Word: fraud
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...using dead people’s names, campaign workers coercing or bribing people into voting for their man—that sort of thing. But their evidence is almost always mere innuendo. Consider The Wall Street Journal’s John Fund, who leads a cottage industry of voter-fraud hyperventilators. The day before the election, Fund laughably tried to tie ACORN, that all-purpose conservative bugaboo, to anticipated wrong-doings in New Jersey: “Philly operatives associated in the past with ACORN may now be advising their Jersey cousins,” he warned. In other words...
...conservative scare tactics always confuse voter-registration fraud, which is as harmless as illegitimately filling out a registration form, with voter fraud: when illegitimate people actually vote. Take poor Uremia Rojas, who told Fund that “a man with a clipboard knocked on my door and had me sign something so I could vote by mail. I was skeptical but signed and got a ballot. I never really wanted one.” I understand it can be distressing to possess a ballot that you don’t really want to fill out, but here?...
...conservative pursuit of voter fraud has a long and sordid history. The Bush Justice Department sent its U.S. attorneys out hunting for it, but they turned up nothing—a few dozen cases of mistakes and misunderstandings, a few small-time conspiracies in local elections, but no evidence of corruption in federal or state elections. This, of course, wasn’t what the Bush administration wanted to hear, so they fired U.S. attorneys who they thought weren’t being aggressive enough...
Despite this pathetic record, fears of voter fraud have served to justify restrictive laws and tactics that end up disqualifying eligible voters. Six swing states, using flawed and possibly illegal criteria, purged “tens of thousands” of eligible voters from their rolls in the run-up to the 2008 election. Some states passed laws to restrict voter registration drives; the threat of some prankster signing up as “Mickey Mouse” is just that terrifying! And others require extensive photo identification from in-person voters, which serves not to reduce fraud (in-person...
There’s a really simple remedy to voter fraud, insofar as it even exists, and that is universal voter registration. You can’t pretend to be eligible to vote if everyone’s automatically registered. This is one area among many in which the U.S. lags behind other advanced democracies. Of course, Republicans dread the possibility that we might catch up; an influx of young, poor, and minority voters would cost them many an election...