Victory at moral cost

Shane Wade
Opinion Editor

I’ve spent quite a few editorials discussing how voter fraud is a fabrication perpetuated by Republican legislators and conservative pundits, but in light of recent events, I would like to apologize for those remarks.

I’d like to repent for my transgression by informing you that voter fraud is indeed alive and well in America today.
And it’s being perpetuated by those same individuals.

The casual peruser would assume I’m discussing the arrest of Colin Small, who was, according to a report in the Los Angeles Times, “working as a supervisor as part of a registration operation in eight swing states financed by the Republican National Committee.” Small was arrested after he was seen tossing a bag containing at least eight completed registration forms into a dumpster in Harrisonburg, Va.

Eight forms aren’t a big deal, but when that evidence is mount alongside the quiet scandal brewing most prevalently in Florida, it epitomizes a mountain.

Earlier this year, the RNC and Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign hired Strategic Allied Consulting to perform voter registration drives in five swing states: North Carolina, Florida, Nevada, Colorado and Virginia. That same consulting firm is now being criminally investigated by Florida’s Department of Law Enforcement on allegations of criminal acts of voter fraud, including registering dead people to vote. To date, the Atlanta Daily World has reported that the SAC voter scandal has involved more than 220 allegations in 10 different counties of Florida.

If you recall, a community organization that went by the acronym ACORN, performed a similar function (albeit not criminally), registering voters and assisting locals with understanding voting laws. But with little congressional investigation and based on what was obviously edited and exaggerated footage by a James O’Keef, that organization was lambasted and consequently shut down by right-wing pundits and politicians.

They’ve since been fired and the RNC has disavowed their relationship, but the implicit message remains: Republicans mean to take this election, by any means possible. Even if that spirit wasn’t so evident within the party’s leadership, the stark number of individual and organizational instances where misconduct or voter tampering has been reported stands out.

Operating under the guise of voter fraud prevention, nonprofit groups run by those who fit the demographic of conservatives and Republican-majority state legislatures have done their utmost to suppress the sheer number of voters in the 2012 electorate. Even before Romney’s primary victory, they’d given up hope that he or any running mate he’d chosen, could successfully energize their base as Obama had done in 2008.

Anyone that has researched voting knows that Americans have one of the lowest voter turnout rates of any democracy. The problem isn’t that individuals want to cheat the system; the problem is that political organizations want to cheat the system.

Voter I.D. laws would make sense if they were free and easily accessible, but the legislatures and organizations touting them aren’t gearing towards that end; they’re about registering the most people possible, slamming down a brick wall in the form of voter I.D. laws and allowing a trickle of the populace to vote.

Numerous nonpartisan investigative groups have researched the issue of voter-impersonation and voter fraud. Again and again they have found that it’s a non-existent problem. Again and again their exhaustive analysis and research is ignored in the favor of heresy as conservative and Republican organizations fund efforts to fight a ghost of a problem.

The only real voter fraud is the misinformation campaign Republicans and conservatives are raging across the nation. From providing Hispanics in Arizona with erroneous voting dates, to complex voter I.D. law changes in Pennsylvania, Virginia and South Carolina, voter intimidation billboards in Cleveland and funding “nonpartisan” nonprofit groups that operate voter-roll purges that have, in the past, erroneously disenfranchised thousands of Floridian Democrat and African-American voters, the GOP has made it clear: through legitimate means or not, they mean to take control of the country’s helm, whether the majority of Americans favor it or not.

This is corruption at its clearest. Officials elected by the people and for the people are working against the people. The sworn duty of politicians is to protect the freedoms of Americans; not to treat them as second-class citizens, guilty until proven innocent. Voting is a right to be expressed, not legislated and hampered.

Put aside your party and political views: There’s a concise and directed effort by Republicans to disenfranchise American citizens on a local, regional, and national level. If you don’t fit their demographics, your ability to vote could be in jeopardy.

If you remotely care about the direction this nation is going in, you’ll look beyond the presidential election and look to local and state political races. That’s where your life is most directly affected.