Friday, February 24, 2012

S.C. Looks Into Voter Fraud, Finds None

South Carolina joined the long list of Republican controlled states that passed voter suppression laws under the guise of an anti voter fraud law. The argument was voter fraud is fairly rampant and unless drastic action was taken our future elections are at risk.


There is no evidence of such fraud occurring and no record of any modern election in SC that has been impacted by fraud; But like good republicans, Gov.Nikki Haley and her minions passed this voter suppression law and then went about trying to prove it was needed. A list of over 900 'dead voters' was produced, the state went running to the DOJ (and Faux news) claiming that they had proof that their voter suppression law was necessary.
There was only one problem.... the dead voters were not dead, the issues that were involved included clerical errors at the polling place, absentee ballots and scanner failures, but no illegal voting. This dead, stinking, rotting from the head red herring is the only justification that Nikki and her crew can come up with to explain why their voter suppression law is needed, and it failed.

The truth is, the Republicans do not want the poor, the elderly and students to vote, these folks tend to not support the party of the rich. So they crafted a law that will make it more difficult for these people to vote and discourage their participation. And from a position of mathematics the efforts to suppress votes makes sense, while the effort to end voter’s fraud are foolish.

As this latest snipe hunt makes clear, voter fraud seldom happens, and its impact (if it did occur) is nonexistent. IF all 900+ suspected votes were fraud and IF each and every one of them was cast for a single candidate in a high profile state wide election, they would have had ZERO impact in 2008 or 2010. The total count of suspected votes was .00475% of votes in the 2008 election. In other words nothing. On the other hand voter suppression tactics like the current voter ID law are projected to have the potential to prevent 10s of thousands of votes from being cast..... That is a notable impact that could swing an election.

And that makes the actions of Nikki Haley and her Republican minions understandable.




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