Voter Fraud Is Another Trump Lie

"A study of 2,068 alleged election-fraud cases in 50 states between 2000 and 2012 found the level of fraud was infinitesimal compared with the 146 million voters registered over the 12-year period. The analysis found only 10 cases of voter impersonation, the only kind of fraud that could be prevented by voter ID at the polls."

From NBCNews

But if you are going to look, [President] Trump, why not start at home:

Tiffany Trump is one of these voters registered in two states

President Trump's top advisor white supremacist Steve Bannon is another

Cases like Ms Trump's and Steve Bannon's are the rationalization for the massive Interstate Crosscheck the scheme for purging legal voters from the rolls deployed nationwide by Trump supporter Chris Kobach.

Were Bannon and Trump reported to the states by Interstate Crosscheck?

So, an infinitesimal problem. The source of Trump’s anecdotal evidence was a friend of his, a German national, who tried to vote in Florida and was rejected. Trump’s friend complained to him that lots of people were voting who obviously should not have been…according to a foreigner who attempted to commit voter fraud, presumably on behalf of Trump.

Trump does not explain how Bernhard Langer could have seen 3-5 million allegedly illegal voters in this one precinct in Florida.

The Langer anecdote story from CNBC

Here is a fact check from the very middle of the road USAToday

The Electoral College Should Block Trump, Not Enable Him

Peter Beinart, in the Atlantic, explains how the Founders devised the Electoral College to prevent demagogues like Trump from reaching power, not to enable them to.

"As Michael Signer explains, the framers were particularly afraid of the people choosing a demagogue. The electors, Hamilton believed, would prevent someone with “talents for low intrigue, and the little arts of popularity” from becoming president. And they would combat “the desire in foreign powers to gain an improper ascendant in our councils.” They would prevent America’s adversaries from meddling in its elections. The founders created the Electoral College, in other words, in part to prevent the election of someone like Donald Trump.”

David Kaiser says much the same thing in TIME.

From Federalist 68, the Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton:

"It was equally desirable, that the immediate election should be made by men most capable of analyzing the qualities adapted to the station, and acting under circumstances favorable to deliberation, and to a judicious combination of all the reasons and inducements which were proper to govern their choice... It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder. This evil was not least to be dreaded in the election of a magistrate, who was to have so important an agency in the administration of the government as the President of the United States. But the precautions which have been so happily concerted in the system under consideration, promise an effectual security against this mischief.”

Preventing a dangerous demagogue and liar and tax dodger and draft evader and con man and bigot like Donald Trump from seizing power is exactly why the Electoral College was invented. Trump’s whole life has been one of mischief. The Founders would be appalled.

Paul Abrams at Huffington Post cites the Russian spy agency's interference in this election as reason enough to use the Electoral College to block Trump––not to use it as a device to put him in the White House. After all, Hillary Clinton earned 1.7 million more votes than Trump did.

The Christian Science Monitor proposes some reforms to the Electoral College.

If the Russian interference isn't enough there is this: For 50 years the GOP’s game plan has included vigorous voter suppression.

ThinkProgress calls the Republican strategy a case study in voter suppression

How do we know the suppression and intimidation of voters has been central to the GOP playbook all along? They've boasted about it. They crow about each law they pass to disenfranchise voters. They boast about how it will elect Republicans if they can keep people from voting. This year's decline in voter turnout was the Republican Party's doing.

It's worth sharing this famous speech excerpt from the father of the modern right wing Republican Party, superchristian demagogue Paul Weyrich. Here, Paul Weyrich cheerfully derides Good Government. Over the past decades since then the Republican Party has done its damnedest to destroy Good Government and replace it with bad.

Your Daily Trump––Is Trump A Fascist Or Just Pretending To Be One?

To start off, here's an appetizer: A Reddit list of reasons why Trump is a fascist.

The media didn’t report on the corruption of the Trump Foundation because it was too hard. Not true, actually. It’s been right there in plain sight.

A story so simple to explain it can be done in a Twitter feed.

Trump has taken millions in campaign contributions and paid himself via his companies. This is a new kind of shell game.

Vanity Fair on how your friends' contributions have wound up in Trump's pocket.

One law professor believes if Trump is elected, he could be impeached before he’s sworn in. He cites racketeering levels of corruption.

Reported by Daily Kos.

Samantha Bee examines how the lake of hog shit called FoxNews contaminated the aquifer of truthful information. That cocktail brought us Donald Trump.

Sam Bee nails it in a few hilarious minutes.

Hillary is supposedly “secretive” (a meme trademarked by FoxNews, so you know it’s true) Well, Trump is a brick wall. Reported by SLATE.

This WW2 vet doesn’t appreciate Trump’s insult to people who served in our wars.

Watch the short video here: Via The Tablet.

Ralph Nader on the danger of Donald Trump

If you don't believe me, listen to the guy who gave us eight years of Bush.

And in an interview with Amy Goodman he explains that Trump is a "Freeloading, Pontificating Empty Suit Who Has Cheated on Everything He's Done"

Nader via Democracy Now.

Yes, the presidential campaign has gone insane. For months the news media has ignored insane and tried to cover up the bigotry and hate and corruption of Donald Trump. The result? It’s like ignoring cancer hoping it will go away or turn out to be enjoyable.

The insanity diagnosis from American Prospect.

But we don’t need to worry because the sane voters will outvote the insane ones. Especially the people of color. But wait… the GOP has a plan to prevent those people from voting because their name happens to be Brown or Garcia.

If Trump is elected it may be because Trump's GOP reached out to black voters and prevented them from voting. From Rolling Stone.

I’ve been struggling to find one decent thing that might result from Donald Trump’s campaign. This might be it. Anne Coulter has said she would die for Donald Trump. If I were less of a mensch I’d say “Good idea.” Still, the most loathsome voice in this election season is a Trump worshipper. That’s a good reason to stop the guy.

Reported by the DC political paper The Hill.

Of course Coulter's promises may be as unreliable as Trump's.

Hypocrisy In The News

The Republican Secretary of State in New Mexico was elected on a Stop Voter Fraud platform. She is now under indictment on 65 counts including fraud, embezzlement and money laundering. She is also being charged with identity theft. Hm... It’s a shame Republican voters don’t understand irony or hypocrisy... The LATimes has the full story.

The state of Alabama was very pleased when the Supreme Court said nobody needed to enforce the Voting Rights Act anymore because bigotry and prejudice were over with. So Alabama did two things. They added a requirement that all voters have a photo ID to vote, and they closed offices where these photo IDs could be obtained in majority black counties. Hm… Anybody phoned Chief Justice Roberts for comment? Maybe just phone the Department of Justice... The Root has a full report on this story.

A hurricane just dropped several feet of rain on South Carolina causing the dozenth “thousand year flood” in the past few years. All their Republicans in Congress loudly demanded disaster relief, and they’ll get it too, because it’s what Americans do to help other Americans in trouble. Trouble is, when Hurricane Sandy hit New York, New Jersey and the rest of the northeast every one of these South Carolina Republicans voted against federal aid. Hm… Sometimes hypocrisy is so ripe you have to hold your nose... This story is all over the news; here's Salon's article.

Republicans Believe Our Government Should Be Used To Attack Their Political Opponents

The Republicans have very different ideas about what democracy is supposed to do. Sometimes they even admit it openly. A few examples:

The purpose of Congressional committees is to destroy Democratic candidates’ poll numbers.

(EJ Dionne wrote an excellent column about the vendetta of the Benghazi panel)

The purpose of the U.S. Senate is to make sure Democratic presidents fail.

The purpose of Republican-led state legislatures is to make it harder for people to vote so Republicans are elected president.

This is not a new thing. Nixon used the IRS and FBI and tried to use the CIA to attack his political enemies. It appears more evident each year that Dick Cheney used our military and our sons and daughters enlisted in it to carry out a personal agenda involving acquisition of oil reserves in Iraq and large contracts for his former company, Halliburton. It was a war that multiplied the value of his Halliburton stock portfolio.

Each example points to the likelihood that abuse of power has remained a part of the Republican DNA since the day 41 years ago when Nixon's abuse of power brought his resignation and disgrace. It doesn't seem to embarrass or disgrace Republicans anymore because they believe they were elected to government to abuse its power. Democracy isn't for the people, it's for the Right People.

In 1980, the founder of the Heritage Foundation stated the Republican/conservative strategy very clearly.

Paul Weyrich didn’t believe in Good Government. He called it the “goo goo syndrome.” He didn’t want people to vote. The group he was addressing represented conservative Christianity. They apparently believe the reason there is a God is to enhance the personal power and wealth of “the right people." Every kind of bigotry and economic unfairness flows from this. Democracy is supposed to protect us from this kind of abuse, but it doesn't when those we elect use their new power for personal vendettas.

Ronald Reagan addressed this same gathering and was elected later that year by the same conservative movement that still is trying to break our democratic system.

Books have been written about how successful the vandals have been, but very little of this gets into the nightly news. To criticize one party requires our “fair and balanced” news anchors to find something equally bad to say about the other party.

On the day Obama was inaugurated Republican congressional leaders met and agreed on a plan to oppose everything he did and to refuse any manner of compromise on any issue even if the president's proposal were something they had supported in the past, like healthcare reform based on private insurers and an insurance mandate.

A book was written about this conspiracy, titled Do Not Ask What Good We Do.

Another, co-authored by Norm Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute and Thomas Mann of Brookings, placed most of the blame on the Republicans.

The Republican goal is to make government stop working.

Why?

Because each public institution they can destroy will offer an opportunity for their corporate clients to exploit.

Government looks at public needs as a moral duty. Corporations look at them as an opportunity to leverage necessity into large profits. The greater and more desperate the need, the greater the profit.

Ultimately Republicans would like our government run like a corporation, from the top down, with a command structure, where people do as their told, where the boss’s motives are never questioned. Americans who want a corporate tough guy as our next president do not seem to realize that corporations are not run democratically. In their blind admiration of "business" Americans forget what happens when business and government are in cahoots. There is a name for this. It’s called fascism. It’s been tried in many places. In Pinochet’s Chile, Franco’s Spain, Mussolini’s Italy, and in many smaller tin-pot dictatorships that have operated under the aegis of American corporations and their military allies. But fascism ruled most notoriously in Hitler’s Germany. It was not a successful experiment and it took millions of lives to remove it.

How the GOP is Taking Away Our Right to Vote

During Reagan's rise to power Paul Weyrich made a speech disparaging good government and urging Republicans to make it harder for Americans to vote because the fewer the voters the more Republicans get elected. Paul Weyrich shaped the modern Republican Party around this subversive idea, wrapped it in the flag and went on to found the Heritage Foundation and other antidemocratic groups.

It's still happening. Republicans are attacking voting rights with all the billions of their monied allies. The goal is to reduce our democracy to a plutocracy, in which only the rich can decide policy, in which the rich evade taxes and enact laws to take rights away from workers, suppressing wages as well as voting rights. Imagine a world before Theodore Roosevelt. The bookends of this Republican coup d'etat are voter suppression and billionaires dominating politics via the recent Citizens United decision of the Republican flank of the Supreme Court. Pure politics.

This short video tells the story of an elderly woman's long hard effort to get the GOP-mandated voter ID.

This well-known Tennessee Democrat who left office in 2011 was deleted from the voting rolls in the district he represented for years. If it can happen to him it can happen to anyone.

An 86 year-old veteran found himself barred from voting on Super Tuesday. One of the groups most targeted by Republican voter purges are the elderly.

Who's doing this and how is it being done? It's being done deliberately and concertedly nationwide. The GOP and its corporate allies, notably the multibillionaire Koch brothers and their organization ALEC, which writes voter suppression laws, invites state legislators on junkets to sunny resorts and instructs them how to get their laws enacted. Legislation by remote control.

The actual plan by ALEC to suppress voting state by state, as written by the Koch brothers and their corporate cronies.

A report from Mother Jones magazine

Voter suppression is being prosecuted in a few places, but the effort to hunt down nonexistent "fraudulent voters" is far more aggressive and widespread and it's been legislated and funded by Republicans. But voter fraud is a phony issue, a pretext.

This article is from Washington Monthly.

This is from American Prospect.

How big is this voter fraud boogeyman the Republicans are scaring everybody about? After an expensive investigation in Ohio, it turned out to have happened in fewer than one MILLIONTH of ONE PERCENT of all votes cast. and this is what the Republican Party and ALEC are using to disenfranchise millions of voters. Phantom crimes are useful to right wing politicians. imagined crime frightens people into giving away their rights. And again, there are billions of corporate dollars behind this.

This report from the Brennan Center lays out the pathetic and transparent cynicism behind the GOP's voter purges and voter suppression campaign nationwide. They want power back and don't care whose rights they trample to get there.