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Gothmog

(145,126 posts)
Sat Feb 23, 2019, 03:02 PM Feb 2019

Where the hunt for voter fraud is worse than the crime itself

I volunteer a great deal of time on voter protection efforts. Texas GOP has been trying to suppress the vote for a while. Texas had one of the worst voter id law laws in the country until Mark Veasey and the state party sued and got it gutted. Texas is heavily gerrymandered and has one of the worst voter registration laws in the country

Texas move toward turning blue and so the Texas GOP is at it again
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/where-the-hunt-for-voter-fraud-is-worse-than-the-crime-itself/2019/02/05/083bda5e-28c0-11e9-984d-9b8fba003e81_story.html?utm_term=.c8e156340f23

From there, predictably, the echo chamber took over.

“VOTER FRAUD ALERT,” tweeted Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton. Abbott followed by retweeting Paxton and declaring flatly that this was evidence of “illegal vote registration. I support prosecution where appropriate.”

Then it blared from the biggest amplifier of all. “58,000 non-citizens voted in Texas, with 95,000 non-citizens registered to vote,” President Trump tweeted at this latest purported evidence to support one of his favorite conspiracy theories. “These numbers are just the tip of the iceberg. All over the country, especially in California, voter fraud is rampant. Must be stopped.”
Study after study has shown it is exceedingly rare for someone who is not a citizen to attempt to vote. And registrars across the state
immediately recognized the problems with both the claims of widespread illegal balloting and Whitley’s approach for rooting it out. In 2017, more than 1.8 million Texans were naturalized citizens. What is becoming apparent is that many who landed on the list are people who took their oath of citizenship since the last time they got a driver’s license.

In El Paso County, for instance, election administrator Lisa Wise saw one of her own staff members named on the list of 4,152 names she received. “We had a naturalization party for her” when the staffer became a citizen in 2017, Wise told the Texas Tribune. “She
had gone and gotten her driver’s license, I think, four years ago.”

The Texas democrats in the Senate have blocked Greg's nominee to be Sec. of State. We will be fighting this crap
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