Will The GOP Blame a Trump Defeat on "Voter Fraud"?

As many posts have noted before, claims of preventing voter fraud are the Republican raison d'etre to justify disenfranchising minority voters and others who are presumed to be pro-Democrat.  The problem is, of course, that as the nation's demographics change, a point will be reached where it is impossible to disenfranchise enough voters to continue to assure GOP election victories in non-gerrymandered districts.  Are we now at that point, especially in the wake of several court rulings that struck down GOP enacted voter ID laws such as the one in North Carolina?  That is what some are conjecturing as Donald Trump and other Republicans are floating the meme that the 2016 election will be "rigged" against the GOP.  A piece in Talking Points Memo looks at the issue.  Here are highlights:

It may not seem terribly important right now with all the stories roiling the campaign. But I think there's a good chance it's the most important. Over the last 48 hours Trump's allies, surrogates and now Trump himself have forcibly injected the topic of voter fraud or 'election rigging' into the election. Longtime TPM Readers know this topic has probably been the publication's single greatest and most consistent focus over fifteen years. The subject has been investigated countless times. And it is clear that voter fraud and especially voter impersonation fraud is extremely rare - rare almost to the point of non-existence, though there have been a handful of isolated cases.

Vote fraud is clearly the aim in what is coming from Trump allies. But Trump's own comment - "I'm afraid the election's gonna be rigged, I have to be honest" - seems to suggest some broader effort to manufacture votes or falsify numbers, to allude to some broader conspiracy. Regardless, Trump is now pressing this issue to lay the groundwork to discredit and quite possibly resist the outcome of the November election.

Some might suggest that Trump's prediction of a 'rigged' election is simply an extension of his complaints and vocabulary during the primary process. They're wrong. Primaries have convoluted and complex rules. They're not one person one vote elections. National elections have a clear cut set of rules. The only way to rig them is to change the vote numbers.

It's true that Republicans have been very disingenuously pushing the 'voter fraud' con for years, especially as the power of minority voting has grown over the last two decades. However, as bad as that has been, there's a major difference. Republicans to date have almost always used bogus claims of 'voter fraud' to rev up their troops and build support for restrictive voting laws, largely focused on minority voters. A number of those laws have been overturned by federal courts in the last week. A notable case was North Carolina where the Court found that the changes were intentionally designed to limit voting by black North Carolinians.

What Republicans politicians have virtually never done was use this canard to lay the groundwork for rejecting the result of a national election. This is Donald Trump, not a normal politician. You should not be surprised if he refuses to accept the result of an electoral defeat or calls on his supporters to resist it.

The other point goes to the raced nature of all voter suppression legislation. They focus overwhelmingly on claims that African-Americans commit rampant vote fraud in "inner cities" and that immigrants, particularly Hispanic immigrants do the same. These are of course two of Trump's main group enemies. Combining the animosity he has already stoked among his followers toward these groups with the claim that they will now try to "steal" the election through fraud is nothing less than striking a match in a gas filled room.

Whether Trump is starting to lay the groundwork for contesting the election on claims of widespread voter impersonation fraud or some kind of broader effort for election officials to falsify results, we're entering a dangerous new phase of the 2016 election campaign.

Ken Cuccinelli: Missing in Action on Voter Fraud But Actively Anti-Gay

Virginia Attorney General Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli continues to be a sweetheart of the objective reality untethered far right but when it comes to acting to stopping real voter fraud, Kookinelli is missing in action.  But never fear, Kookinelli is on the front lines when it comes to beating the drum of homophobia and doing all in his power to subvert the constitutional rights of LGBT Americans, be assured that Kookinelli will be there on bells on.  

 

First, it is informative to look at a piece in Not Larry Sabato that focuses on a situation of continuing voter fraud in Virginia where voter registration forms have mysteriously disappeared only to reappear after filing deadlines - or after election day in 2012.  If one believes the Republican Party of Virginia, one of the biggest threats to democracy is voter fraud.  Hence one would expect Kookinelli to be jumping to action.  But wait. Who is engaged in voter fraud and disenfranchisement activities?  Republicans, of course.  Hence Kookinelli is conveniently suffering from total blindness.  Here are some highlights concerning very disturbing events in Harrisonburg, Virginia, that involve Republicans Debbie Logan (pictured at right) and Suzanne Obenshain, the wife f a GOP state Senator :

Last week, after Colin Small was arrested in Harrionburg the national media began paying attention to the voter fraud issue and how it might impact this election in Virginia.  Here's the dirty secret about Virginia politics.  Yes, there are many areas of the state where voter fraud incidents are rare and elections are generally run well. There are also areas of the state, where elections always seem to have problems, suspicious activity and other irregularities. In fact, Harrisonburg where this scandal started is the voter fraud capital of Virginia.

[R]egistrars like Debbie Logan in Harrisonburg who didn't want college students to register have since made it as difficult as possible.  In fact in 2008 there was a massive irregularity in Harrisonburg.  
Students supporting Barack Obama dropped off one group of registration forms at the office.  Somehow those forms left the office, made their way over 100 miles to Richmond, where someone mailed them back to the office AFTER the registration deadline.

 [T]he forms disappear from the office, reappear in another city, get mailed in after the deadline from a fake address, and the registrar's son - who lives in that city where the forms ended up- starts calling people, lying about who he is, falsely identifies himself the same way the forms were falsely misaddressed and tries to threaten those who were upset about the situation.
 
Not only did the registrar or her son not get charged with a crime- but Debbie Logan is still the registrar in Harrisonburg today.

Who supervises Debbie Logan?  Members of the electoral board- including one of Debbie's good friends- Suzanne Obenshain- wife of the local Republican State Senator (and Attorney General hopeful for 2013), Mark Obenshain.  Suzanne served as a member during this whole 2008 debacle with the voter forms, until mid 2011, when the General Assembly passed a new law that said electoral board members could not be related to candidates or officeholders in their area.  That bill passed the Senate 39-0 with Sen. Obenshain abstaining.  Ms. Obenshain did nothing to remove Logan- her friend- after this 2008 debacle.

With the national press circulating, Logan is doing all she can to protect the GOP.  Her office has not finished processing all the voter registrations that came in before the deadline, and she told Ryan Nobles of NBC12 that she may not finish for two weeks.  This was on the 19th, meaning Logan may not be able to tell us who is- or is not- registered to vote until as late as November 2nd- the Friday before election day.

In other words- if your registration was destroyed, Logan won't even be able to tell you until it is too late to challenge it.

What has Kookinelli - who has not hesitated in injecting himself and the Attorney General's office into all matter of issues and lawsuits dear to the far right done to address obvious instances of voter fraud and illegal disenfranchisement?  Nothing.  Nothing at all whatsoever.

But jump to the issue of gay rights, and Kookinelli is as I said on the front lines supporting homophobia, denigrating LGBT citizens, and seeking to subvert the First Amendment of the United States Constitution which guarantees freedom of religion to ALL citizens, not just Christofascists.     Here are highlights from the Washington Blade on Kookinelli's efforts to deprive LGBT citizens of the constitutional rights while engaging in campaign events for Mitt Romney and George Allen, boyh of whom have pldeged to keep LGBT Americans 4th class citizens.:

The Washington Blade has learned Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli is scheduled to speak at a rally against same-sex marriage at a Manassas church on Friday.

“He will be addressing the summit at 6 p.m. in Manassas,” said Cuccinelli’s spokesperson, Brian Gottstein, in response to questions about the upcoming gathering at Reconciliation Community Church. “Since the marriage amendment is the law in Virginia, the attorney general was asked to speak about it.”

The Manassas event is the latest of a series of rallies and other gatherings scheduled to take place across the commonwealth on Friday during what organizers have dubbed the Marriage Protection Virginia Bus Tour. Participants are scheduled to attend an early morning rally at Liberty University in Lynchburg before traveling to Richmond, where they are slated to gather at Capitol Square Grounds before eating lunch at a Chick-fil-A restaurant. Afterwards, participants are expected to attend a second rally at the Fredericksburg Prayer Furnace in Fredericksburg before traveling to Manassas.

Gay state Sen. Adam Ebbin (D-Alexandria) also criticized Cuccinelli for agreeing to speak at the event.  “It’s clearly political posturing to assist divisive figures like [U.S. Senate candidate] George Allen and Mitt Romney,” he told the Blade. “Ken Cuccinelli knows full well that we have an anti-gay marriage amendment that he helped put in the Virginia state constitution. And I don’t know what pretense he’s using, but it doesn’t seem relevant to the economic issues Virginians are facing this year and the recovery Virginia is experiencing under the Obama administration. It’s a diversion, it’s divisive and it’s typical of Ken Cuccinelli. Fair minded people who oppose Ken Cuccinelli and bigotry should volunteer to support the president and [U.S. Senate] candidate Tim Kaine.”

Douche bag is too kind of a label to apply to Kookinelli.   As for the voter fraud issue in Virginia, I increasingly feel as if I am living in some sleazy banana republic of old compliments of the Republican Party of Virginia.. 

Cuccinelli Silent on Arrest of GOP Official Who Destroyed Voter Registration Documents

To hear Ken "Kookinelli" Cuccinelli and other GOP elected officials whine and bloviate about supposed election fraud - the excuse behind all of the GOP efforts to disenfranchise voters - one would think that Mr. Kookinelli would immediately jump up and down and try to spearhead an investigation in the wake the arrest of a campaign official in Virginia for seeking to destroy completed voter registration forms. After all, Kookinelli has shown himself to be only too willing to launch himself into investigating things and people - especially academic types - who don't subscribe to Kookinelli's crazed views.  But, oops!  There's one tiny problem: the man arrested is a Republican and has ties to the national GOP.  That's right, the RNC itself.  And what has Cuccinelli done?  Nothing to date.  An article in Salon looks at the arrest in the context of other GOP voter registration schemes to keep Democrat leaning voters from voting.  Here are excerpts:

 

A man originally reported to have been working for the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested by the Rockingham County, Va., Sheriff’s Office on Thursday and charged with attempting to destroy voter registration forms by tossing them into a dumpster behind a shopping center in Harrisonburg, Va.

“Prosecutors charged him with four counts of destruction of voter registration applications, eight counts of failing to disclose voter registration applications and one count of obstruction of justice,” according to a report late Thursday afternoon from TPM’s Ryan Reilly. More charges could be forthcoming, according to officials.

But there is more to the story, as evidence emerges to document that it ties into a still-expanding nationwide GOP Voter Registration Fraud Scandal that the BRAD BLOG first began reporting in late September, after we’d learned that the Republican Party of Florida had turned in more than 100 allegedly fraudulent and otherwise suspect voter registration forms in Palm Beach County. The story has continued to widen ever since, to a dozen Florida counties and several other states, now including Virginia, and even to the upper-echelons of the Republican Party itself.

The man arrested today was 23-year-old Colin Small of Phoenixville, Pa. As it turns out, he does not only work for the Virginia Republican Party. According to an online profile, he appears to be working for the Republican National Committee and, prior to that, served as an Intern for Rep. Mike Kelly, R-Pa., in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Joseph Tanfani at the Los Angeles Times is reporting that Small was “working as a supervisor as part of a registration operation in eight swing states financed by the Republican National Committee.”

Some of those questionable applications included address changes for existing voters, such that Florida election officials told the BRAD BLOG they worry voters could find themselves disenfranchised come Election Day. In Florida, as in many states, provisional ballots cast at precincts other than where voters are officially registered will not be counted. So changing the addresses on voter registrations without voters’ knowledge is a serious crime with potentially very serious consequences.

If, in fact, Small, or the workers he is said to have supervised, were using the same technique of misrepresenting themselves to voters about being a pollster, rather than being a registration worker, it’s likely he would have been able to glean whether those registrations he was allegedly seen tossing into a dumpster were for Democratic or Republican-leaning voters.

Colin Small - Arrested for Destroying Voter Registration documents.