August 25, 2012
Desperately seeking fraud
By David Giffey
If you’ve ever seen a dog chasing its tail, you might have some sympathy for Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen’s enraptured pursuit of the state’s discredited Voter ID Law. But please rein in your pity.
Van Hollen this week petitioned the Wisconsin Supreme Court to enact the purposeless Voter ID Law (Act 23) passed by Republicans May 2011. Act 23 was justly overturned as unconstitutional earlier this year by Circuit Court rulings. Van Hollen’s preoccupation with enacting the law for the November election is gross partisanship.
State Senator Lena Taylor, Milwaukee, suggested on wispolitics.com that the attorney general’s petition “smacks of possible ex parte communication” between Van Hollen and the Supreme Court’s conservative luminaries, including David Prosser, accused by Justice Ann Walsh Bradley of applying a chokehold to her neck during a dispute last year.
No need to ask if there’s a Republican bias against as many as 300,000 eligible Wisconsin voters – the elderly, minorities, students, low-income grandmothers – because the answer is obviously “yes.” Evidence presented when opposition mounted months ago gave names and faces to people who would be disenfranchised by the law. They might not have had a driver’s license in their life, or a marriage certificate, and they might be forced to fork over some needed cash to get copies of documents, including birth certificates, that proved what has long been known to their families, friends, neighbors, and poll workers: These people are real. They just don’t have a photo ID, and there’s no logical need for them to have one.
Oh, what about voter fraud?
In 2008, Van Hollen chaired John McCain’s campaign in Wisconsin and spread rumors about voter fraud to suppress votes. At that time, Uppity Wisconsin said, “Van Hollen has a serious conflict of interest here. This attack on Wisconsin voters by the GOP and Wisconsin’s own attorney general is also part of their support to enable the Real ID act, a costly, burdensome requirement that will do nothing to clean up state elections.”
Van Hollen is still trying with his latest petition to the Supreme Court. If the conservatives prevail before the November election, not only will voting be suppressed by possibly massive numbers, but municipal clerks will be over-burdened with another complicated round of last minute changes, an invitation to further errors and uncertainty, all in the name of Van Hollen’s shadowy fraud specter.
Republican National Committee chair Reince Priebus said in June that voter fraud in Wisconsin made it necessary for Republicans to win by wider margins to secure election. State Representative Robin Vos mimicked Priebus and said fraud occurred, even though he had no direct evidence of it, when Democrat John Lehman won the June recall election over State Senator Van Wanggaard, a Racine Republican. PolitiFact.com said Vos’s “certainty” that there was fraud was “false.”
The Voter ID Law is intended to create perceptions of nonexistent fraud, while it really discourages solid citizens from voting. That’s where the real fraud occurs, perpetrated by GOP partisans against our fellow citizens who are entitled to vote.
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If one loses an election, then there's fraud.
Voter fraud is non-existent whereas lying to get into office has become the norm. Which threatens the democracy more, non-existent voter fraud or people who lie to get into powerful positions for the benefit of themselves and cronies?
-Pietr Haikuu | Hurley, Wis | August 25, 2012
Oh, the irony of it all. Damn you Voter ID!
From PA:
"Helen Taylor, an 81-year-old from Doylestown who wants to vote for Romney, wasn't aware the voter ID law would prevent her from voting until she was contacted by TPM. She no longer drives, and her licence expired a few years ago after she got into an accident."
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2012/08/thought_for_the_day.php
-Mad Hemingway | Heart of Badger country | August 25, 2012
RE: Helen Taylor, from Doylestown, PA
Yeah, MH, it's ironic, but irony is immaterial to the Republicans when they're in full disenfranchise mode. If 300,000 voters would NOT be able to vote because of the PA law, and only 10K or 20K are Republicans, the Republican fraudsters will take it and run. Remember that thieves like this have NO honor (think Karl Rove), so they'll gladly sacrifice 10s of thousands of their own voters IF they can be assured that 100s of thousands of Democratic voters will fall by the way.
What ticks me off the most is that it's NOT a concern with democracy that's driving ANY of this, it's crass Tammany Hall style politics. This isn't even something in a gray area, like re-districting which has valid, legal underpinnings (though it can obviously be abused by Tom DeLay or Scott Walker's minions) - - - it's just CLEARLY an attempt to win elections by concocting solutions to fictitious scenarios that just happen-to-oh-so-coincidentally benefit the prevaricator GREATLY. It's of course reminiscent of the recent financial scandals whereby financial institutions KNEW (especially near the end) that the high risk mortgages they were bundling & promoting were doomed, but they continued not to say anything and even essentially 'sold-short' on them.
-Big Em | Milwaukee, WI | August 25, 2012
I cannot help but ask, "WHERE ARE THE DEMOCRATIC ATTORNEY GENERALS OF ALL STATES?" Why can't they file some class action law suits to deal with these shady issues? 1. Why can't citizens across the US file a class action lawsuit demanding that due to potentially rendering the entire US elections fraudulent, ALL states MUST have a certifiable, 24-7 (guarded night and day by both parties' law enforcement), paper trail? 2. Why can't citizens across the US file a class action lawsuit demanding that voter ID, if it exists, MUST include components that assist EVERY ELIGIBLE VOTER to obtain their ID, well in advance, and also to get to the polls? 3. Why can't citizens across the US file a class action lawsuit charging potential fraud due to huge
corporate lobbyists robbing our tax dollars by taking monopolized time of our Congressmen, and by potential infiltration of internation money into elections??? WHERE ARE THE DEMOCRATIC ATTORNEY GENERALS?
-hmj | Madison, WI | August 26, 2012
Yet her 93 year old senior Viviette Applewhite who is the lead plaintif in the case maganged to get her ID. Amazing you guys missed that part of the story.
http://www.sungazette.com/page/content.detail/id/582147/93-year-old-woman-gets-ID-for-voting.html?nav=5011
-SW | Waukesha WI | August 26, 2012
Voter fraud is a very real issue; just look at Florida (2000), Ohio (2004), or Waukesha county. The problem is that the repugs focus on voter suppression instead of addressing the actual fraud that they rely on to 'win' close 'elections'.
It is time for people to realize that the United States is not a functioning democracy, and U.S. elections are not 'free and fair', they are for sale to the highest bidder.
-Ron | SoCal | August 26, 2012
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