"The Voter-Fraud Myth" ....... by Jane Mayer --THIS is a must read. Hans von Spakovsky
It's all here:
Voter Integrity Project (VIP) "an organization that trains ultra-conservative young activists. (In 2009, one of them, the guerrilla videographer James OKeefe..."
True the Vote
Heritage Foundation
these are the same people who got David Iglesias (US Attorney New Mexico)fired
A.L.E.C.
Database Technologies, which was designing the State of Floridas procedure for scrubbing its voter rolls of felons and other ineligible people
Hans von Spakovsky, a Republican lawyer who served in the Bush Administration, has promoted strict voter-I.D. laws. Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.
Engelbrecht has received especially valuable counsel from one member of the group: Hans von Spakovsky. A Republican lawyer who served in the Bush Administration, he is now a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank. Hans is very, very helpful, Engelbrecht said. Hes one of the senior advisers on our advisory council. Von Spakovsky, who frequently appears on Fox News, is the co-author, with the columnist John Fund, of the recent book Whos Counting?, which argues that America is facing an electoral-security crisis. Election fraud, whether its phony voter registrations, illegal absentee ballots, vote-buying, shady recounts, or old-fashioned ballot-box stuffing, can be found in every part of the United States, they write. The book connects these modern threats with sordid episodes from the American past: crooked inner-city machines, corrupt black bosses in the Deep South. Von Spakovsky and Fund conclude that electoral fraud is a spreading danger, and declare that True the Vote serves an obvious need.
Lorraine Minnite, a public-policy professor at Rutgers, collated decades of electoral data for her 2010 book, The Myth of Voter Fraud, and came up with some striking statistics. In 2005, for example, the federal government charged many more Americans with violating migratory-bird statutes than with perpetrating election fraud, which has long been a felony. She told me, It makes no sense for individual voters to impersonate someone. Its like committing a felony at the police station, with virtually no chance of affecting the election outcome. A report by the Times in 2007 also found election fraud to be rare. During the Bush Administration, the Justice Department initiated a five-year crackdown on voter fraud, but only eighty-six people were convicted of any kind of election crime.
Hasen, who calls von Spakovsky a leading member of the Fraudulent Fraud Squad, told me that he respects many other conservative advocates in his area of expertise, but dismisses scholars who allege widespread voter-impersonation fraud. I see them as foot soldiers in the Republican army, he says. Its just a way to excite the base. They are hucksters. Theyre providing fake scholarly support. Theyre not playing fairly with the facts. And I think they know it.
The election of 2008 was a milestone in terms of turnout. The percentage of African-Americans who voted (sixty-five) rivalled the percentage of whites who voted (sixty-six). Penda Hair, the co-director of the Advancement Project, a progressive voting-rights advocacy group, says that this statistic discomfited Republicans. Conservatives were looking at it and saying, Weve got to clamp things down, Hair said. Theyd always tried to suppress the black vote, but it was then that they came up with new schemes.
With legions of citizen watchdogs on the lookout for fraud, voters confused about the documents necessary to vote, and the country almost evenly divided politically, von Spakovsky is predicting that November 6th could be even more chaotic than the 2000 elections. He will play a direct role in Virginia, a swing state, where he is the vice-chairman of the electoral board of Fairfax County. Joining us at the conference table at the Heritage Foundation, John Fund, von Spakovskys co-author, told me, If its close this time, I think were going to have three or four Floridas. Von Spakovsky shook his head and said, If were lucky only three or four. If there are states where the number of provisional ballots cast exceeds the margin of victory, he predicts, there will probably be horrendous fights, and litigation between the lawyers that will make the fights over hanging chads look minor by comparison. Pursing his lips, he added, I hope it doesnt happen. But, if it does, no one will be more ready for the fight.
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/10/29/121029fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all
Thinkingabout
(30,058 posts)This True the Vote group will find two people with the same names voting in different counties and declare it fraud when in fact there are people with the same names. Talk about dumbing down and though they have not presented good evidence to get anyone charged with voter fraud they still collect donations to "fight" a non existent problem. I just wonder who their donors are. What is with accepting their candidates just are not winning elections for lack of votes.