Thursday, October 16, 2008

Texas Republican Voter Registrar says "Registering over and over is not fraud ... it's just a bogus waste of time."


Even though I pretty much conceded yesterday that the Republicans will win one thing this voting season, that there really is such a thing a voter fraud, I may have spoken to soon about everyone believing in the myth.

Take a look at this article by Lisa Falkenberg in the Houston Chronicle that pretty much put to rest, AGAIN, the myth of voter fraud and the smear campaign against ACORN.

The sky is falling at voter registrar offices across the country! Or was that just an ACORN? It's hard to tell these days with breathless news reports blanketing airwaves and the Internet, spewing accusations of voter registration fraud in battleground states. We're told dead people are being signed up, along with Mickey Mouse and the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys — bogus registrations supposedly planted by the liberal-leaning community organizing group ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now.

Voter fraud is a perennial political boogeyman of the Republicans …There's no doubt that each election cycle, ACORN hires canvassers who end up turning in bogus registration cards …These paid canvassers … are more likely motivated to pad their stacks to collect a paycheck than to join in a sinister plot to swing an election.

"There's no Dallas Cowboys football team. President Roosevelt has not been re-registered. We've done a cursory check," says Paul Bettencourt, Harris County voter registrar. In fact, Bettencourt, a Republican, says he has a healthy relationship with ACORN. When there's a problem, he meets with the group's officials to work it out … many of these duplicates are well-intentioned mistakes, the result of people who can't remember if they've registered, or they still haven't received their voter registration card in the mail, so they fill out another application.

There's an important difference between bogus voter registration applications and real, Election Day voter fraud.

"Registering over and over is not fraud," Bettencourt says. " ... it's just a bogus waste of time."
And the chances of the bogusness leading to Election Day fraud?
"The odds are higher than zero. That's really all you can say," Bettencourt says.

Bettencourt argues that ACORN could reduce its error rate if it used volunteer canvassers instead of paid ones. ACORN says using volunteers isn't a feasible option for a large-scale operation. But the errors are a waste of time, and money, for ACORN's privately funded campaign, too.

The only clear motivation in the supposed battleground state scandals is political. And let's not forget the role of voter fraud in the infamous U.S. attorney firings scandal that helped take down former Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.

A recent Justice Department inspector general report detailed how David Iglesias, New Mexico's former U.S. attorney appointed by President Bush, got the boot because his fellow Republicans objected to the lack of zeal with which he handled voter fraud and public corruption cases against Democrats. Iglesias had formed a bipartisan task force to investigate more than 100 claims of voter fraud, but it wasn't good enough because it found no prosecutable cases.

Partisanship trumped the facts. Same thing with the latest accusations. In politics, the acorn doesn't fall far from the tree.

I thought this comment was interesting:

nonewsisgoodnews wrote:
An audit of applications shows about 20% of REAL voters make errors on their application, such as listing their name as "Joe" when their driver's license says "Joseph", or omitting their apartment number, or getting one digit of their TDL or social security number wrong. By challenging the first twenty voters at each inner-city precinct, Republicans can create long lines at each polling place that force working people to give up. Republicans have said their goal is to block 200,000 people from voting in Ohio...with the goal of stealing Ohio's electoral votes.

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