Tag Archives: Electoral fraud

January 5, 2013 · 1:28 PM

Undeterred By Court Order, Iowa Official Tries Again To Push Through Voter Purge

Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz

Many have suggested that the Republican Party is headed toward obscurity and insignificance.

This story and all the efforts at voter suppression, the war on women and other nefarious measures to insure that conservative ideology is dominant national policy, will be the main reason for the demise of the GOP…

Think Progress

When Secretary of State Matt Schultz attempted to purge voters from the rolls in advance of the November 2012 election, a county judgetemporarily blocked the move, finding that the rules issued by Schultz created fear and uncertainty and could deter legitimate voters. But that risk of voter suppression hasn’t stopped Schultz from proposing a new slightly tweaked rule to remove registered voters in the name of alleged voter fraud.

The rule would allow Schultz’s office to challenge the legitimacy of registered voters who are listed as noncitizens in the Department of Transportation database. Citing a DOT list of some 3,000 registered voters labeled noncitizens, Schultz said, “I have to do something. I can’t just sit back and do nothing when we know people are taking advantage of the system.”

But Schultz’s testimony just last month before the Senate Judiciary Committee shows that he doesn’t know people are taking advantage of the system. When probed by Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) for evidence of voter fraud, Schultz cited just six arrests — not convictions – out of 1.6 million votes cast. And this was after a special agent was designated to specifically target voter fraud.

As for the list of 3,000 people, that claim was easily dismissed by the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund’s Nina Perales during the same hearing:

Secretary Schultz … said he had identified 3,500 noncitizens using the driver’s license rolls. He did not. He identified 3,500 people who were noncitizens at the time that they obtained their driver’s licenses. And we know that since that time and before they registered to vote, the overwhelming majority and perhaps all of them have become naturalized citizens. So at this point, anyone who undertakes to accuse people of non-citizenship based on driver’s licenses should be on notice that this is not correct and should not be done. It’s fundamentally unfair.

Attempts to prove voter fraud nationwide have fallen similarly short, with less than 20 instances of fraud charges offered in most states. Florida GOP officials have even publiclyadmitted voter suppression was the goal of that state’s aggressive and inaccurate purge.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other groups are also arguing that Schultz cannot implement a purge without going through the state legislature. The ruling that blocked Schultz’s last attempt said that, at the very least, Schultz should have gone through the proper rulemaking procedure that allows for public input instead of going forward on his own. Schultz is now going through that procedure, but the court could still hold this process insufficient.

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September 28, 2012 · 8:30 AM

How The Tea Party Hopes To Purge Thousands of Ohio Voters

I’ve heard about this on Rachel Maddow’s show.  The far Right will stop at nothing to assure that Barack Obama doesn’t win a second term…

Think Progress

Members of an Ohio tea party group are taking it upon themselves to individually police alleged voter fraud, launching challenges to a targeted list of voters that includes hundreds of college students, trailer park residents, homeless people and African Americans in counties President Obama won in 2008. In all, the group has sought to remove from the voter rolls at least 2,100 registrations in 13 Ohio counties, nine of which Obama won in 2008, according to the Los Angeles Times.

The alleged perpetrators of this voter fraud include Lori Monroe, a 40-year-old recovering from cancer, whose apartment for the past seven years was allegedly listed as a commercial property; and eight members of an African American family, whose four-bedroom home where the family has lived since the 1980s was allegedly listed as a vacant lot. The group has also focused on challenging college students for failure to specify a dorm room number, a claim that every election board has thus far found invalid.

The group behind this crusade has dubbed itself the Ohio Voter Integrity Project, an offshoot of Texas-based True the Vote, which champions voter purges and voter ID laws and has been building a “poll watcher” network, an effort documented by Colorlines’ Brentin Mock:

[True the Vote National Elections Coordinator Bill] Ouren and Americans for Prosperity gathered these recruits in Boca Raton in July to instruct them on how they could become “empowered” vessels for True the Vote’s poll watcher program. True the Vote is most widely known for its advocacy of restrictive photo voter ID laws. But while that might garner headlines, the group’s real focus is on policing the act of voting itself. As Ouren declared during the group’s national summit in April, and repeated again in Boca Raton, his recruits’ job is chiefly to make voters feel like they’re “driving and seeing the police following you.” He aims to recruit one million poll watchers around the country. […]

True the Vote encourages recruits to “build relationships with election administrators” because “they control the access to the vote,” as 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.”

Of course, these phony charges of voter fraud – a wildly exaggerated phenomenon — do more than harass legally registered voters; they provide an artificial justification for the real and considerable threats to disfranchisement that come from new restrictive voter suppression laws, such as the move to limit early voting in Ohio, now embroiled in litigation.

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July 28, 2012 · 4:52 PM

South Carolina Attorney General Admits Voter ID Won’t Prevent “Voter Fraud”

No one believed the GOP line that there was rampant voter fraud, hence the ID laws in several states…

Think Progress

Taking a break from defending his state’s restrictive voter ID law in court, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson spoke at a Heritage Foundation panel on Thursday regarding the dire need to prevent the threat of voter fraud. To illustrate, he offered a hypothetical in which a man votes under a stolen identity…by using a fraudulent voter ID card:

WILSON: The ability for someone to come in and, through fraud, dilute the voting pool is very present. I want to be able to give our government the ability to combat that, to give them the tools. It is very difficult to prove a negative. If Alan Wilson goes in and uses a fraudulent voter ID card under the name of John Smith and I vote under John Smith’s name and then leave the polling place, you cannot go back in time and prove the negative. It is impossible. It is very difficult to catch somebody in the act. But I hear countless stories of people who witnessed that.

In Wilson’s imagined scenario, a voter uses a fake ID to cast an extra vote. But his own argument rests on the idea that the requirement to show ID at the polls is necessary to combat rampant voter fraud and identity theft. By this logic, voter ID laws would do nothing to prevent this threat.

Watch it:

In-person voter fraud like the type Wilson claims to prevent is extremely rare. It is so rare, in fact, that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than commit voter fraud. Even the Supreme Court could only identify one example of in-person voter fraud in the past 143 yearsin their 2009 decision upholding a voter ID law.

By contrast, a recent Brennan Center report found that nearly 500,000 voters — mostly low-income and minority individuals — in the ten states with voter ID laws stand to be disenfranchised.

Wilson has sued the Department of Justice for blocking South Carolina’s voter ID law, arguing, “The changes have neither the purpose nor will they have the effect of denying or abridging the right to vote on account of race, color, or membership in a language minority.”

According to the ACLU’s estimate, 180,000 voters will be affected by the South Carolina law, with minority voters hit hardest by the new requirements.

This isn’t the first time Wilson’s hypotheticals have fallen flat. After he claimed over 900 dead voters cast ballots in South Carolina, an investigation by the State Election Commission found no evidence to back him up. Wilson has continued to insist that the threat of dead voters is real, and repeated the statistic at the Heritage Foundation on Thursday.

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February 27, 2012 · 8:04 AM

No Questions For Mitch Daniels About Indiana Voter Fraud

This is typical Fox News bull crap.

Although they have been incessantly talking about alleged voter fraud committed by Democratic voters, Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace never mentioned a word  about Indiana’s voting issues in his Q & A with Indiana Governor Mitch Daniels (R).

NewsHounds

Although Fox News obsesses about (Democratic) voter fraud, the subject somehow never arose during Chris Wallace’s lengthy interview yesterday with Indiana Republican Governor Mitch Daniels.

Even though Indiana’s Republican Secretary of State, Charlie White – the man in charge of voting integrity – had just been convicted of multiple counts of  felony voter fraud.

Even though Daniels had considered re-appointing White if the charges were reduced to a misdemeanor (they weren’t).

And even though allegations have recently surfaced that Indiana’s Republican Senator Dick Lugar’s voter registration lists him at an address he moved from in 1977.

And if all that wasn’t enough to pique Wallace’s voter-fraud curiosity, you’d think that White’s recent accusation that Daniels’ own voter registration doesn’t match his domicile would.

But no.

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November 14, 2011 · 10:09 AM

Anti-Voter Fraud Tea Party Group Hosts Author Who Thinks Poor Shouldn’t Vote

The Tea Party equals hatriots and hypocrites…

TPM Muckraker

The King Street Patriots are a Texas Tea Party group with an anti-voter fraud spin off organization that is plotting a nationwide poll watching movement and advocates for voter ID laws. Matthew Vadum is a conservative columnist who thinks that registering poor people to vote is un-American and “like handing out burglary tools to criminals.” On Tuesday, the King Street Patriots will be hosting him for lunch in Houston.

For $100, guests of the King Street Patriots can dine at Maggiano’s for a four-course meal and a signed copy of Vadum’s Subversion Inc.: How Obama’s ACORN Red Shirts are Still Terrorizing and Ripping Off American Taxpayers. They’ll learn all about how a group with “such an innocent sounding name and endearing logo” is really “a criminal organization with the goal of the destruction of America and the installation of a totalitarian government.”

From the invite:

Would you like to know the more than 360 groups ACORN controls? Learn their entire history and how their corrupt tactics have allowed them to worm their way into every corner of our government, right up to and including the Community Organizer In Chief.We invite you to educate yourself on ACORN’s history and their endgame agenda.

His mindblowing expose SUBVERSION, INC. should be required reading for all American who love freedom and virtue.

The King Street Patriot’s Catherine Engelbrecht told the first national conference of True the Vote in March that their effort was “not a partisan thing.” She said she wanted to have about one million volunteers in every precinct in the country for the 2012 presidential election.

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September 22, 2011 · 8:41 AM

GOP-Pushed Student Voter Fraud Investigation Finds Zero Voter Fraud

Republican Party (United States)

Image via Wikipedia

TPM Muckraker

Remember how Maine GOP Chairman Charlie Webster accused over 200 students of committing voter fraud because they were paying out-of-state tuition but registered to vote in the state? Turns out none of them actually voted.

A two-month taxpayer funded investigation found that zero of the students committed voter fraud and found just one case of a non-citizen voter — and that happened all the way back in 2002, Bangor Daily News reports. Still, Secretary of State Charlie Summers is maintaining that the system is “fragile and vulnerable” and renewed his opposition to same day voter registration.

David Farmer of Protect Maine Votes called Webster’s allegations “false outrageous and, perhaps, defamatory.”

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September 3, 2011 · 6:59 AM

Democracy Is Un-American

 

The Supreme Court of the United States has given corporations unprecedented power to literally buy elections. The powerful have no use for the poor voting in any election.  Matthew Vadum is the only one actually saying that the poor should not be allowed to vote, but the rich and powerful (politicians included) have been implementing ways to prevent the poor from voting for decades…

Firedoglake

Via Rick Hasen, right wing “VOTER FRAUD ACORN OMG” nut Matthew Vadum explains why “Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American”:

Why are left-wing activist groups so keen on registering the poor to vote?

Because they know the poor can be counted on to vote themselves more benefits by electing redistributionist politicians.  Welfare recipients are particularly open to demagoguery and bribery.

Registering them to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals.  It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

So let me see if I have this right: Helping millions of poor people to vote for someone they hope might occasionally represent their interests is “antisocial and un-American,” but a tiny minority of ridiculously wealthy people and corporations spending gobs of money to put the government securely in their pocket is “free speech”?

Of course, we won’t mention that most of the poor are “nonproductive” because none of the politicians who slid into office on avalanches of corporate money give a damn about creating jobs.  Or that obscene wealth does not necessarily equate to productivity.  Or that “productivity” is not actually a requirement for voting eligibility in the first place.

Still, I’ll give Vadum credit for coming out and saying that he just doesn’t want poor people to vote.  Usually the right pretends that they’re terribly concerned about the imaginary threat of voter fraud, in much the same way that they’re terribly concerned about the sanctity of marriage, the lives of unborn babies, the threat of terrorism, and the morale of our troops.

The only thing un-American about poor people voting is that it doesn’t give them a voice, even when their candidates win.

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June 22, 2011 · 8:47 AM

Who says Republicans don’t care about the poor?

Political Irony

Republicans made huge gains in the 2010 elections, promising to improve the economy. Isn’t it funny that the economy is now going back down? What isn’t funny is that 33 states — all with Republican controlled legislatures — have passed laws that make it more difficult to vote.

How can you tell that these laws are politically motivated? Well, in Texas, you can use a concealed handgun permit to identify yourself to vote, but you can’t use a student ID. And in Florida, they also restricted efforts by the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Proponents say the new laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud, but election law experts say that there is little evidence of voter fraud in US elections.

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June 13, 2011 · 2:43 AM

Shrinking The Vote: Using Election Reform To Decrease Turnout

The whirlwind of election reforms has taken place in some 13 states in eight weeks alone.

Daily Kos

As the U.S population grows and the number of eligible voters continues to climb with each election cycle, a disturbing trend of limiting voter access to the polls is taking place. With 2012 on the horizon, states are already gearing up to ensure that barriers are installed across the voting process, from restrictions on voter registration to strict requirements at the polls. It’s been called “the largest legislative effort to scale back voting rights in a century.”

Legislators justify the vast majority of this legislation by claiming they are merely attempting to prevent widespread voter fraud. The Brennan Center for Justice conducted the most extensive analysis of voter fraud allegations and concluded that proponents of voter ID laws could not find “a proven example of a single vote cast at the polls in someone else’s name that could be stopped by a pollsite photo ID rule.” (PDF)

Combating “voter fraud” is a red herring. It doesn’t take more than a passing glance at the 2008 results map to understand why Republicans have been working so diligently to decrease the vote, especially in states where President Obama won by a slim margin.

Read much more here…

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November 2, 2010 · 4:00 AM

The voter fraud & intimidation stories you won’t hear about on Fox

Everything the right wing does is designed to accomplish one of two things, either:
(a) transfer wealth from everyone else to the rich, or,
(b) distract everyone else from the fact that (a) is occurring.”
~ Jack Clark

For years the GOP and their media supporters have touted the straw man argument that there is wide-spread voter fraud going on in the general and midterm elections.  The fact is they are using these stories to cover-up what they are in fact doing in terms of voter disenfranchisement, voter caging and intimidation.

Media Matters

For the past several months, Fox News has hyped GOP accusations of voter fraud, no matter how little evidence exists to support them, and Bret Baier has promised that Fox will cover voter fraud allegations “in every show.” But Fox has failed to report on, or has dismissed and distorted, numerous accusations of voter fraud or intimidation carried out by individuals linked to right-wing groups and politicians.

Fox largely ignores the DoJ is looking into allegations that Texas Tea Party group members engaged in voter intimidation

King Street Patriots’ “True the Vote” initiative accused of intimidating voters. Talking Points Memo published an article on October 19 about allegations of voter intimidation by poll watchers trained by the Tea Party group King Street Patriots. According to the article, the Department of Justice is looking into claims that poll watchers in Harris County were “‘hovering over’ voters, ‘getting into election workers’ faces’ and blocking or disrupting lines of voters” at early voting stations. From the article:

Poll watchers in Harris County, Texas — where a Tea Party group launched an aggressive anti-voter fraud effort — were accused of “hovering over” voters, “getting into election workers’ faces” and blocking or disrupting lines of voters who were waiting to cast their ballots as early voting got underway yesterday.

Now, TPMMuckraker has learned, the Justice Department has interviewed witnesses about the alleged intimidation and is gathering information about the so-called anti-voter fraud effort.

“We are currently gathering information regarding this matter,” Justice Department spokeswoman Xochitl Hinojosa said in a statement confirming the Civil Rights Division’s involvement.

Continue reading…

Beck briefly mentioned and dismissed allegations that King Street Patriots poll watchers were engaged in voter intimidation. A Nexis search of Fox transcripts for “King Street Patriots or Houston Votes or True the Vote” returns two results, one from Glenn Beck’s October 31 program and one from the September 27 broadcast of Fox & Friends. Megyn Kelly also mentioned the King Street Patriots during a segment on November 1. Beck appeared to dismiss the allegations, managed to tie the DOJ’s actions to George Soros, and concluded, ”Gee, I wonder which side will take the phone calls at the DoJ.” From the Nexis transcript of the program:

BECK: So expect the reaction. Expect the fraud. Expect intimidation. It’s all been done before. Eric Holder’s DoJ didn’t seem alarmed, you know, at the radical militants that were hovering at the polls. No big deal! They inexplicably dropped the rock solid case against them. Now they’re being looked at to look into voter intimidation, alleged voter intimidation, in Harris County, Texas. A group there called the King Street Patriots have been trained – have been training poll watchers to watch out for document or voter intimidation or fraud. They document everything they see. They write it all down.


Continue reading…

Fox & Friends hypes King Street Patriots’ “True the Vote” allegations of voter fraud, ignored reports they doctored a photo to support claims of voter fraud

Kelly mentions King Street Patriots but fails to mention Department of Justice involvement or specific allegations at polling places

Fox airs no reports on fliers from phony Texas group that were intended to trick Democratic voters

Non-existent “Black Democratic Trust of Texas” distributed fliers telling voters not to vote “straight ticket Democratic” because “it is actually voting for Republicans.”

Fox airs no reports on Republican activists in Texas allegedly harassing elderly black voters at their homes

Seven elderly black voters report being harassed at their homes in Texas after sending their mail-in ballots. Mother Jones reported on October 29 that a voting rights lawyer filed a complaint with the Department of Justice on behalf of elderly black voters who complained of being harassed and intimidated at their homes in eastern Texas. The article said at least seven elderly voters complained they were harassed by “two unidentified white women” who came to their homes in Bowie County to interrogate them about their mail-in ballot applications. The article describes the women as “middle-aged, local Republican activists who had accessed publicly available information about which voters had requested mail-in ballots”.

Fox did not report on allegations that GOP candidate Kirk planned “voter integrity” squads for African-American neighborhoods

By contrast, Fox has repeatedly hyped stories of “voter fraud” allegedly carried out by Democrats

Baier vowed that Fox News will cover voter fraud allegations “in every show.” After airing a report on various allegations of voter fraud on an October 31 special edition of Special Report, host Bret Baier concluded that “we’ll be following this in every show.”

Fox has relentlessly hyped GOP-linked accusations of voter fraud, regardless of their credibility. As Media Matters for America has repeatedly documented, Fox News has promoted many allegations of voter fraud supposedly carried out by Democrats and left-wing groups, no matter how little evidence exists to support these claims.

Fox has voter fraud email tip line. As Talking Points Memo noted, on October 28, Fox News announced that it “has set up an e-mail to collect viewer complaints over voter fraud ahead of the midterm elections.” The email address is voterfraud@foxnews.com.

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