The GOP set up a supposedly independent voter's rights group that was the only citizen's group claiming there was a massive problem with voting fraud in this country. It's work was cited all over the country in every state as Republican legislators tried to make it harder for the elderly, the disabled, the minorities, the poor to vote in an effort to wipe out this scourge of American democracy - the fraudulent voter. The supposed center's work is now being cited in Austin. Except it was all a sham.
Both the problem, which was extremely rare, and the group, which has now shut down like it never existed. Bradblog documented how the group was never more than a post office box and a handful of Republican operatives willing to testify and give alarming reports of heavily Democratic areas in battleground states being festering fraudulent sores on democracy. It was set up just days before GOP congressional hearings to give legitimacy to stricter voter ID requirements that purely coincidentally suppress Democratic votes.
There is no question there is registration fraud, mainly by people being paid up to $5 a voter registration card, but extensive studies show ineligible voters are about a handful or less per million voters. "The DoJ devoted unprecedented resources to ferreting out polling-place fraud over five years and appears to have found not a single prosecutable case across the country."
Nearly all problems with polling place voter fraud had been solved in the 2002 uniform voter act, AKA "Help America Vote Act," provisions requiring ID for first time voters and other measures. Polling place fraud which voter-ID bills are designed to cure are a non-existent problem. Not so with election official fraud and mail-in ballot fraud which do exist and which voter-ID bills don't address.
The entire reason for voter ID bills is to gain a few more points in close elections by suppressing Democratic votes. This is also the not so hidden reason around the Karl Rove ordered firings of Justice Department state attorneys for not pursuing publicity heavy voter fraud cases and pursuing too publicly cases involving Republican office holders.
The disappearing American Center for Voting Rights and its Republican operatives is further proof of this. Read the Bradblog archives documenting this GOP front group or the Slate article for more on this. From Slate:
Just this week, Republican members of the Texas state Senate are trying to push through a voter-ID law over a threatened Democratic filibuster. Their political machinations have already required a Democratic state senator recovering from a liver transplant to show up to vote—and they almost passed the bill when another Democratic senator came down with the stomach flu.
Texas legislators should be ashamed. All of this effort to enact a law that would stop a nonexistent problem. If only there were a way to ensure that spurious claims of polling-place voter fraud could have disappeared with ACVR.
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