Registration Fraud May Give the GOP a Taste of Their Own Medicine

They say Karma is a bitch. After pushing voter ID to disenfranchise groups that tend to vote Democratic, the Republican Party is at the heart of a growing scandal over voter registration fraud. That would be the same crime the right -- falsely, it turned out -- accused ACORN of doing. It was a crime so heinous that ACORN had to be defunded, thereby killing off the organization. Logical consistency demands that the GOP must meet a similar fate.

But no one's seriously going to demand the organizational death penalty. Still, this may be in the neighborhood.


[Los Angeles Times:]

[A California voter registration fraud scandal] has also raised anew the question of whether the state should ban firms that pay workers for each voter they register or signature they secure on a petition rather than paying them an hourly rate. Workers have an incentive to cut corners under such arrangements, according to Assemblyman Richard Pan (D-Natomas), who has proposed barring the practice in a bill that is on the governor's desk.


Registration fraud's becoming a bit of a scandal for Republicans. The story broke big in Florida, followed by the California story this weekend.

Pan's California bill would be a blow to the GOP's election efforts because Republicans tend not to rely on volunteers to register voters. If they were forced to, they'd probably have trouble finding them -- which explains why they rely on volunteers. Would this disenfranchise voters like a voter ID law would? No. But it would affect Republican efforts almost exclusively.

Registration fraud works this way: you find a mark who's either unregistered or registered with the "wrong" party, then you register them or re-register them as Republicans -- whether they want to or not. This is accomplished through various methods. In some cases, the forms are just forged or altered. In others, people are duped into signing a "petition" that registers them as a Republican. In California, people who signed a petition to legalize marijuana were told they'd have to sign a registration form as well. The form was later completed by the petitioner to switch the signatory's party.

So what's the big deal with voter registration fraud? I mean, just because you're registered Republican doesn't mean you have to vote Republican, right?

"Have to?" No. But it's less black and white than that.

The fact is that people who are registered Republican are more likely to vote Republican -- even if they're unaware that they're registered GOP. Voter lists are public information, so political organizations use them to make call lists and mailing lists. If you're registered Republican, you're getting mail and robocalls from every wingnut organization under the sun. You're being bombarded with rightwing propaganda and false information, as well as fundraising appeals. You are the target in a targeted advertising campaign. And, when election day comes, the call you get tells you that the Republican is counting on your vote. It suppresses the liberal vote in some cases by convincing them the Democrat is scum not worth voting for and, in other cases, actually converts voters from left to right.

"Democrats say bogus registrations are more than just an issue of workers trying to make an extra buck," L.A. Times reports, "that they're a trick to prevent the Democratic party from getting supporters to the polls as well as to draw more money to the area's Republican races."

Now imagine all the perks of having registered Republicans drying up. Democrats are sending volunteers door to door, signing up new voters and creating relationships with new voters, while Republicans are trying to scare some up in a base unused to real volunteerism. Sure, they'll staple tea bags to their hats and make asses of themselves at rallies held once in a blue moon, but an ongoing effort where doors may be slammed in their faces? Glenn Beck never told them about any of that. They don't think they need to volunteer, that's what the free market is for. They'll just write a check.

Banning hired voter registration workers wouldn't be the blow to Republicans that voter ID is to Democrats. Not even close. But it would hurt pretty much only Republicans. And, unlike voter ID, this law would fight an actual ongoing campaign of fraud. While voter fraud is mostly imaginary, registration fraud is very, very real -- and very, very Republican.

Not only might Pan's bill be necessary on a national level, but it would be poetic justice.

-Wisco

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GOP Hired the Right Crook for the Voter Suppression Job

It should be a scandal eclipsing Mitt's 47-percent comments -- but it's not.


[Raw Story:]

The Republican National Committee fired a voter registration firm owned by a paid consultant to the party’s presidential candidate Mitt Romney Thursday, after Florida officials traced more than 100 possibly fake registration forms back to the company.

NBC News reported that the RNC cut ties with Strategic Allied Consulting (SAC), run by party strategist Nathan Sproul, had been paid $2.9 million this year to register voters in five swing states before being dismissed.

Sproul is also the founder and managing partner of another company, Lincoln Strategy Group, which records show was paid by the Romney campaign paid to do “field consulting.”


The Romney campaign told NBC News, "We used this vendor for signature gathering services during the primary but have not used them since 2011." The question should be why Romney or the RNC hired Sproul at all. The man should be washed up and unemployable in the voter registration business -- or in anything to do with elections.

Mark Crispin Miller reported in 2005 that Sproul's Strategic Allied Consulting "got into a bit of trouble last fall when, in certain states, it came out that the firm was playing dirty tricks in order to suppress the Democratic vote: concealing their partisan agenda, tricking Democrats into registering as Republicans, surreptitiously re-registering Democrats and Independents as Republicans, and shredding Democratic registration forms." Miller's report is damning.

And here Sproul is, doing exactly the same thing again. And here Republicans are, hiring this crook again. If this was the sort of thing they wanted to avoid, they've gone about avoiding it in exactly the wrong way. We can only assume that Sproul is an illegal voter suppression expert and that the GOP and the Romney campaign hired him for exactly those skills; as I said, the man should be considered unemployable otherwise. He's really useless for anything else. And Sproul's not the only one out there.

I'm going to keep writing the same phrase until everyone starts repeating it: the enemies of democracy are the enemies of freedom. Free people get to vote. And people who try to undermine and cheat democracy are not democracy's friends. The GOP is trying to undermine and cheat democracy. They only fired Sproul because he got caught. You hire Strategic Allied Consulting because you want them to do this stuff. There is no other reason to hire them.

Combined with their push for suppressive voter ID laws, it's becoming eminently clear that Republicans are trying to do away with free and fair elections and replace them with rigged games. They oppose democracy. Therefore, they oppose freedom.

We need everyone to get out and vote in November -- Republicans can't possibly keep every non-Republican away from the polls. You need to get out and vote to cover those whose votes were stolen. If they get away with it this time, next time they'll be even worse.

-Wisco

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All Things to All People, President to None

Mitt Romney is now reduced to begging people to believe he gives a crap. Limping along with a self-inflicted wound across 47% of its body, the Romney campaign has released a new ad assuring America that their candidate isn't a psychopath and is capable of human emotion. "Compassionate conservatism" again enters the conversation and again causes some to ask why the word "compassionate" must be added to the word "conservatism." Modern conservatives tend to leave the compassion out of their politics. Remember how terrible they argued empathy was?

Just as Republicans apparently prefer unfeeling automatons as judges, who'll hand down verdicts and rulings without caring whose lives they ruin, so they apparently (or at least naturally) prefer the same sort of robotic coldness in their politicians. Consider their love for "tough talkers" who tell "hard truths" and "make the tough decisions." You know, guys like Paul Ryan. What they're really saying in all this is that they need people who'll do what they think needs to be done and who don't care who they offend or screw over. The emotionless psychopath is the perfect conservative leader, just as it's the perfect conservative judge.

And that fact, combined with Mitt Romney's current emo-trouble, brings up a very interesting question: can a candidate appeal to the Tea Party base and the general electorate and go on to win national office? So far, that's looking like a no. Romney had to go behind the scenes to rip on freeloaders and welfare queens. Now that it's right out there, his big chore is convincing everyone he didn't mean it. He's even throwing the anti-healthcare reform people under the bus.

"Don't forget - I got everybody in my state insured," Romney told an NBC affiliate in Toledo. "One-hundred percent of the kids in our state had health insurance. I don't think there's anything that shows more empathy and care about the people of this country than that kind of record." Heathcare reform is good until he talks to someone who thinks it's not. A social safety net is important until he needs to talk about freeloaders.

And this has been a big part of Romney's flip-flop, etch-a-sketch problem all along: the Republican base -- who a primary candidate has to appeal to -- lacks anything resembling human decency. I'm talking the real wingnut, fever-swamp, birther base with talk-radio-controlled brains here. They don't disagree with people, they hate people. They hate the poor and gays and women seeking abortions or birth control. They hate environmentalists and atheists and immigrants. They hate kids on free school lunch programs and public employees and community organizers. I could go on, but it's easier just to say they hate everyone who isn't a Republican. And not just any Republican, but their idea of a perfect Republican. Anyone else is a "RiNO."

But you can't win a national election that way. It's like you have to act like a lunatic for the base, then pretend to have been cured somewhere along the way. You have to be a multiple-personality candidate -- an unfeeling hard-ass for the 'bagger crowd and a person capable of empathy for everyone else. And it's looking like it simply cannot be done. The contradictions are just too extreme.

If Mitt Romney does manage to pull this out of a tailspin and win, it'll be despite the Tea Party base, not because of them. And if he loses (the more likely scenario), that same base will conclude he wasn't extreme enough -- that he wasn't cold enough and hateful enough and cruel enough. That he was a RiNO.

And in a prime example of learning the exact wrong lesson from their mistakes, the base will probably demand even more extremist leadership.

I'm willing to be proven wrong on that one, but I doubt I will be.

-Wisco

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Big Trouble for Mitt Romney

This is not good news for Team Romney.


[Quinnipiac:]

President Barack Obama is over the magic 50 percent mark and tops Gov. Mitt Romney among likely voters by 9 to 12 percentage points in Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania, according to a Quinnipiac University/ CBS News/New York Times Swing State Poll released today.

Voters in each state see President Obama as better than Gov. Romney to handle the economy, health care, Medicare, national security, an international crisis and immigration. Romney ties or inches ahead of the president on handling the budget deficit.

Matching Obama against Romney in each of these key states - no one has won the White House since 1960 without taking at least two of them...


In this race, Mitt Romney needs -- absolutely needs -- Ohio and Florida to win. MSNBC's First Read notes that Romney begins a bus tour today that "has to do more than stop the bleeding for Romney in Ohio; it has to be the beginning of a turnaround for him in this state. Losing Ohio isn’t checkmate, but it’s close." Losing Florida and Ohio? That is checkmate -- and Mitt can't tour both states at once. So he seems to be piling all his chips on Ohio.

Publicly, Team Romney's trying to put a happy face on the situation. Asked yesterday about poor polling numbers in Ohio, Romney's political director Rich Beeson said, "There's still 42 days to go. We are by any stretch inside the margin of error in Ohio. And the Obama campaign is going to have some problems there."

That's not the case anymore. Quinnipiac has Romney down 10 in the Buckeye state, 53%-43%. They don't put out polls with a margin of error spanning ten freakin' points. The margin of error for this particular poll is, in fact, 2.9%. Romney is not any stretch inside the margin of error in Ohio. And he's going to have some problems there.

All of this means that the debates are going to be must-see TV. Team Romney, already scrambling to make up lost ground, will shift into panic mode. Mitt's wild charges and ridiculous falsehoods may become wilder and more ridiculous. And it will happen at the worst possible time.

I say that because the debates were where I expected his campaign of lies to unravel anyway. It's one thing to put out insane lies in a stump speech or a thirty second ad, it's another to do it to your opponent's face. I have no doubt that Romney will lie shamelessly, but this time those lies will be answered immediately.

And that's really what began to sink Romney after the conventions. The Democrats wisely used their convention, scheduled after the RNC, to rebut Republican lies. In any debate, the person with the final word is in the strongest position to make a convincing case -- it's one of the reasons why the defense argues last in a criminal trial. Democrats (and Bill Clinton in particular) used that position well. They answered GOP lies and made a case for Democratic governance. As a result, Romney's polling began to crash and he's never really recovered.

It's normally the case that the candidate down in the polls during the debates puts out a call for more debates. Mitt Romney may just break with that tactic, because I doubt it would serve him well.

-Wisco

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Ignorance Becomes a Political Tactic

The Republican break with reality is nearly complete. From the historic failure if trickle-down economics to global warming to evolution to the fact you don't choose to be gay, conservatives have been waging a War with Reality for years. And it's the nature of that war that the believe they're winning, despite the fact that they can't possibly. I wrote about an aspect of it yesterday, but that was before this story broke on Buzzfeed:


Republicans have taken their complaints about media polls allegedly favoring Democrats a step further this morning, embracing an obscure new polling website that re-engineers public polls to add more Republicans to their samples, and which gives Republican Mitt Romney a wide lead.

Some Romney supporters have long complained that public polls suggest higher Democratic turnout, and lower Republican turnout, than they think is likely this year. Pollsters have replied that their samples are dictated by what poll respondents themselves say. (This exchange between Hugh Hewitt and Lee Miringoff is illustrative of the argument.)

Dean Chambers, a blogger on Examiner.com who writes from his home in Duffield, Virginia, took that complaint a step further — producing wide Romney leads far beyond what the Republican's campaign or Republican pollsters have suggested is the case.

The site -- unskewedpolls.com -- is of course made entirely of the purest, most highly refined BS. Basically, he takes polling samples that are the most favorable to Republicans, then applies those percentages to other polls. In other words, if he believes the poll oversamples Democrats, he subtracts a percentage of dem respondents and adds a percentage of GOP ones. As you can imagine, this changes everything radically. Buzzfeed posted a Chambers chart from yesterday and Romney leads in a spread of +3 to +100.

"[Y]ou cannot compare partisan weighting from one polling firm to another," pollster Scott Rasmussen told Buzzfeed in response to this story. "Different firms ask about partisan affiliation in different ways. Some ask how you are registered. Some ask what you consider yourselves. Some push for leaners, others do not. Some ask it at the beginning of a survey which provides a more stable response while others ask it at the end."

And, as the number of people who will vote a certain way changes from day to day, so does party affiliation. If the pollster isn't asking how a person is registered (and in a lot of states, you don't have to register with a party), then the party affiliation numbers will also change from day to day. This is not astrophysics and the party percentages aren't unchangeable like the speed of light. How do you determine the partisan make up of the populace? You ask them, in a survey, and then -- and here's the real important part -- you don't just ignore what they say.

As a result of these BS rejiggered numbers, many on the right are expecting Mitt Romney to win by a landslide. And consider the rationale for doing all this; the media is colluding in a conspiracy to reelect Barack Obama. They've all gotten together, agreed to skew polling, and (somehow) this means Barack Obama wins. But that's way too complicated; if the press really wanted to get together to sink Mitt Romney, they'd just publish photoshopped images of him hunting malnourished, homeless children for sport or something. Trying to get everyone to join in on some bandwagon effect would be a gamble, to say the least.

But that wouldn't play into the conservative penchant for victimhood. They're planning their martyrdoms in advance now. After November, should Romney lose (as is looking more and more likely), they're going to run shrieking into the streets, waving these totally madeup numbers, and claiming to have proof that Obama stole the election. The media was spinning polls so you wouldn't notice how far off the final vote tally was. It was all a big conspiracy to take over the country for socialism or terrorism or terrorist socialism or whatever. And a blizzard of victim cards will fly. "Obama stole the election" will be the new birtherism. If the old birtherism is any indication, the new variety will spread like plague.

The whole thing's as dangerous as it is delusional. This is a party that almost literally worships guns. If the government is seen as illegitimate, these are exactly the sort of nutjobs who would use their "second amendment freedoms" to right that egregious wrong. The Tea Party right is already a bonfire of stupidity, gullibility, and misplaced anger. Rightwing blogs are preparing to throw gasoline on it.

They think that'll work out great. As I said, they aren't big fans of reality.

-Wisco

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