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Posted on Monday 19 May 2008


Since its inception, TPM has been chronicling the Republican party’s efforts to push bogus or wildly exaggerated claims of vote fraud to suppress voting among predominantly Democratic constituencies like the old, the poor and the non-white. And here we have another installment from the GOP vote fraud bamboozlement file.

Two years ago Texas’ Republican Attorney General Greg Abbott declared war on what he claimed was rampant vote fraud in Texas. He set up a special vote fraud unit and got a $1.4 million grant from the feds for the work. Now, two years on, courtesy of the Dallas Morning News, we have a run-down of what Abbot came up with – 26 cases.

The details tell the story: All 26 cases involved Democrats, and almost were either blacks or Hispanics. Of the 26, 8 appear to have been genuine cases of fraud, two of which were cases of people actually casting fraudulent ballots, as opposed to bogus registrations.

The remaining 18 cases all involved eligible voters casting legitimate mail-in ballots. The ‘fraud’ was that others collected the ballots and deposited them in mailboxes without putting their own name and address on the envelope in which the mail-in ballot was sent. These latter instances were almost all cases involving elderly or disabled voters who could not easily mail their own mail-in ballots. In other words, the great majority of the cases in his meager haul were technical violations that non-politicized prosecutor’s offices most likely never would have pursued.

The final verdict is one that will be familiar to anyone who’s followed this on-going scam. Claims of widespread vote fraud justify big investigations, which more or less transparently target minorities, and find at most a handful of actual cases of wrongdoing.
Let’s see. $1,400,00.00 divided by 26 equals  $53846.15 [if you take only the actual fraud cases it’s $1,400,00.00 divided by 8 equals  $175,000.00]. Pressing further, the population of Texas in 2007 was 23,904,380 and the U.S. was 301,621,157. So Texas was 23,904,380/301,621,157 = 7.93% of the U.S.  Using those figures, we can conclude that a vigorous nation-wide search for voter fraud would yield 101 fraudulent voters [8/0.0793] at a cost of $17,654,476.67. Finding fraudulent voters is a hell of a lot cheaper than going to war in Iraq, that’s for sure. So we have a new definition:
wide·spread /ˈwaɪdˈsprÉ›d/ [wahyd–spred]  – adjective
1. more than 100 per country.
2. more than 0.0000335%.

Seriously, what’s the point of such absurdity? Here’s the answer:
Not surprisingly, Abbot is also pushing for a new law in Texas to require photo IDs to be allowed to vote – the latest gambit to try to shave a few percentage points off voter participation among the targeted groups.
The voter I.D. laws chase off or allow intimidation of lots of voters. As we learned in 2000, every little percentage point counts. The modern term for such sheenanigans is "Rovian"… 

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