Political Irony

A few days after the presidential election when Joe Biden was declared the winner, the Lt. Gov. of Texas, Republican Dan Patrick, offered a bounty of up to $1 million to anyone who could supply proof of voter fraud, and a minimum of $25,000 to anyone who provided information that led to a conviction.

This offer wasn’t limited to Texas, it was for anywhere in the country. Patrick specifically called out the large (and heavily Democratic) cities of Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Detroit, and Atlanta. After all, if your goal is to overturn the election to install Donald Trump as the rightful president, you have to find a lot of Democratic votes to invalidate.

Well, it has been just under a year, but Patrick finally made his first payout, cutting a check for the minimum $25,000. As reported by the Dallas Morning News (paywall):

Nearly a year after offering up a hefty bounty for evidence of voter fraud in the wake of Donald Trump’s loss, Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick has handed out his first reward. But instead of going to an informant who smoked out fraud by Democrats, Patrick’s five-figure payout went to a progressive poll worker in Pennsylvania whose tip led to a single conviction of illegal voting by a registered Republican.

So there was voter fraud, but it was committed by a Republican who tried to cast an extra vote in his son’s name. And there is more fraud. Just in Pennsylvania alone, there are two other cases where Republicans tried to vote for their dead mothers. In Ohio, a local Republican official forged his dead father’s signature on an absentee ballot, and then voted again himself.

What is even worse, is that most of these people got what amounts to a slap on the wrist for their intentional voter fraud. The Republican in Pennsylvania who tried to vote for his son was put on probation. The Republican in Ohio was sentenced to three days in jail and a $500 fine.

Compare this to Crystal Mason, a black woman in Texas who was out on supervised release due to a federal conviction for tax fraud (for which she had already spent almost three years in jail). Mason cast a provisional ballot in the 2016 presidential election. She didn’t know she wasn’t allowed to vote, and her vote was never counted. But the mother of three was sentenced to five years in prison for illegal voting.

And as a side note, I’m wondering if Donald Trump will spend any time in jail for all of his tax fraud.