The GOP war on voting – failing to make its case

Posted by AzBlueMeanie:

One of the biggest frauds of our time is the "voter fraud" fraud perpetrated by the GOP and the conservative media noise machine echo chamber.

But wait, Republicans say, occasionally there really is fraud. In fact, the Republican National Lawyers Association (RNLA) released a report last week to document all the cases of voter fraud that have been prosecuted over the last decade. Political Animal – The ‘evidence’ bolstering voter-fraud allegations:

And what did the group turn up? A grand total of 311 cases. Given the larger national context — over 131 million Americans voted in 2008, for example — that’s an infinitesimally small number.

But as Julia Krieger explained, that’s really just the start of the problems with the RNLA’s findings.

What’s more, the RNLA is dishonestly representing their data when they describe it as “in the past decade”: A quick gander at the website’s evidence shows citations going as far back as 1997. Although they claim to have evidence of 46 states with voter fraud prosecutions in the last decade, their website only lists 44 states. For two of those 44, there are only examples from the 1990s up to 2000, bringing the state count down to 42. To be clear, that’s eight states where they identified no instances of voter fraud in the last decade.

[This is a mean average of approximately 7.4 cases in those 42 states over a decade, which is fewer than one case per year in each state.]

Further, the RNLA brags: “The RNLA webpage presents evidence that there were at least seventeen cases involving prosecutions for non-citizen voting in 2005 just in one state: Florida.” However, according to the Department of Justice, at least four of the seventeen cases they list were dismissed. 

[Typically these are legal resident aliens who are misinformed that they are eligible to register to vote.]

Remember, we’re talking about a Republican group taking its best shot at this. RNLA officials could take their to do as much comprehensive research as they wanted, they could define their terms to their liking; they could massage the results to match their pre-determined conclusion; and they still couldn’t make much of a case.

And if the RNLA thinks these 311 cases from the last decade — some of which weren’t from the last decade, some of which were cases that got thrown out of court, some of which may have very well have been innocent mistakes — justify a national campaign to restrict Americans’ access to their own democracy, they’re wildly misguided.

Republicans support all kinds of new voting restrictions — voter-ID laws, severe limits on voter-registration drives, closing early-voting windows, strict new limits on absentee ballots — because they find it easier to rig voter eligibility than to win elections fair and square. It’s why all of these restrictions affect traditionally Democratic constituencies.

The problem is that the allegations of fraud are largely imaginary, and GOP officials are really just looking for excuses to block traditionally-Democratic constituencies from voting.

UPDATE I: The Huffington Post's Debbie Hines: New Republican Data Shows No Need For Voter ID Laws:

The RNLA produced data showing 46 states and various convictions for voter fraud. Presumably by their absence, 4 states and the District of Columbia had no convictions.

Viewing the data for the period 2000-2010, the report by its own account shows there is no link between voter fraud in states and the need for stricter voter ID laws. The data shows that during the entire 10 year period, 21 states had only 1 or 2 convictions for some form of voter irregularity. And some of these 21 states have the strictest form of voter ID laws based on a finding of 2 or less convictions in ten years. Five states had a total of three convictions over a ten year period. Rhode Island had 4 convictions for the same 10 years. Taking a close look at the RNLA data shows 30 states, including the District of Columbia had 3 or less voter fraud convictions for a 10 year period.

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Now the Republicans' own data dispels their rampant voter fraud myth. A closer scrutiny of the RNLA data shows voter fraud has no correlation to needing strict voter ID laws.

UPDATE II: “You constantly hear about voter fraud… but you don’t see huge amounts of vote fraud out there,” Attorney General Eric Holder told the Washington Post. Holder: ‘You Don’t See Huge Amounts Of Voter Fraud Out There’ | TPMMuckraker. Holder’s comments come ahead of his scheduled speech at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Libary and Museum in Texas Tuesday night, where he will be addressing “the importance of ensuring equal access to the ballot box and strengthening America’s long tradition of expanding the franchise.”

UPDATE III: On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against Wisconsin's voter ID law, alleging that it imposes the equivalent of a poll tax on individuals with out-of-state drivers licenses and discriminates against the poor, students and the elderly. ACLU Sues Scott Walker Over Wisconsin’s Voter ID Law | TPMMuckraker:

ACLU lawyers argue in a 54-page lawsuit that the law “imposes a severe and undue burden on the fundamental right to vote under the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution; violates the Twenty-Fourth and Fourteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution as an unconstitutional poll tax; and violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment in arbitrarily refusing to accept certain identification documents.”

The suit argues that the law would force individuals to “choose between surrendering their driving privileges to obtain a free Wisconsin state ID card, paying a fee for a Wisconsin driver’s license, or losing their right to vote.” They argue that the requirement to surrender an out-of-state driver’s license “constitutes a material requirement imposed on an eligible voter who refuses to forfeit his/her right to vote without paying an unconstitutional poll tax.”

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In making their case, the ACLU gathered 17 voters — from a 84-year-old woman without a certified birth certificate to a 52-year-old homeless Army veteran to a 20-year old without a Social Security card to a 19-year-old college student who doesn’t want to give up his California driver’s license — to demonstrate the effect the law could have.