Registration Fraud May Give the GOP a Taste of Their Own Medicine

They say Karma is a bitch. After pushing voter ID to disenfranchise groups that tend to vote Democratic, the Republican Party is at the heart of a growing scandal over voter registration fraud. That would be the same crime the right -- falsely, it turned out -- accused ACORN of doing. It was a crime so heinous that ACORN had to be defunded, thereby killing off the organization. Logical consistency demands that the GOP must meet a similar fate.

But no one's seriously going to demand the organizational death penalty. Still, this may be in the neighborhood.

Los Angeles Times:

[A California voter registration fraud scandal] has also raised anew the question of whether the state should ban firms that pay workers for each voter they register or signature they secure on a petition rather than paying them an hourly rate. Workers have an incentive to cut corners under such arrangements, according to Assemblyman Richard Pan (D-Natomas), who has proposed barring the practice in a bill that is on the governor's desk.

Registration fraud's becoming a bit of a scandal for Republicans. The story broke big in Florida, followed by the California story this weekend.

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Rightwing Election Fraud in Wisconsin Recall

The Wisconsin recalls of Gov. Walker and Lt. Gov. Kleefisch are now underway and in full swing. But, if the recall effort is moving forward, so are Republican dirty tricks.

Caledonia Patch:

Residents who signed legitimate recall petitions may never have them counted by the Government Accountability Board.

A Caledonia resident, who asked not to have his name used, told Caledonia Patch that he and at least two other people in Racine are collecting signatures to recall Scott Walker, but have no intention of turning them into the GAB. Instead, they want people to think they've signed the petition, but not actually have their signatures count.

They are doing this to sabotage the recall effort, the resident said.

"The man claimed he had already collected 150 signatures at Walmart and Pick'n Save on 27th Street in Franklin yesterday," according to the report. "However, when asked to produce the documents, he said, he would need to think about showing them to Patch. He said he won't be turning them into the GAB, but hasn't destroyed them."

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The Republican Attack on Democracy

The Republican war on voting actually serves two purposes. The most obvious is in preventing people from exercising their most fundamental right as an American, while the second is to create yet another culture war wedge issue. Hordes of illegal aliens are voting, they argue -- without evidence. In other cases, people vote twice or in the wrong district, in order to elect their candidates. The problem with this scenario is that the one high-profile case I can think of involved someone who would most definitely not vote dem. Still, it fosters the divisive "us-vs-them" hysteria that Republicans love so.

The New York Times editorial board points out just how phantasmagorical the idea of widespread voter fraud really is.

In Kansas, the secretary of state, Kris Kobach (who also wrote Arizona’s notorious anti-immigrant law), pushed for an ID law on the basis of a list of 221 reported instances of voter fraud in Kansas since 1997. Even if that were true, it would be an infinitesimal percentage of the votes cast during that period, but it is not true.

When The Wichita Eagle looked into the local cases on the list, the newspaper found that almost all were honest mistakes: a parent trying to vote for a student away at college, or signatures on mail-in ballots that didn’t precisely match those on file. In one case of supposed “fraud,” a confused non-citizen was asked at the motor vehicles bureau whether she wanted to fill out a voter registration form, and did so not realizing she was ineligible to vote.

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