mean, these are pretty extraordinary measures that should give us all pause.

The efforts in St. Louis to keep the polls opened — open in selected precincts — I mean, I would love to have that happen as long, as I could pick the precincts.

This is a real problem. And it is not going away.

I mean, Bernalillo County, New Mexico will have a problem after the next election, just like it has had after the last two elections.

I mean, I remember election night, 2000, when they said, oops, we just made a little mistake; we failed to count 55,000 ballots in Bernalillo; we’ll be back to you tomorrow.

(LAUGHTER)

That is a problem. And I don’t care whether you’re a Republican or a Democrat, a vegetarian or a beef-eater, this is an issue that ought to concern you because, at the heart of it, our democracy depends upon the integrity of the ballot place. And if you cannot…

(APPLAUSE)

I have to admit, too — look, I’m not a lawyer. So all I’ve got to rely on is common sense. But what is the matter? I go to the grocery store and I want to cash a check to pay for my groceries, I’ve got to show a little bit of ID.

Why should it not be reasonable and responsible to say that when people show up at the voting place, they ought to be able to prove who they are by showing some form of ID?

We can make arrangements for those who don’t have driver’s licenses. We can have provisional ballots, so that if there is a question that arises, we have a way to check that ballot. But it is fundamentally fair and appropriate to say, if you’re going to show up and claim to be somebody, you better be able to prove it, when it comes to the most sacred thing we have been a democracy, which is our right of expression at the ballot.

And if not, let’s just not kid ourselves, that elections will not be about the true expression of the people in electing their government, it will be a question of who can stuff it the best and most. And that is not healthy.

QUESTION: I’ve been reading some articles about different states, notably in the west, going to mail-in ballots and maybe even toying with the idea of online ballots. Are you concerned about this, in the sense of a mass potential, obviously, for voter fraud that this might have in the West?

ROVE: Yes. And I’m really worried about online voting, because we do not know all the ways that one can jimmy the system. All we know is that there are many ways to jimmy the system.

I’m also concerned about the increasing problems with mail-in ballots. Having last night cast my mail-in ballot for the April 11 run-off in Texas, in which there was one race left in Kerr County to settle — but I am worried about it because the mail-in ballots, particularly in the Northwest, strike me as problematic.

I remember in 2000, that we had reports of people — you know, the practice in Oregon is everybody gets their ballot mailed to them and then you fill it out.

And one of the practices is that people will go to political rallies and turn in their ballots. And we received reports in the 2000 election — which, remember we lost Oregon by 5000 votes — we got reports of people showing up at Republican rallies and passing around the holder to get your ballot, and then people not being able to recognize who those people were and not certain that all those ballots got turned in.

On Election Day, I remember, in the city of Portland, Multnomah County — I’m going to mispronounce the name — but there were four of voting places in the city, for those of you who don’t get the ballots, well, we had to put out 100 lawyers that day in Portland, because we had people showing up with library cards, voting at multiple places.

I mean, why was it that those young people showed up at all four places, showing their library card from one library in the Portland area? I mean, there’s a problem with this.

And I know we need to make arrangements for those people who don’t live in the community in which they are registered to vote or for people who are going to be away for Election Day or who are ill or for whom it’s a real difficulty to get to the polls. But we need to have procedures in place that allow us to monitor it.

And in the city of Portland, we could not monitor. If somebody showed up at one of those four voting locations, we couldn’t monitor whether they had already cast their mail-in ballot or not. And we lost the state by 5,000 votes.

I mean, come on. What kind of confidence can you have in that system? So yes, we’ve got to do more about it.

You’ll recall that most of the US Attorneys involved in the firing scandal were fired for refusing to use the power of their office to interfere in these very same states’ electoral systems. And when that blew up in their faces, they just switched gears and took it to the individual states. Like sharks, they never stop moving.

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The truth is not a core issue

by digby

If you want to see a perfect example of how reporters can get so lost in journalistic process that they lose sight of the truth, reality even, read this NY Times public editor column from yesterday on the “he said/she said” convention:

Readers are quick to cite examples. Several who wrote to me thought there was an element of false balance in a recent front-page article in The Times on the legal battles over allegations of voter fraud and vote suppression — hot topics that may affect the presidential race.

In his article, which led last Monday’s paper, the national reporter Ethan Bronner made every effort to provide balance. Some readers say the piece, in so doing, wrongly suggested that there was enough voter fraud to justify strict voter identification requirements — rules that some Democrats believe amount to vote suppression. Ben Somberg of the Center for Progressive Reform said The Times itself had established in multiple stories that there was little evidence of voter fraud.

“I hope it’s not The Times’s policy to move this matter back into the ‘he said she said’ realm,” he wrote.

The national editor, Sam Sifton, rejected the argument. “There’s a lot of reasonable disagreement on both sides,” he said. One side says there’s not significant voter fraud; the other side says there’s not significant voter suppression.

“It’s not our job to litigate it in the paper,” Mr. Sifton said. “We need to state what each side says.”

Mr. Bronner agreed. “Both sides have become very angry and very suspicious about the other,” he said. “The purpose of this story was to step back and look at both sides, to lay it out.” While he agreed that there was “no known evidence of in-person voter fraud,” and that could have been included in this story, “I don’t think that’s the core issue here.”

I just don’t know what to say at this point. How can you possibly believe you’ve “laid it out” if you didn’t include the most salient fact that there is no evidence of in-person voter fraud? It’s completely inexplicable unless you realize that if you say that, you are simultaneously raising the question of why the Republicans would be passing laws to prevent it. That’s when it gets dicey — the only reasonable conclusion is that these people don’t believe the evidence and are passing these laws out of some form of mass paranoia. Or they are trying to suppress the vote, the success or failure of which is nearly impossible to measure.

That’s the “core issue,” whether you’re reporting about the two sides being at odds or whether you’re trying to educate the public about the issue itself (or, hopefully, doing both …) I suppose it’s understandable that a reporter could get so mired in the weeds that he could no longer see that he was actually misleading his readers by reporting on the dispute without offering all the context and evidence that would lead the reader to understand the entirely of the issue. I guess I just assumed it would be an editors job to make sure he did. Apparently this editor didn’t think so and others obviously remain confused which I find truly depressing.

The public editor did weigh in on that in a frank and refreshing way, I thought:

It ought to go without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway: Journalists need to make every effort to get beyond the spin and help readers know what to believe, to help them make their way through complicated and contentious subjects.

The more news organizations can state established truths and stand by them, the better off the readership — and the democracy — will be.

Yes, it certainly ought to go without saying but I’m glad somebody in that job finally said it.

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Obama’s army of dead voters and welfare queens

Too little too late?

A federal judge on Wednesday said he was prepared to grant a permanent injunction that would block controversial restrictions on voter registration groups passed by Florida Gov. Rick Scott (R) last year.

Federal Judge Robert L. Hinkle had earlier put a temporary hold on the measure, declaring that it put “harsh and impractical” restrictions on civic groups focused on registering new voters. In his latest order, Hinkle stated that he intends to permanently block the law, pending the case’s dismissal from a Court of Appeals. The plaintiffs and the state of Florida have reportedly agreed not to appeal Hinkle’s ruling.

“This order is a decisive victory for Florida voters,” said Lee Rowland of the Brennan Center’s Democracy Program, one of the attorneys who argued the case for the plaintiffs, in a statement. “The Florida legislature has tried repeatedly to stifle access to voter registration opportunities, and once again a federal court has stopped them in their tracks. We are thrilled that voter registration groups can now get back to what they do best — expanding our democracy.”

Since a new set of state voting laws went into effect more than a year ago, the number of new Democrats registering in Florida has all but disappeared, according to a Times-Union review.

During the 13 months beginning July 1 the year before elections in 2004 and 2008, registered Democrats increased by an average of 209,425 voters. From 2011 to this year, that number was 11,365.

In Duval County alone there were about 13,000 new Democrats, meaning the rest of the state lost them.

Over that same time, the number of registered Republicans increased by 128,039, topping the average of 103,555 during the past two presidential cycles.

Overall, Democrats still hold a 445,794 statewide registration advantage.

On July 1, 2011, a sweeping election law overhaul passed by the Legislature put new restrictions on groups that hold voter registration drives. Among the changes, groups were required to file new voter registration applications with election officials within 48 hours, instead of the old 10 days, or face a penalty.

Groups said the new rules made it impossible to comply. As a result, many got out of the registration game until a federal judge ruled in their favor at the end of May, 11 months later.

“It has without a doubt hurt registration numbers,” said Deirdre Macnab, president of the nonpartisan League of Women Voters of Florida. “It really gummed up the works and made it harder for Floridians to get registered.”

Macnab said Democrats may have seen a bigger impact because registration groups often target areas that lean Democratic.

“We try to get to areas that don’t have easy access to traditional means of getting registered,” she said. “That’s places like college campuses, senior centers and low-income communities.”

Proponents argued the rules were needed to root out voter fraud.

“Increasing the accountability of those who collect voter registrations helps protect the rights of new voter registrants,” said Secretary of State Ken Detzner, even though local election officials say that hasn’t been a problem.

This was inevitable when the Democrats did nothing about electoral reform after the 200 debacle and then turned on their own during and after the 2008 election cycle by allowing voter registration efforts to be demonized with crude propaganda. Maybe they couldn’t have stopped it, but they didn’t make much of an effort to counter it and now the chickens have come home to roost. Failing to register virtually any new voters since 2010 in the state of Florida could prove to be a fatal error.

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Precious examples of the Republican soul

by David Atkins

Yesterday I posted a story about California’s move to adopt online voter registration. The link I pulled was from my local paper of record, the Ventura County Star.

As you might imagine, the comments from conservatives predictably went off on the usual paranoia about nonexistent “voter fraud.” Granted, the comments from so-called conservatives on most major news websites are appalling, but sometimes it’s worth highlighting them because we must constantly remind ourselves of the base to which most Republican politicians are appealing (to his credit, local Republican county clerk Mark Lunn fully supports the online voter registration push.)

It’s worth reminding ourselves in part because as long as it’s people like these before whom Republican politicians must grovel to win votes, there is no hope for the “reasonable compromise” in government so sought by media elites. So on to the sampling:

From RevTrueGrit (conservatives never use their real names to comment, often trying to pick names that sound badass to themselves, but comical to everyone else…)

More lib voter fraud!!And all the illegals can vote for there
European president Obama,Very sad days Jan 2013 the cliff is here!!

and

Maybe he can make another new law where he can be
King Obama and be president for the next 30 years,
Glad to see ice suing this fraud admin.
Obama removed 2012

Unindoctrinated wants to let you know that only old white property owners should vote. And that President Obama is a “child:

If you are too immature to register, or not interested enough to register, you should not be voting in the first place. Bleat.

These people are after 18 and 19 year olds, the impressionable, the spoiled, the rebellious, the lazy, the inexperienced; it’s not hard to appeal to the naive. Bleat.

Think about this, hand everything over to your children (accounts, bill paying, planning, shopping…) how long do you think I will take for everything to fall apart? That’s what I thought. Bleat.

By urging uninterested children to vote, and voting for children (our president) how long do you think it will take for everything to fall apart? That’s what I thought. Bleat.

Freedom1 has a different racist paranoid conspiracy:

What if the individual doesn’t have any data on file with the DMV? Now I understand the urgency for Mr. Obama’s new “Dream Act” light being pushed through – got to let them get drivers licences so the system will recognize their signature regardless of their citizenship status or “right” to vote. Very clever. Of course in California it really doesn’t matter – the Dem’s “run” the state (right into the ground)!

Yep. That’s why we’re pushing the DREAM Act. You got us.

Adam_1 is a pillar of humanity who would doubtless be very offended if you called him a racist:

This is a great idea! With computer technology our precious illegal aliens can register to vote, apply for food stamps, make an appointment at one of our overrun emergency rooms, register their anchor babies at one of our lousy public schools, and rip off us hard-working American taxpayers in so many ways. Fantastico!

Yes, with the magic of computer technology, migrant farm workers and the people begging for work outside Home Depot will hop right online to register themselves to vote and bypass security with secret hacker skills, despite limited English skills. Also “hard-working American” could never be a synonym for “white”, could it? Nah.

whosebone steps in for your daily dose of birtherism:

only bring it up change because his bc has been PROVEN to be a manufactured document, he is using a PROVEN fraudulent social security number, and his selective service registration document has been PROVEN to be doctored.

VCforlife is very Christian also:

There have been many Democratic organizations convicted of voter fraud. Most recently in Nevada. In Washington State, the Democratic Party was busted for hiring illegal aliens to register fellow illegals. You and your fellow Liberals can deny the truth. But, we will not. The reason the Democratic Party is fighting for no ID’s to vote, is they want to bus in illegal aliens to polling places. All I know is the Democratic Socialist Marxist Party have no moral compass. If Liberals do not believe a fetus is human life why would you think they care about voting fraud, child molestation(teachers), drug use(Obama),rape(Clinton), murder(Ted Kennedy).

And that’s just one article. On a public news site, not a swampy Republican blog. Comments on the left just don’t even begin to match that level of mean-spirited paranoid ignorance.

As long as this is what the Republican Party is made of, Republican politicians will keep moving rightward, and compromise will be impossible. The only question is whether the media will ever tell the truth about what is going on.

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