The Dirty Little Secret About Election Fraud

Over the summer, I wrote about Thaddeus McCotter, the rather bizarre congressmen from Michigan, who wanted to be president but couldn't even get enough legitimate signatures on his nomination papers to stay on the ballot for his current seat. Because of allegations of improprieties with his nomination signatures, McCotter not only withdrew from all of his races but immediately resigned from his seat.

Now we know why.

Four of McCotter's staffers were charged with a total of 36 counts of falsifying the nomination papers:

Four staffers of former U.S. Rep. Thad McCotter, R-Livonia were charged today in connection with the false nominating petitions that led to McCotter's departure from Congress.

Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette described the four as "not simply Keystone Kops running amok ... criminal acts were committed."

He said the petition forgeries and cut-and-paste jobs on the petitions "would make an elementary art teacher cringe."

Schuette said the McCotter staffers also likely did the same thing in the 2008 elections, using 2006 petition signatures.

In a eerily similar path as we're seeing here in Fitzwalkerstan, one of the staffers already entered a plea of no contest.

Can you imagine that? The party so worried about election fraud is again the party that commits it.

I would point the gentle reader to this article which my friend pointed out to me, which points out what the Republicans don't want you to know:

This incident perfectly highlights the dirty little secret about election fraud. Election fraud overwhelmingly happens on the campaign side, not the voter side. It’s far easier – and more rewarding – to cheat while working from within the system than it is to commit in-person voter fraud. The GOP is legislating against cases of voter fraud in which a person would have to give someone else’s name at the correct polling place in order to falsely vote once; meanwhile a Republican Congressman and his staff fabricated 1,756 signatures so that he could run illegally.

And this is the truth about so many Republican policies: rules and regulations are put in place to scapegoat people who aren’t causing problems. In Florida, drug testing welfare recipients showed that less than 3% of those receiving welfare were using drugs illegally, while that discriminatory testing cost the state nearly $120,000. Mitt Romney has evoked the “47% of people [who] pay no income tax,” conveniently ignoring that collecting income tax from all of those households would bring in less than than the president’s Buffett Rule which would slightly raise taxes for the country’s wealthiest. Reagan’s racist welfare queen myth still looms large in the conservative narrative, despite the fact that the Bush-era bailout for corrupt and irresponsible banks cost far more than years of welfare programs.

The cognitive dissonance bordering on willful delusion has become the hallmark of Republican policies and rhetoric. Expecting this heinous fraud to bring the GOP back to reality would be wishful thinking at this point, but at least one corrupt Congressman is now out of a job.

I do believe I've mentioned before that when the Republicans start squawking like wet hens about something, like election fraud, it's best to start looking at where they're not pointing.

Michigan Is The New Fitzwalkerstan

Unbelievable:

Michigan Republican Rep. Thaddeus McCotter resigned from Congress on Friday, a surprise decision that caps among the most madcap two-month periods in modern politics.

The Michigan Republican and 2012 presidential candidate announced his decision in a lengthy and characteristically verbose statement citing his desire to shift his focus to his family now that his congressional career is over. (He also quoted Bob Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue”.)

[...]

McCotter failed to qualify for the primary ballot after most of his petition signatures were recently found to be fraudulent. State officials are investigating the matter.

McCotter initially opted to run a write-in campaign, but then announced he would not seek reelection.

[...]

McCotter’s bizarre period continued this week when the Detroit News reported that he had written a TV pilot with a rather odd premise — McCotter himself hosting a crude variety show that joked about flatulence and female anatomy, among other things. The script was leaked to the newspaper by a former staffer who thought it unbecoming a member of Congress.

McCotter said in his statement that he will no longer give interviews as the state attorney general investigates his campaign’s fraudulent signatures.

This guy sounds like David VanderLeest, John Nygren and Glenn Grothman all rolled up into one and given steroids.

It also again raises the eternal question: How the hell do these people even get elected, much less reelected time after time?