The reason that Republicans are pushing voter ID is straightforward, they don’t want n*****s to vote. The descendants of “Bull”Connor run the party now.<\/p>\n
But there is another element to this, that of projection: The Republicans believe that Democrats engage in vote fraud, because they themselves routinely engage in vote fraud, largely through the absentee ballot process.<\/p>\n
In Michigan, we have Thaddeus McCotter’s staffers charged with voter fraud over his crudely forged reelection petitions<\/a>. And some context:<\/p>\n This incident perfectly highlights the dirty little secret about election fraud. Election fraud overwhelmingly happens on the campaign side, not the voter side. It\u2019s far easier \u2013 and more rewarding \u2013 to cheat while working from within the system than it is to commit in-person voter fraud. The GOP is legislating against cases of voter fraud in which a person would have to give someone else\u2019s name at the correct polling place in order to falsely vote once; meanwhile a Republican Congressman and his staff fabricated 1,756 signatures so that he could run illegally. <\/span> And then we have Western Massachusetts, the Republican part of the state, not so far where I went to college, where voter fraud in East Longmeadow is so blatant that the state was compelled to take over the election<\/a>:<\/p>\n There\u2019s just one Republican primary in East Longmeadow next month.<\/span> You notice just how much easier<\/b> it is to commit voter fraud with absentee ballots?<\/p>\n If Villamaino’s had been a bit less greedy, no one might have noticed.<\/p>\n And then again, there is Palm Beach, Florida, the home of the infamous butterfly ballot<\/a>, and the epicenter of Republican vote fraud, where Virginia based Strategic Allied Consultants<\/a>, one of Nathan Sproul’s network of voting fraud shops:<\/p>\n The Republican Party of Florida is dumping a firm it paid more than $1.3 million to register new voters, after Palm Beach County Elections Supervisor Susan Bucher flagged 106 \u201cquestionable\u201d registration applications turned in by the contractor this month.<\/span> Seriously, if the DoJ seriously went after real voter fraud, half the Republican consultants in the nation would be under indictment. <\/p>\n It’s like the old days of the cold war: You knew what the USSR was doing, because they would accuse us of doing it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The reason that Republicans are pushing voter ID is straightforward, they don’t want n*****s to vote. The descendants of “Bull”Connor run the party now. But there is another element to this, that of projection: The Republicans believe that Democrats engage in vote fraud, because they themselves routinely engage in vote fraud, largely through the absentee …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1000,978],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-183946","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-elections","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183946"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183946"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183946\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183946"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183946"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183946"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/span>And this is the truth about so many Republican policies: rules and regulations are put in place to scapegoat people who aren\u2019t causing problems. In Florida, drug testing welfare recipients showed that less than 3% of those receiving welfare were using drugs illegally, while that discriminatory testing cost the state nearly $120,000. Mitt Romney has evoked the \u201c47% of people [who] pay no income tax,\u201d conveniently ignoring that collecting income tax from all of those households would bring in less than than the president\u2019s Buffett Rule which would slightly raise taxes for the country\u2019s wealthiest. Reagan\u2019s racist welfare queen myth still looms large in the conservative narrative, despite the fact that the Bush-era bailout for corrupt and irresponsible banks cost far more than years of welfare programs. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/span>Marie Angelides and Jack Villamaino are vying for a Massachusetts State Representative seat.<\/span>
<\/span>Secretary of State Bill Galvin says his office will be running the election. That\u2019s because fraud has found way into the race.<\/span>
<\/span>Experts say in a State Representative race, there\u2019s often 30-45 absentee ballots that are filed. This summer, there\u2019s been more than 400.<\/span>
<\/span>Galvin confirms that hundreds of the applications were never filled out by voters; somebody forged the applications and even changed the political parties of Democrats to Republican so they would receive an absentee ballot in the mail. The Boston Globe reports it\u2019s widely believed the Villamaino\u2019s campaign and an East Longmeadow clerk\u2019s office employee are behind the scheme.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cI have had a substantial amount of experience in running elections. I cannot recall a single instance where i saw such a brazen effort to steal the rights or identities of voters, to change their party enrollments and in effect to steal their ballots,\u201d Galvin said.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cI\u2019m disheartened to see that in the political process,\u201d former State Representative and District Court Judge Robert Howarth said.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/span>Bucher asked the state attorney\u2019s office to review the applications \u201cin an abundance of caution\u201d because she said her staff had questions about similar-looking signatures, missing information and wrong addresses on the forms.<\/span>
<\/span>The state GOP hired Strategic Allied Consultants of Glen Allen, Va., for \u201cvoter registration services\u201d and get-out-the-vote activities. The firm got identical payments of $667,598 in July and August.<\/span>
<\/span>\u201cWhen we learned today about the instances of potential voter registration fraud that occurred in Palm Beach County, we immediately informed the Republican National Committee that we were terminating the contract with the voter registration vendor we hired at their request because there is no place for voter registration fraud in Florida,\u201d said RPOF Executive Director Mike Grissom late Tuesday.<\/span>
<\/span>An employee of the company said no one was available to comment Tuesday evening.<\/span>
<\/span>Bucher said some of the applications she questioned were for new voter registrations while others were for address or party affiliation changes or requests for new voter cards, Bucher said.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n