Voter fraud trolling is for people who miss the poll tax
I know I'm late to the party with this, but I was thinking about about how some of the GOP dead-enders really seem taken with the idea of voter fraud, even though they don't allege any noticeable amount actually going on. And in line with Josh's "voter registration fraud almost never leads to fraudulently cast votes" it came to me that there's pretty much no plan for creating and then using fraudulent registrations that isn't more difficult, more expensive and more dangerous than just effing registering real people and getting them to the polls on election day.
That's because registering to vote under your own name is dead easy (unless someone discards your form). Sure, once you register you might have to spend 8 or 10 hours in line waiting to exercise the franchise, but imagine trying to keep a crack team of impersonators waiting in those same lines for the same length of time. Still easier and safer to use real people.
It's dead easy because, with few exceptions, pretty much everyover-18 citizen of the US is eligible to vote somewhere. Maybe not in the district of the house they've just been foreclosed out of (or maybe), maybe in the town where they go to school instead of the one where their parents live, but somewhere.
And that in a nutshell is the problem for people who want to suppress the vote. A few people voting in the wrong place might affect races for village coal-measurer or selectboard, but for statewide and national races they're completely irrelevant. A vote for McCain or Obama in Ohio is, as far as the spirit of the law goes, a vote for McCain or Obama regardless of where in the state it's cast. (Sure, you can imagine busing those impersonator teams into small states like Rhode Island or Alaska and swinging a crucial margin, but only if you have a really fervid imagination.)
Of course, it didn't use to be that way. In the good old days, when only the right kinds of white men were elected, people who didn't own land, couldn't pony up the fee, or who couldn't extemporaneously construe Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, weren't allowed to vote. And that's the way Hans von Spakovsky and his cronies still think it should be. The fact that every citizen of the country really is eligible to vote galls them, and they disguise it by nattering on about people voting under the wrong name or in the wrong place.
That's because registering to vote under your own name is dead easy (unless someone discards your form). Sure, once you register you might have to spend 8 or 10 hours in line waiting to exercise the franchise, but imagine trying to keep a crack team of impersonators waiting in those same lines for the same length of time. Still easier and safer to use real people.
It's dead easy because, with few exceptions, pretty much everyover-18 citizen of the US is eligible to vote somewhere. Maybe not in the district of the house they've just been foreclosed out of (or maybe), maybe in the town where they go to school instead of the one where their parents live, but somewhere.
And that in a nutshell is the problem for people who want to suppress the vote. A few people voting in the wrong place might affect races for village coal-measurer or selectboard, but for statewide and national races they're completely irrelevant. A vote for McCain or Obama in Ohio is, as far as the spirit of the law goes, a vote for McCain or Obama regardless of where in the state it's cast. (Sure, you can imagine busing those impersonator teams into small states like Rhode Island or Alaska and swinging a crucial margin, but only if you have a really fervid imagination.)
Of course, it didn't use to be that way. In the good old days, when only the right kinds of white men were elected, people who didn't own land, couldn't pony up the fee, or who couldn't extemporaneously construe Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, weren't allowed to vote. And that's the way Hans von Spakovsky and his cronies still think it should be. The fact that every citizen of the country really is eligible to vote galls them, and they disguise it by nattering on about people voting under the wrong name or in the wrong place.
