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.<\/p>\n
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<\/em>, we have a run-down of what Abbot came up with<\/a><\/strong> – 26 cases.<\/p>\n 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.<\/p>\n The remaining 18 cases all involved eligible voters<\/em> casting legitimate mail-in ballots<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n\n
\n wide·spread<\/span> ![\"\"](\"http:\/\/cache.lexico.com\/dictionary\/graphics\/luna\/thinsp.png\")
\/<\/span>\u00cb\u02c6wa\u00c9\u00aad\u00cb\u02c6spr\u00c9\u203ad<\/span>\/<\/span> <\/a><\/span>[<\/span>wahyd<\/strong>–spred<\/strong><\/span>]<\/span> – <\/span><\/span><\/span>adjective <\/span><\/td>\n<\/tr>\n\n 1.<\/td>\n more than 100 per country<\/strong>.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n \n 2.<\/td>\n more than 0.0000335%<\/strong>.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/table>\n