Republican Lies category archive

Annette John-Hall tackles the gut out the vote efforts, speaking with Faye Anderson of the Election Protection group and the Pennsylvania Voter ID Coalition. A nugget:

Though she’s lived in Philly for three years, Anderson’s a non-driving, native New Yorker who takes the $1 Bolt bus to her old stomping grounds in Brooklyn as much as she can.

“I never got a Pennsylvania ID because I still have three years left until my New York one expires,” Anderson explains. “So here I am, a Stanford lawyer and a founding member of the voter’s coalition and if I didn’t have a passport, I wouldn’t have an acceptable form of ID to vote in Pennsylvania. I know you can be a responsible person and not have an acceptable form of ID.”

There is nothing new about gut out the vote. Facing South reports:

A video produced by students at Duke University’s Center for Documentary Studies in collaboration with the voting-rights watchdog group Democracy North Carolina puts these laws in historical context. It looks at the expansion of the franchise during Reconstruction and the rise of interracial fusion politics, and subsequent efforts by the Democratic Party — then a party of conservatism and white supremacy — to turn back the clock.

Now coming to an election near you. Robyn Blumner considers the most recent attempts to disenfranchise voters. A nugget:

Funny that this is being done by immigrant-heavy swing states with Republican secretaries of state. Both Colorado and New Mexico made a media splash with dire claims that noncitizens were registered and likely voting in large numbers. But a closer look by the nonprofit Brennan Center for Justice found that those states had drawn indefensible conclusions about noncitizen voting and had refused to release evidence that backed up their claims. The allegations of voter fraud, the center suggests, were smoke and mirrors and couldn’t be trusted.

The same can be said for all the dead people voting in South Carolina. That state’s attorney general, Republican Alan Wilson, claimed recently that more than 900 votes had been cast by dead people. But after the South Carolina Election Commission looked into the claim, it didn’t hold up. There was no evidence that anyone had fraudulently voted in the name of someone dead.

She’s taking them to court.

Applewhite said she has voted in every election since she voted for John F. Kennedy in 1962, but this year, Pennsylvania’s harsh new voter ID law means that she and the others who have no government issued photo ID will be unable to cast a ballot this fall. She has been named as the plaintiff in a suit brought against the state by the NAACP and the ACLU.

Ms. Applewhite has tried for years to obtain a photo ID, but to no avail. NYU School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice estimates that 25 percent of black adults have no form of state-issued photo ID, as opposed to only eight percent of white adults.

Mitt the Flip.

Bob Cesca explains.

Glomarization reports:

If you are an otherwise voting-eligible woman in Pennsylvania, check your wallet. Does the name on your poll-acceptable ID match the name under which you’re registered to vote? There is a one in three chance that it does not. If not, start the ball rolling now to fix the situation. Either change your voter registration to match your driver’s license exactly, or get a new driver’s license so that it matches your voter registration exactly. If you need a birth certificate to get a new driver’s license, request one immediately. It can take 14 weeks (not a typo) to get it, and that’s even if the state complies with the request: ACLU-PA’s petition includes a plaintiff who has been requesting a birth certificate multiple times over several years but hasn’t gotten an answer.

It’s simple. Republicans don’t want the people to vote. If the people vote, Republicans lose.

And they know it.

Left Blogistan has been having a lot of fun celebrating the ignorance:

Two of Romney’s surrogates dropped Cold War references when referring to Obama’s foreign policy failures. One said the White House has abandoned Czechoslovakia (a country that hasn’t existed since 1993) and the other said Obama wasn’t strong enough to prevent “the Soviets” from “pushing into the Arctic.” The outdated references revealed Romney’s advisers on foreign policy to be largely relics of the past – thereby proving the Obama campaign’s point.

But there’s a larger point that is being missed amongst the snark.

This was not a mistake. It was strategy–a strategy to which research and facts are irrelevant.

Republican don’t care about truth. They are willing to say anything that they think will help their cause, hoping that the lies will have enough truthiness to live until election day.

I will not be surprised when I listen to a radio show about foreign policy to hear someone call in with a comment about how President Obama lost Czechoslovakia.

The merchants of hate.

The Republican voter suppression campaign begins to take its toll.

Glomarization reports on a woman who has voted for 70 years, but who no longer can because she doesn’t have the right papers.

An actual voter fraud voter has been found.

Guess who.

Glomarization is back from the shadows again, pointing out the the Republican War on Women includes warring and women’s votes:

Speaking of which, women voters in photo-ID states need to beware, and they need to beware fast. Fully one third of American women over 18 do not possess a valid photo ID, one that the pollworkers will accept, reflecting their legal name (3-page PDF), mostly for marriage or divorce reasons.

Follow the link to see her complete post and to follow the links to her evidence.

Via BartCop.

Aside:

Oddly enough, the last time I looked, Communism was dead, dead, dead, except to the Republican Party, which seems determined to keep it alive.

Via BartBlog.

Thom explains how the big lie works, using the attempt to privatize public education as an example.

But the wingnuts can. And do.

They really can’t deal with the idea of a black guy in the White House.

Like the seducer pursuing the girl, Little Ricky will say whatever he thinks his prey wants to hear. You know what comes next.

The Booman tries to explain Little Ricky’s perspective.

Video via Raw Story.

Tony Norman points out the genius of the voter fraud fraud.

It’s easy to dress that wolf up in sheep’s clothing.

This brings us back to the irresponsible notion that the lack of actual widespread voter fraud in Pennsylvania is somehow evidence that poor, elderly, minority citizens and college students should be left to bask in their enfranchisement unmolested. In the grand tradition of fixing things that ain’t broke, the Republicans have come up with a process that increases the aggravation factor when it comes to voting.

None of the requirements for a photo ID will be impossible to meet, but it will make voting inconvenient. While the Republicans aren’t erecting literal barriers to voting, they can’t say with a straight face that they aren’t introducing an element of unprecedented Election Day hassle. That is the point.

In a nation already cursed with low turnouts, there is a fiendish elegance to voter ID laws. It’s a tactic exclusively designed to reduce the number of Democratic voters, who will be discouraged by long lines in their precincts caused by the new screening procedures.

Click to read the rest.

Reports of rampant voter fraud regularly turn out to be somewhere on a scale between hysterical lies and lying hysteria.

Facing South considers the recent kerfuffle in South Carolina:

As was suspected from the beginning, the fevered stories of “zombie voters” turned out to be fantasy. This week, state elections officials reviewed 207 of the supposed 950 cases of dead people voting, and couldn’t confirm fraud in any of them. 106 stemmed from clerical errors at the polls, and another 56 involved bad data — the usual culprits when claims of dead voters have surfaced in the past.

So the question is, how did this cheap B-movie fiction make it into the public debate in the first place?

Follow the link to see Facing South’s answer to the question at the end of the selection. My answer to it is that Republicans and their sycophants at Fox News will hype for any crackpot (non)story they can find to justifying keeping voters who are not likely to support them from having a say in elections.

Republicans know they are a minority party with no hope of becoming a majority. They have fixed on a strategy of remaking the electorate into one that favors them by excluding those who do not (how shall I put this diplomatically?) fall for their twaddle.