and
Volunteer Busted Only Registering Romney Voters
I believe my psychology prof called the condition wherein a guilty person accuses another of doing the same thing is all “projection”. It seems the GOPers are projecting their own misdeeds on others.
Predictable Republican response: “See? You need voter-ID programs to protect you from people like us!”
The first is voter registration fraud. Not voter fraud.
The second is just downright despicable.
Of course, but voter ID fraud just about never happens so we need to talk fraud where we can find it.
I don’t get it, where’s the payoff? What good is it to register fake voters unless they go to the polls and fake vote, which is a logistical and secrecy nightmare. I know the Pubbies have highly paid teams of professional cynics, but what the fuck is this in aid of?
This is a jigsaw puzzle made of goat droppings, but there’s one missing.
Presumably, the worker got paid a fee for each person they registered, so they had incentive to get creative.
You mean the people writing the checks thought they were paying for legit registrations, and got took? They were ACORNholed?
I should add, even though its happening to Republicans, and the karma is rich in irony, I can’t approve of such behavior. So I don’t. But only because I can’t.
Kimstu called it: They’re trying to gin up a fake fraud scare. The right-wing fundies in Maryland tried a similar stunt when Montgomery County passed equal-rights protection for trans people a few years ago: they dressed up a man in women’s clothes and sent him to invade a women’s locker room. They got called out for it and failed to fool anybody. The failed in their efforts to overturn the trans equal rights legislation. These are the same types who faked out ACORN too, as luci implied, with, yes, fraud.
It’s like being lied to by a five-year-old.
“The dragon did it! He flew in and ate the cookies and he had green wings and big red eyes!”
Now, I suppose, there’s nothing to do but wait for the inevitable tu quoque brigade to drop in.
Wm. F. Buckley taught me that hypocrisy is the service that vice pays to virtue.
So if one is a fraud, a tax cheat, whatever, it’s still supposedly good for society to denounce such behavior in general, and oppose it in others. Or something.
If you win a local election with 1600 votes to your opponent’s 1400, and a nosy journalist notices there are only 2900 registered voters in your area, it can be a tad embarassing. Especially if the registrar belongs to your party.
As is so often the case with your startling insights, LP, I"m not quite sure I grasp your point. Are you suggesting that the plan is to register fake voters, and then pull them like the rabbit from Bullwinkle’s hat, simply to embarrass…who?
When you have 3000 votes but only 2900 registered voters, something is screwy somewhere, and somebody might investigate, especially if the margin of victory is 100 votes. Better make sure your numbers all match up before you fiddle with the ballots, even if that means forging fake registrations for dead people and cartoon characters. Seriously, you’ve never heard all those old jokes about Chicago Democrats registering entire graveyards?
It seem the guy in charge of the company has been doing this for quite some time for the Republicans.
Sproul has been previously accused of suppressing Democratic voter turnout, throwing away registration forms, and manipulating ballot initiatives. His firms – formerly Sproul & Associates, Lincoln Strategy, and Strategic Allied Consultants – had previously worked for RNC voter registration efforts during the campaigns of George W. Bush and John McCain. In 2004, Democratic Senators Leahy and Kennedy sent a letter to then Attorney General John Ashcroft requesting that he “launch an immediate investigation into the activities of Mr. Sproul and his firm.”
I’m shocked.
No, I’m totally shocked to find the inside of my monitor not practically coated by the spittle of Usual Suspects, who spent weeks frothing and ranting about Acorn.
Shocked I tells you.
Shocked.
It’s psychology, but of the applied kind, not the descriptive kind - IOW it’s a political tactic, commonly used by Karl Rove and copied by others. If you know you’re vulnerable on an issue or a behavior, the tactic is to loudly accuse the other guys of it. That dissipates doubts in the minds of your supporters while creating them in the minds of the swayable independents. More usefully, it inoculates you against the charge - if the other guys point out your hypocrisy, it looks like petty spite instead of factual observation, and since the other guys know that, they won’t say something that will backfire on them.
Yes, my wife uses this tactic quite efffectively.
That’s what I first thought. The whole voter fraud “issue” is bullshit anyway. If anything it seems more and more like it is just an excuse to exclude legit voters.
Well yes, but as certain esteemed dopers have pointed out, if it is legal to require voter ID, then it is the right thing to do.
Legal = right
It matters not if the reason behind voter ID is to exclude legitimate voters (who will be voting for the “wrong” party) - this is not a problem. As long as it’s legal, it is morally and ethically OK.
At least that is what our more authoritarian folks here are telling us. YMMV