#GOP Voter #Fraud ... #NYMAG ... #Intelligencer - Ed Kilgore

#GOP Voter #Fraud ... #NYMAG ... #Intelligencer - Ed Kilgore

So now, from North Carolina, there’s finally a clearly documented case


of election fraud that actually appears to have changed an election result. The cruel irony for Republicans is that operatives from their own party — particularly “consultant” Leslie McCrae Dowless — allegedly did the deed.

As Philip Bump notes, this is very much a blue-moon development:

The last time there was a federal election that needed to be rerun was more than 40 years ago, when a close race combined with a faulty voting machine in Louisiana to prompt the calling of a new election. Politico’s Steven Shepard has a good history of past do-overs, including that Louisiana race, a history that makes clear that this is probably the first federal election in which the results were tainted by fraudulent activity.

To be clear, the illegal activity in North Carolina’s Ninth District didn’t resemble the “voter fraud” scenarios Republicans have insisted on imagining in recent years:

[This] wasn’t an election tainted by people showing up to cast illegal ballots, the fraud allegation that has been leveled scores of times by President Trump alone. Instead, it focused on allegedly corrupt actions by a man working for a consulting firm hired by one of the candidates.

So tighter voter-ID laws or voter-roll purges or more closely scrutinized voter-registration drives, the most frequent GOP prescriptions for “election security,” wouldn’t have mattered at all. You could make an attenuated case that opportunities for early voting or voting-by-mail — in this case voting by absentee ballot — that Democrats have recent championed are the problem. But what happened in North Carolina is the functional equivalent of old-fashioned, 19th-century ballot-box stuffing. Unused absentee ballots were fraudulently filled out with signatures forged, and actually filled-out absentee ballots cast for the “wrong” candidate were discarded. As the Brennan Center wryly observes, this activity was much closer to voter suppression than to the voter fraud alleged to justify voter suppression.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Walker Still At It - March 2019~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Scott Walker to raise money for Republican redistricting group

MADISON - Former Gov. Scott Walker will lead fundraising for a Republican group focused on drawing maps for Congress and state legislatures.

As fundraising chairman for the National Republican Redistricting Trust, Walker will serve in some ways as a counterpoint to Eric Holder, the former attorney general under President Barack Obama who has been active in Wisconsin politics since last year. Holder oversees the National Democratic Redistricting Committee. 

Gerrymandering, Redistricting Beyond Reason - As Bad as Voter Suppression

#GOP Voter #Fraud ... #NYMAG ... #Intelligencer