Voter Fraud Fraud

by shamanic

The allegations about voter fraud in our current politics are a lot like the discussions about UFOs. There's no real evidence, despite plenty of peoples' best efforts, but an awful lot of folks believe they're out there. Even I have to admit that some of those mutilated cows are weird.

That's pretty much what the arguments about voter fraud sound like to me. In my own state, Georgia, the GOP-controlled legislature tried to pass a raft of voter ID laws last year, and I kept waiting for my state government to provide me with evidence that such restrictions were necessary to protect the electoral process. After all, in 2002, the election handed the state houses over to Republicans for the first time since reconstruction, and that vote was ratified in 2004. So it seemed a puzzling stretch for Republicans to make the claim that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia. After all, shouldn't that put their majorities in question in the minds of voters?

But no, their argument is always that Democrats are engaged in a concerted effort to engage in voter fraud, and that the Democrats' nefarious plans require strict regulation whose result will disenfranchise large numbers of perfectly legitimate voters. This from the party that abhors regulation and won the last three elections in Georgia.

The GOP evidence for Democratic voter fraud appears to be that Democrats continue to be elected to public office in America. And there continue to be lights in the sky at night. And cows continue to die suspiciously.

They may all be part of some grand conspiracy, but after years and years of searching for evidence of widespread voter fraud, maybe it's time for the GOP to think about putting this one to bed. After all, we now know they used the full force of the DOJ and the US Attorney system to sniff out any suggestion of tampering, and they came up empty handed. It's time to drop it guys. Let it go. The conspiracy is called the electoral system, and the conspirators are the roughly half of American voters who cast ballots for Democratic candidates on election day.

There's no mystery here. Just elections.