THE GOP'S VOTER FRAUD PROBLEM

Remember how the GOP went after ACORN over voter fraud?  

Does anyone think the GOPers will bite their ankles over the report below? Will they send that twit, James O'Keefe, out to investigate with his mickey mouse camera crew and avoid being arrested himself?

The secretary of state of Indiana [the guy in charge of voting standards] will be re-instated, says GOP Governor Daniels, if SoS Charlie White's felonies are reduced to misdemeanors.

So the party that went beserk over ACORN has an actual convicted felon in VOTER FRAUD as a secretary of state who will be put back in his job if his felons are reduced.


Jury finds Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White guilty on 6 of 7 felony charges


NOBLESVILLE, Ind. -- Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White was convicted of six felonies early this morning, and consequently lost his job.

But the Republican could get it back soon.

White, 42, Fishers, plans to ask a judge to reduce his convictions – all class D felonies – to misdemeanors at sentencing. It’s uncertain whether that move would allow him to reclaim his job.

“We don’t know the right answer to that,” White said. “This is all very new.”

Shortly after White’s verdict was read, Gov. Mitch Daniels announced in a news release shortly before 3 a.m. that he has appointed Jerry Bonnet, White’s chief deputy, as interim secretary of state.

“I have chosen not to make a permanent appointment today out of respect for the judge’s authority to lessen the verdict to a misdemeanor and reinstate the elected office holder,” the Republican governor said in the news release. “If the felony convictions are not altered, I anticipate making a permanent appointment quickly.”


But wait!  There's more:

A chief of staff to former Maryland Gov. Robert L. Ehrlich (R) was found guilty on Tuesday on four counts, including election fraud, for his role in setting up robocalls intended to surpress minority voting turnout in the final hours of Election Day last year.

Paul Schurick’s trial took place in Baltimore Circuit Court, where he was brought up on charges of conspiracy, election fraud and a charge relating to his failure to include a disclosure on the robocall that it was authorized by the campaign. He had been indicted by state prosecutors alongside Julius Henson in June.

The Baltimore Sun reports:

Schurick declined to comment on the verdict. His attorney, A. Dwight Pettit, called himself “disappointed” and vowed to appeal the verdict on First Amendment grounds that the call was protected, political speech.

“The attempt for the state to regulate political speech is unconstitutional,” he said.

Schurick and his defense team had portrayed the robocall as a mistake, and used prominent politicians from both parties to vouch for his character.

“We made a faux pas,” defense attorney A. Dwight Pettit said in his closing statement Monday. “That’s not criminal. That’s evidence of somebody who made a political misjudgment, a political faux pas, a political mistake.”

Schurick was allegedly presented with “The Schurick Doctrine,” a plan “designed to promote confusion, emotionalism, and frustration among African-American Democrats,” a blueprint he claims to have rejected.


Remember the good ole days of the Bush Administration where they pushed for trumped-up election fraud charges?  Ted Frier reminds us in this December 2011 article in Open Salon:

"...eight GOP-appointed US attorneys (out of just 93) lost their jobs for refusing to pursue the trumped-up charges of election fraud that Karl Rove intended to use to discredit Democrats in the waning days of the Republican's disastrous 2006 election -- which was, for me, the most dangerous of the Bush administrations long train of abuses against the Constitution because it revealed the depths to which Republicans were ready to go to transform the awesome power of federal law enforcement into a partisan arm of the GOP.

Likewise, the community organizing group, ACORN, no longer exists thanks to a Republican witch hunt that several independent investigations by states attorneys general have since concluded were based on bogus charges. A craven Congress then cut the group's funding after registration irregularities produced by ACORN's minimum wage canvassers -- that the ACORN leadership itself flagged -- were waved like red capes before the bullish audience on Fox News.

We already know that the actual cases of voter fraud are few and far between from the number of prosecutions and convictions. And more recently, the Brennan Center for Justice issued a report that 0.0002% of votes in the recent Wisconsin election were "fraudulent" -- the result of ex-felons who were ineligible to vote.

This finding led comedian Stephen Colbert to quip that "our democracy is under siege from an enemy so small it could be hiding anywhere."

"...while voter registration and signature drive "fraud" might be epidemic, the instances where actual frauds cast real votes in real elections is extremely rare, and for all the reasons Schneider himself admits: The risks just aren't worth the rewards.

But what is epidemic are the efforts by Republicans to suppress the Democratic vote. Republicans know that if you really want to steal an election you don't waste your time on nickel and diming the opposition with a handful of extra votes here or there. The really big money in election theft is in preventing those votes from ever being cast in the first place.

And that's where Republicans excel. "


It is no wonder that the GOPers went after ACORN.  It's called diversion.  Make a lot of noise over voter fraud so that your party can proceed, while the public is distracted,  with disenfranchising large segments of the population who traditionally vote Democratic.   

Meanwhile, the best the GOP has is a pathetic jerk with a camera and loud mouthed cable news readers over at FAUX NOOZ who promote disinformation and lies.