Voting Fraud Lie Lives On

See Debunking the Voter Fraud Myth, (Sept 2016)
Brennan Center for Justice

Republican power-grabs continue

If you have encountered a white Wisconsin election observer or poll worker, you may have encountered a Republican fighting the holy war against voting fraud.

A New York Times editorial sets the record straight on voting fraud:

How does a lie come to be widely taken as the truth?

The answer is disturbingly simple: Repeat it over and over again. When faced with facts that contradict the lie, repeat it louder.

This, in a nutshell, is the story of claims of voting fraud in America — and particularly of voter impersonation fraud, the only kind that voter ID laws can possibly prevent. ...

Credit for this mass deception goes to Republican lawmakers, who have for years pushed a fake story about voter fraud, and thus the necessity of voter ID laws, in an effort to reduce voting among specific groups of Democratic-leaning voters. Those groups — mainly minorities, the poor and students — are less likely to have the required forms of identification.

Behind closed doors, some Republicans freely admit that stoking false fears of electoral fraud is part of their political strategy. In a recently disclosed email from 2011, a Republican lobbyist in Wisconsin wrote to colleagues about a very close election [featuring David Prosser] for a seat on the State Supreme Court. 'Do we need to start messaging ‘widespread reports of election fraud’ so we are positively set up for the recount regardless of the final number?' he wrote. 'I obviously think we should.' ...

The ploy works. 

Yes, the ploy works.

The holy warriors, the overwhelmingly white Republican grassroots extending to the Alt Right, are taking the lie to ever more absurd lengths at the point of voting: The polling place on Election Day.

The objective is to frustrate, aggravate, and obstruct as many minority, young and disabled voters as possible in an effort to suppress the total vote in favor of the Republican Party. If Republicans can demean and dehumanize X number of the wrong kind of voters, Y number of voters won't come back soon.

That municipal bureaucracies treat disfavored voters differently and with animosity is not permissible under the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments is a barrier to overcome, in the rightist view. Republicans wager: We don't know what we can get away with if we don't try.

Concludes the Times: "The scary thing is how many Americans have bought into this charade. It shouldn’t be surprising that the Republican Party’s standard-bearer, Donald Trump, has elevated the lie about voting fraud and 'rigged elections' to a centerpiece of his campaign."

It should not be surprising.

In Wisconsin, from school boards to municipalities to all levers of state government in all branches and in all bureaucracies, Republicans are engaged in a concerted effort to transform Wisconsin into a red state where civil liberties such as voting rights are a defect to be overcome.