Iowa’s Republican Secretary of State Just Proved That Voter ID Laws Are Unnecessary

[Gothmog]

The GOP idiots have been looking for examples of voter fraud to justify their voter suppression laws. The trouble is that voter id laws only stop one form of voter fraud which is voter suppression and the GOP can not find any real examples. The trouble is that the only documented cases of voter fraud are in the area of vote by mail or absentee ballots which the GOP does not want to regulate because a large percentage of the GOP base (i.e. Fox News viewers) use absentee ballots or vote by mail. The Bush administration spent 5 years looking for voter fraud and found nothing. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/12/washington/12fraud.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

WASHINGTON, April 11 — Five years after the Bush administration began a crackdown on voter fraud, the Justice Department has turned up virtually no evidence of any organized effort to skew federal elections, according to court records and interviews.

Although Republican activists have repeatedly said fraud is so widespread that it has corrupted the political process and, possibly, cost the party election victories, about 120 people have been charged and 86 convicted as of last year.

In Texas, Greg Abbott has been looking for voter fraud and he can not find any voter impersonation cases. http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/greg-abbott-bogus-voter-fraud-crusade

Since taking office in 2001, Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott has called voter fraud an “epidemic,” and made cracking down on it a top priority. Now, as he runs for governor, he’s touting his ongoing battle to implement the state’s strict voter ID law, arguing that the measure is crucial to combat fraud.

But over the 13 years of Abbott’s tenure, his office can only cite two fraudulent votes that might have been stopped by the ID law.

To put that another way, such votes accounted for one out of every 18.7 million votes cast in Texas during that period—and that’s counting only the general elections for statewide races. Meanwhile, 796,000 Texans, by the state’s own numbers, lack an ID.

The glaring difference between rhetoric and reality in Abbott’s treatment of the issue underscores the comically weak case for voter ID measures, and highlights the lengths that their backers have gone to—still without success—to find evidence of large-scale fraud. It also raises questions about Abbott’s basic intellectual honesty as he works to persuade Texas voters to make him one of the most important Republican office-holders in the country. ....
There’s just one problem with Abbott’s use of the case: The allegations involve absentee ballots, not in-person voting. That means the voter ID law that Abbott is championing would have done nothing to stop the alleged scheme.

Indeed, election experts say absentee ballot fraud is the most common form of organized voter fraud, since, because of the secret ballot, there’s no way to ensure that an in-person voter is voting for the candidate he promised to. That’s why voter ID laws are an ineffective tool for catching the small amount of fraud that exists.

The Teabagger secretary of state of Iowa has been looking for voter fraud and this idiot just released yet another study that shows that there is no voter fraud that would be prevented by voter id laws. http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2014/05/09/3436160/iowa-matt-schultz-no-voter-id-fraud/

Iowa Secretary of State Matt Schultz (R), one of the nation’s most enthusiastic voter suppressors, released a report on Thursday outlining the results a two-year investigation into possible voter fraud, conducted by the Iowa Department of Public Safety’s Division of Criminal Investigation (DCI) at his request. But while Schultz has frequently scared Iowa voters with allegations of thousands of possible non-citizens voting in the state and living people showing up at the polls to cast ballots in the name of dead voters, the investigation revealed found an infinitesimal number of illegal votes cast and zero cases of impersonation at the polls.....

There was not a single identified case of impersonation fraud at the polls — people showing up and pretending to be another voter — meaning that Schultz’s own investigation found no cases at all that would have been prevented with his proposed voter identification law.

The federal judge in the Wisconsin voter id case pointed out that voter impersonation is a stupid way to steal elections and will not be a problem. http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/04/federal-judge-in-wisconsin-looks-for-voter-fraud-finds-none/361403/

Here is the judge on page 16 of the ruling:

In the present case, no evidence suggests that voter-impersonation fraud will become a problem at any time in the foreseeable future. As the plaintiffs’ unrebutted evidence shows, a person would have to be insane to commit voter-impersonation fraud. The potential costs of perpetrating the fraud, which include a $10,000 fine and three years of imprisonment, are extremely high in comparison to the potential benefits, which would be nothing more than one additional vote for a preferred candidate (or one fewer vote for an opposing candidate), a vote which is unlikely to change the election’s outcome.

Adding to the cost is the fact that, contrary to the defendants’ rhetoric, voter-impersonation fraud is not “easy” to commit. To commit voter-impersonation fraud, a person would need to know the name of another person who is registered at a particular polling place, know the address of that person, know that the person has not yet voted, and also know that no one at the polls will realize that the impersonator is not the individual being impersonated

Study and study show that there is no reasons for voter id laws. The only purpose served by voter id law is to steal voters from minorities.

[calimary]

1. Good compilation here, Gothmog!