What's up with all the reports of Voter Registration Fraud?

[zaj]

http://www.lsj.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040929/NEWS01/409290334/1002

http://www.freep.com/voices/editorials/evote27_20040927.htm

http://www.jsonline.com/news/racine/sep04/262511.asp

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/09/16/state1724EDT0112.DTL

[On the Road]

1. It's an Attempt to Depress the Registration of New Voters

and cast doubt on heavy Democratic voting on Election Day.

Seriously though, I am sure that there are some bogus registrations and the officials SHOULD attempt to weed out the bad ones. That's their job. And Democrats should not practice election fraud under any circumstances.

It looks like the organization that did a lot of the canvassing used a bad methodology:

The sheriff's investigation shows that members of PIRGIM, a statewide advocacy group that encourages voter registration, were paid $50 a day to collect registrations and were given bonuses for collecting extra forms, Bryanton said.

Bonuses for unverified forms will inevitably result in fabricated registrations. On the other hand, some of the complaints don't necessarily sound like fraud:

Last month, Helmbrecht's office notified Bryanton about registration form irregularities such as addresses that didn't exist or several people listed for the same apartment.

Do you know many people share housing because of costs? Do you how many business mailings are returned because of questionable addresses? Without seeing the details, some of this sounds like the kind of whining Republicans did in Florida in 2000.

[zaj]

2. It has become part of the RNC strategy... to create doubt.

One of the Republican operatives that frequents a sports board I visit posted the following thread...

"Dems New Strategy: Forge Voter Registrations Across the Country"
http://www.chiefsplanet.com/BB/showthread.php?t=100001

[ClassWarrior]

3. THIS is what's up:

http://www.pfaw.org/pfaw/dfiles/file_459.pdf

Jim Crow's alive and well...

23.

[Mountainman]

4. I hardly think that Dems would wantonly commit voter fraud.

I would accept that Repubs do the dirty work to win elections more than we would. We lose with honor they win with deceit.

[On the Road]

7. Don't Think Democrats are Incapable of Fraud

There's a long, long history, especially at the municipal level. In the South, of course, many of the people involved have become Republicans over the last 30 years.

Here's a history of suppressing the black vote in Florida from The World Socialist Website. Lots of great stuff in this article:

Florida's legacy of voter disenfranchisement
By Jerry White
9 April 2001

---snip

Florida's current lifetime ban on voting by convicted felons—which disenfranchised nearly a third of all black males during the 2000 elections—dates back to the reactionary measures implemented in the late nineteenth century. At the time the state's vagrancy laws and convict lease system—under which prison laborers were rented out to private contractors—allowed the authorities to jail blacks and poor whites on the flimsiest of charges, and strip them of their constitutional rights.

Local election officials even used the secret ballot law to take advantage of high illiteracy among blacks. Under the guise of protecting the integrity of the ballot, the state of Florida barred anyone from providing assistance to a voter even if he could not read.

According to Professor Darryl Paulson of the University of South Florida, these measures were brutally effective. In the presidential election of 1888, prior to the passage of the disenfranchising laws, 75 percent of adult male Floridians voted. By the time of the 1892 presidential election, with the voting barriers in place, only 39 percent of adult males voted. Black male turnout fell from 62 percent in 1888 to 11 percent in 1892.

--snip

Alongside racist legal measures, the disenfranchisement of African Americans was enforced through violence and terror. From 1900 to the 1930s Florida had the highest per capita rate of lynching in the South: 4.5 lynchings for every 10,000 blacks. This was twice the rate of lynchings in Mississippi, Georgia and Louisiana, and three times that of Alabama. From 1921 to 1946 there were 61 reported lynchings in Florida—twice as many as in Alabama, and topped only by Mississippi (88) and Georgia (68).

--snip

[BurtWorm]

5. Standard Retardlican operating procedure.

:puke: Also known as projection, as they're guilty of virtually all of the voter fraud in any election.

Hey, Republitards, if you're out there: FUCK YOUR CONSTIPATED SELVES HARD! (Don't forget to take Viagra first.)

[DeepModem Mom]

6. See this thread about appealing to international observers NOW --

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x916412