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Another big election year means another year for Republicans to make false claims about voter fraud. It looks like they are already running the exact same drill that they have run stretching all the way back to the 1960’s. The Republican National Committee has added a page on its website entitled “You Can’t Make this Stuff Up.” Interesting title since most of the accusations of voter fraud on the page are either totally made up or at least severely short on the facts.
A recent story on Alternet lists a few examples posted on the RNC site. In Louisiana the Republican Party questioned a registration drive because 30 percent of the applications were missing some information – an industry norm – and called for an investigation. The Alabama’s Republican Attorney General said that “fraud and systemic corruption” were rampant in a few Democratic-majority counties. He then made the outlandish claim that absentee ballots were being sold and “traded for gravel” but could not cite any charges filed. In Indiana a Republican Party official made the unfounded claim that large numbers of people were coming over from Illinois to vote in their presidential primary. The local county election director rejected his claims as being totally unfounded.
These outrageous claims are nothing new to anyone that has been paying attention to the right wing attempt to disenfranchise specific voters. The vast majority of these accusations, and the many to come, will eventually be forgotten because very few of them have any basis in fact. We can all remember in 2004 when Wisconsin Republicans made false accusations about specific people. As usual they were proven wrong but that didn’t matter because they were successful in getting the states largest newspaper to buy into their false accusations and spread their defamation of Milwaukee voters. Even the conservative U.S. Attorney in Milwaukee investigated their accusations and found that there was no widespread voter fraud in Milwaukee.
Being completely wrong about voting issues hasn’t stopped the GOP from making up stuff then and it certainly wont this year either. Now, they even have an entire web page where they can all gather and make up stuff together. Wow, just what they needed to have their accusations taken seriously, an online Republican rumor mill.
