[Hightower]  Rabbit Hole of Voter Fraud

by Jim Hightower
June 11, 2008

At last, politicians are addressing the infuriating issue of election fraud. Unfortunately, they’ve tumbled down some rabbit hole inhabited by leprechauns, snipes, unicorns and frauds-that-don’t-actually-exist.

Rather than dealing with outrageous voter suppression schemes or the vote-stealing impact of electronic voting machines, these public officials are lost in Wonderland. They are out to stop the hordes—hordes, I tell you!—of ineligible voters who are using false identities to cast ballots and sway elections. Only … there are no such hordes.

Still, immune to reality, these partisans are insisting that new voter ID laws are necessary to end such non-existent fraud. Here in Texas, Attorney General Greg Abbott is a Republican who has fallen deep into this rabbit hole. A couple of years ago, he wailed that there is an “epidemic” of illegal immigrants and other ineligible voters casting ballots. To deal with this “crisis” and show the need for a Big Brother voter ID law, Abbott set up a special investigative unit.

After spending two years and $1.4 million in taxpayer money, Abbott could not come up with a problem to fix. Far from an epidemic, he could find only 26 cases in all of Texas to prosecute, nearly all of them misdemeanor technical violations. In 18 of the cases, the voters were eligible, and their absentee ballots were properly cast, but the people mailing in the votes failed to properly address the envelopes—so Abbott prosecuted them.

His 26 cases were all against Democrats, nearly all of them African American or Latino. Curiously, he had refused earlier to prosecute a Republican election official who had mishandled more that 100 ballots.

The real political fraud is by characters like Abbott. They’re trying to scare up support for a despicable partisan law designed to intimidate legitimate voters.

Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator, writer, public speaker and author of “Thieves In High Places: They’ve Stolen Our Country And It’s Time to Take It Back.” He says he has taken on the role of battling the Powers That Be on behalf of the Powers That Ought To Be—consumers, working families, environmentalists, small businesses and just plain folks.