Wednesday, July 25, 2012

Grothman's Inappropriate "Voting Inappropriately" Comment

Think Progress did an interview with our misogynistic state senator, Glenn Grothman, regarding the Voter Suppression law, which looks like it is effectively dead, having been ruled unconstitutional twice. In the interview, Grothman admits that the voter suppression law would benefit the Republicans. That in itself is not surprising.

What is outrageous is his rationale:
“Insofar as there are inappropriate things, people who vote inappropriately are more likely to vote Democrat,” argued Grothman.
Now some wags might make a crack that anyone who votes Democratic is voting inappropriately, but that is not what he is saying. He's saying that the only time voter fraud happens, it's a Democratic vote.

He couldn't be any more wrong, and for Grothman, that's saying a lot.

Three years ago, I pointed out that the area of the electoral process most open to fraud is not at the ballot box, but with absentee ballots. Not only would a voter suppression bill not help with this, but the Republicans don't want to fix it because most of the fraud that happens here is in favor of the Republicans.

If Grothman was serious about wanting to prevent voter fraud, he should pass a bill banning squawk radio:
But when he did the same thing in 2008, he said, there was no indication that he and his wife had voted absentee.

Owing to the steady chatter on talk radio about voter fraud that day, he said, they assumed the worst.

"We were convinced we had been disenfranchised," he said. "There was supposed to be a check-off" for their absentee ballots.

But didn't he know they had mailed their absentee ballots about a week earlier?

"At that moment I was convinced I had not been counted, that my vote was gone."

And so when the poll worker handed them each regular ballots, they cast them.
However, all joking aside, what Grothman really, really needs to do is follow the example set in Pennsylvania, where they're having their own court battle over voter suppression, and tell the truth for once:
A court filing by the state of Pennsylvania, ahead of a trial starting later this week on a lawsuit filed by civil rights groups against the state’s new voter fraud law, contains an astounding admission:
The state signed a stipulation agreement with lawyers for the plaintiffs which acknowledges there “have been no investigations or prosecutions of in-person voter fraud in Pennsylvania; and the parties do not have direct personal knowledge of any such investigations or prosecutions in other states.”
In other words, the state knows that voter fraud is a nonexistent problem, but will nonetheless defend a law that could potentially disenfranchise a huge number of the state’s voters. Of course, it’s not hard to see why the state — and particularly its Republican governor — would continue to support the measure.
But we all know better to expect that kind of honesty or integrity from Grothman or any of his Republican colleagues.

1 comment:

  1. One might note republicans never mention Mitt Romney's fraudulent vote for Scott Brown when they talk about voter fraud.

    ReplyDelete