Cigar
07-24-2012, 07:24 AM
As our regular readers undoubtedly know, Republicans have been engaged in a concerted effort to reduce voting (http://www.winningprogressive.org/fight-for-your-right-to-vote) by college students, people of color, poor people, the elderly and other Democratic-leaning constituencies by enacting laws prohibiting people from voting unless they have certain government-issued photo IDs. Supporters of such laws claim that they are trying to stop rampant in-person voter fraud – i.e., concerted efforts to have ineligible people vote in order to throw an election. But the reality is that there is no evidence of any such fraud. For example, a five-year long investigation by the Department of Justice under President George W. Bush found “virtually no evidence of any organized effort” to fraudulently impact federal elections (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html?pagewanted=all), and other analyses (http://www.pfaw.org/rww-in-focus/the-right-to-vote-under-attack-the-campaign-to-keep-millions-of-americans-from-the-ball) have similarly found no evidence of fraud (http://www.truthaboutfraud.org/).
This past week in Pennsylvania, leading Republicans admitted in two separate circumstances that in-person voter fraud is virtually non-existent. The first such admission came in the state of Pennsylvania’s response to the ACLU’s lawsuit challenging the restrictive voter ID law (http://www.aclupa.org/legal/legaldocket/applewhiteetalvcommonwealt/) that was passed in March 2012 and is scheduled to go into effect for the November election. The court hearing in that lawsuit – titled Applewhite v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania – is scheduled to begin on July 25, 2012, and in a pre-hearing filing (http://www.aclupa.org/downloads/ApplewhiteStipulation.pdf), Pennsylvania (which has a Republican Governor and Attorney General) stipulated that;
- There have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania
- The state is not aware of any in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania
- The state will not offer any evidence that in-person voter fraud has occurred
- The state will not offer any evidence or argument that in-person voter fraud is likely to occur in the absence of the photo ID law
In short, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has admitted that the entire “justification” for the photo ID law does not exist.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/07/23/pennsylvania-gopers-concede-that-voter-fraud-claims-are-a-myth/
This past week in Pennsylvania, leading Republicans admitted in two separate circumstances that in-person voter fraud is virtually non-existent. The first such admission came in the state of Pennsylvania’s response to the ACLU’s lawsuit challenging the restrictive voter ID law (http://www.aclupa.org/legal/legaldocket/applewhiteetalvcommonwealt/) that was passed in March 2012 and is scheduled to go into effect for the November election. The court hearing in that lawsuit – titled Applewhite v. Commonwealth of Pennsylvania – is scheduled to begin on July 25, 2012, and in a pre-hearing filing (http://www.aclupa.org/downloads/ApplewhiteStipulation.pdf), Pennsylvania (which has a Republican Governor and Attorney General) stipulated that;
- There have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania
- The state is not aware of any in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania
- The state will not offer any evidence that in-person voter fraud has occurred
- The state will not offer any evidence or argument that in-person voter fraud is likely to occur in the absence of the photo ID law
In short, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has admitted that the entire “justification” for the photo ID law does not exist.
http://www.addictinginfo.org/2012/07/23/pennsylvania-gopers-concede-that-voter-fraud-claims-are-a-myth/