Republicans made huge gains in the 2010 elections, promising to improve the economy. Isn’t it funny that the economy is now going back down? What isn’t funny is that 33 states — all with Republican controlled legislatures — have passed laws that make it more difficult to vote.
How can you tell that these laws are politically motivated? Well, in Texas, you can use a concealed handgun permit to identify yourself to vote, but you can’t use a student ID. And in Florida, they also restricted efforts by the League of Women Voters to register new voters. Proponents say the new laws are necessary to prevent voter fraud, but election law experts say that there is little evidence of voter fraud in US elections.
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On May 12 Republicans on the U.S. House Judiciary Committee killed an amendment aimed at preventing legal firearms sales to suspected terrorists. Republicans argued that restricting sales to people on the FBI’s terrorist watch list would “steal the Second Amendment rights of those placed on the list by mistake.”
On the other hand, Republicans across the country are pushing bills making voting more difficult. Republicans seem happy to suppress voting among students, minorities and workers in order to avoid very rare cases of voter fraud.
I guess these Republicans value their second amendment rights more than other’s right to vote.
I suspect that no Republicans actually believe that voter fraud is a real problem.
I think “no Republicans believe voter fraud works in their favor” is more accurate.
There is Republican voting fraud. It happens through the absentee ballots. That is the only place where voting fraud has been documented to occur and it has more often involved Republican votes.
Yes, isn’t that what Ann Coulter did?
Yup, here it is — http://www.bradblog.com/?p=8124
Sure, but ask one about voting fraud and see what they say. The ones I hear about most often are:
– Illegal immigrants voting
– Someone using a dead person’s name/ID to vote
– Someone using a different person’s name/ID to vote
This is typically followed with a long winded diatribe about ACORN.
I’m not saying that there is no Republican voting fraud, I’m saying that at least in my experience they don’t believe it works in their favor. Hell I can’t remember a recent big election in which a Democrat won where I didn’t hear at least a little about one of the 3 things above from the right wingers I know. I have yet to hear it even suggested in a race that a Republican was victorious.
The Republican stand on voter fraud makes me think of a theory that posits if someone suspects wrong-doing, it is frequently because they have done the “wrong” themselves in the past and are thus more aware of it’s possibility in the future.
In a further (untested) theory of my own,
I suspect that this behavior ususally disappears after puberty! 🙂
Mitt Romney is guilty of voter fraud too unless you really believe he lives in his son’s basement rather than either of his multimillion dollar homes.
I don’t care if somebody votes in the wrong district once because they forgot to update their registration but actively stating an address you never lived in is flat out fraud.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43479572/ns/health-health_care/?GT1=43001
IK, a story of interest for the times
Speaking from the perspective of 70+ years,as a person who has contemptiously rejected both political parties, it is my considered assessment that voter fraud is a mainstay of the national Democrat party- along with spreading the virus of wealth and class envy that has now, today hopelessly divided us as a nation. Party “one-upmanship” has displaced everything else – except retaining elective office. The Constitution has become an antiquated document to be gamed.
Chase – your first sentence and set of points is conservative propaganda, 100% fact free. There is virtually no voter fraud in the US – every time it’s been investigated there has either been no evidence of it, or what little was found ws completely immaterial. And it’s been on both sides – or do you really think Scott Walker’s pet judge got re-elected because they actually “found” 7,000 ballots all for him after the other votes were counted?
It is equally propaganda that Democrats “spread a virus of wealth and class envy”. The argument about the incredible income disparity in the US isn’t about envy, and it isn’t about socialism. It’s about fairness.
When the US leads the world by MORE THAN AN ORDER OF MAGNITUDE in the ratio of CEO pay to worker pay, when the US ranks the same as Iran and Nigeria for income equality, when we are BORROWING MONEY FROM CHINA to give millionaires a tax cut, and when the 1% gamble with the 99%’s money, sticking us with the losses and keeping all the wins AND getting bailed out when any of their peronsal money is at risk, we don’t have capitalism and a level playing field. We have a plutocracy that is shamefully stealing from the poor to give to the rich and destroying the very thing that made America an economic powerhouse in the first place – a vibrant and free spending middle class.
Your second and third points are completely valid and equally applies to both parties. Hyper partisanship and defeating the other party is more important than governing, and more important than the people. Ignoring the Constitution to maintain power is equally prevalent in both parties.
We need the National Popular Vote and Alternative Voting, and we need to bring down the plutocracy so we can get back to the constitutional republic America is SUPPOSED to be.