UFO Sightings Are More Common Than Voter Fraud

The frantic attempts by Republicans to keep citizens from voting is evidence that they know they are likely to lose a fair election.

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2012/07/voter-id-laws-charts-maps

By Hamed Aleaziz, Dave Gilson, and Jaeah Lee
| July/August 2012 Issue

Since 2001, nearly 1,000 bills that would tighten voting laws have been introduced in 46 states.

24 voting restrictions have passed in 17 states since 2011. This fall, new laws could affect more than 5 million voters in states representing 179 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

In the past two years, 5 battleground states (Florida, Iowa, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin) have tightened their voting laws.

As of April, 74 restrictive voting laws were on the table in 24 states

Since 2011, 34 states have introduced laws requiring voters to show photo ID, and 9 states have passed photo ID laws, affecting 3.8 million voters.

2.2 million registered voters did not vote in 2008 because they didn't have proper ID.

Note that many elderly and poor people don't have photo ids because they don't drive.

Last year, 12 states introduced laws requiring birth certificates or other proof of citizenship to vote; 3 passed.

Only 48 percent of women have a birth certificate with their current legal name on it.

Texas' new ID law permits voters to use concealed-handgun licenses as proof of identity, but not state university IDs.

Note: Many African-Americans, esp. the elderly, don't have birth certificates because they were born in racist states. Some people, like myself, have lost our original certificate, and it costs money to replace them. If you are middle-class, the cost may not be much, but for many poor people, $35 is more than they can afford.

.....

12 percent of minority voters report registering through voter drives, twice the rate of white voters. In 2011, Florida and Texas passed laws making registration drives much harder to organize.

Florida state Sen. Mike Bennett, a supporter of the tougher voter registration law, said, "I don't have a problem making it harder. I want people in Florida to want to vote as bad as that person in Africa who walks 200 miles across the desert. This should not be easy."

Did he have to walk 200 miles across a desert to register to vote? Of course not.

4 million Americans who have completed prison sentences are ineligible to vote. 38 percent of disenfranchised voters are African American.

13 percent of African American men cannot vote due to criminal records, a rate 7 times the national average.

The United States and Belgium are the only democracies that disenfranchise citizens for lengthy or indefinite periods after completing prison sentences.

To regain their voting rights, released felons in Iowa must provide the address of the judge who convicted them and a credit report showing they have paid off their court costs. "They make the process just about impossible," said a 40-year old ex-con who'd stolen a soda machine as a teen.

Most people I have met assume that voting rights are automatically restored after a person completes their sentence. It depends on the state.

While defending its precedent-setting photo ID law before the Supreme Court, Indiana was unable to cite a single instance of voter impersonation in its entire history.

A 2005 report by the American Center for Voting Rights claimed there were more than 100 cases of voter fraud involving 300,000 votes in 2004. A review of the charges turned up only 185 votes that were even potentially fraudulent.

In support of a voter ID law, Kansas Secretary of State (and the legal brains behind a slew of anti-immigration laws) Kris Kobach cited 221 incidents of voter fraud in the state between 1997 and 2010. Yet those cases produced just 7 convictions—none related to impersonating other voters.

Last December, Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus declared that Wisconsin is "absolutely riddled with voter fraud." In fact, the state's voter fraud rate in 2004 was 0.0002 percent—just 7 votes.

In 2008, John McCain said fraudulent registrations collected by ACORN were "one of the greatest frauds in voter history in this country, maybe destroying the fabric of democracy." The Congressional Research Service found no proof that anyone improperly registered by ACORN tried to vote.

Note: Republicans have claimed to have found numerous people on the voting roles who were dead or not citizens, as a justification for making it harder to vote. Of course, because someone who died has not yet been removed from a list does not at all mean that someone is actually voting in their name. When such claims were investigated, almost all were found invalid. Eg., a person claimed to be dead, was actually the son of someone with the same name who had died. People who were claimed not to be citizens had actually become citizens.

Between 2000 and 2010, there were:

649 million votes cast in general elections

47,000 UFO sightings

441 Americans killed by lightning

13 credible cases of in-person voter impersonation



http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_07/behind_the_myth_of_voter_fraud038321.php

In her 2010 book, The Myth of Voter Fraud, Lorraine Minnite tracked down every single case brought by the Justice Department between 1996 and 2005 and found that the number of defendants had increased by roughly 1,000 percent under Ashcroft. But that only represents an increase from about six defendants per year to 60, and only a fraction of those were ever convicted of anything. A New York Times investigation in 2007 concluded that only 86 people had been convicted of voter fraud during the previous five years. Many of those appear to have simply made mistakes on registration forms or misunderstood eligibility rules, and more than 30 of the rest were penny-ante vote-buying schemes in local races for judge or sheriff. The investigation found virtually no evidence of any organized efforts to skew elections at the federal level.

The bottom line is that during George W. Bush’s administration Republicans were in a position to carry out a truly obsessive search for voter fraud and found remarkably little.