vote fraud

Good bookNow that the recall elections are winding down (two more to go; don't forget to vote Aug. 16 if you live in the districts of Democrats Robert Wirch and Jim Holperin), maybe we can get the Republicans to finish up their ostensible project to prevent vote fraud. Starting with their own backers.

As it turns out, the biggest threat to vote integrity appears not to be individual citizens who vote in the wrong place or more than once or illegally altogether, but organized political institutions that clearly engage in vote suppression. The examples from this round of campaigns have been clumsy and absurdly transparent:

The official vote count isn't even in yet and Republican apologists are coming out of the woodwork intimating that Democrats stole the election for JoAnne Kloppenburg. Their arguments are highly specualtive, inaccurate and -- most important -- all tired shibboleths we've heard before, and which have been dragged out before by Wisconsin Republicans insistent about implementing their vote-suppression I.D. measure. Callers to right-wing talk shows make unsupported claims -- for instance, that a box of ballots went missing in one jurisidiction -- and the national blogs dutifully report it as a suspicious reality.

I won't belabor you with further examples, except this one, from the conservative Daily Caller. The entire article is typical of the hand-wringing and sly, perception-influence operation that is already underway: