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It turns out that the Republican Party’s obsession with voter fraud may be yet another case of projection. Four former staffers for resigned House Rep. Thaddeus McCotter have been charged with 36 counts of misdemeanor and felony election fraud. Yesterday one of those staffers, Lorianne O’Brady, pled not guilty to five misdemeanor counts of submitting fraudulent signatures on a ballot petition. O’Brady is the last of the four staffers to be arraigned; the other three, Don Yowchuang, Mary Melissa Turnbull, and Paul Seewald, were arraigned on similar charges on August 10th.

So what happened? It all started last May, when the Michigan Congressman announced that he was considering running for the Republican nomination for president. McCotter, who had served in the US House of Representatives for nine years, officially announced his candidacy in July of 2011, but was unsuccessful due to his relatively unknown status. In September of 2011, McCotter officially withdrew from the race and endorsed Mitt Romney.

For the next part of the story, we have to go back to April of 2011. Prior to running for president, McCotter had not confirmed that he would be running for reelection is his district. He was the only one of Michigan’s 15 representatives who still had yet to announce his intentions for his seat. That May, after McCotter began exploring a presidential run, he confirmed that he would not campaign for his seat in the House. Then in September, McCotter reversed that plan after ending his presidential campaign. McCotter was indeed running for reelection in Michigan’s 11th District.

Fast forward to May 2012. the date to collect signatures to appear on the ballot in Michigan has come and gone. 1,000 signatures are necessary for each candidate, and the McCotter campaign turned in over 2,000. There was just one small problem: most of those signatures were forgeries or photocopies. Only 244 of the signatures – just over 10% of the total number – were actually legitimate signatures.

Michigan’s Secretary of State announced that the McCotter campaign had not gathered 1,000 valid signatures, which McCotter accepted. McCotter then announced that he would still be running for his seat in the August primary, as a write-in candidate. But the discoveries of fraud by the Secretary of State were so egregious that the matter was turned over to Michigan’s state attorney general. The Michigan elections director Chris Thomas called the fake signatures an “unprecedented level of fraud.”

By June, the news of the false signatures had put enough pressure on McCotter, and the Congressman resigned in disgrace. In his resignation statement, McCotter lamented his decreased earnings potential, expressed his concern for the toll the scandal took on his family, and said that he would continue to cooperate in the investigation. He never took responsibility for the incident.

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.

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Fast forward to May 2012. the date to collect signatures to appear on the ballot in Michigan has come and gone. 1,000 signatures are necessary for each candidate, and the McCotter campaign turned in over 2,000. There was just one small problem: most of those signatures were forgeries or photocopies. Only 244 of the signatures – just over 10% of the total number – were actually legitimate signatures.

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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.

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I mean, this *is* the guy who not only fired that bastard Andrew Shirvell, as mentioned in another thread here, but Bill strikes me as very atypical in that it seems he took the job for the express purpose of getting his rocks off by kicking the elite and powerful in the junk.
And here Thadpole hands him a penalty shot - musta been just irresistable.
Hell Mikey, you'd LIKE him, he reminds me of YOU.
(yep, he's that kind of asshole)

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Ark. lawmaker pleads guilty to election charge

LITTLE ROCK, Ark. (AP) - A Democratic state legislator from east Arkansas, his father and two campaign workers pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiracy to commit election fraud after federal prosecutors said the lawmaker's campaign bribed absentee voters and destroyed ballots in a special election last year.

Prosecutors said Democratic Rep. Hudson Hallum of Marion, Kent Hallum, Phillip Wayne Carter and Sam Malone acknowledged that they participated in a conspiracy to bribe voters to influence absentee votes in the Arkansas District 54 primary, runoff and general elections in 2011. The four were released pending a sentencing hearing.

"In a nation in which every person's vote matters, protecting the integrity of the electoral process from those who seek to win office by cheating the system is critical," Assistant U.S. Attorney Jane Duke said in a statement released by her office. "Voter fraud schemes such as that carried out in the 2011 District 54 race have the devastating effect of eroding public confidence in elected officials and disenfranchising voters."

A Democratic Party spokeswoman said Hallum indicated he would step down from his seat, but Gov. Mike Beebe had not received a formal resignation by Wednesday afternoon.

Hallum didn't respond to phone messages from The Associated Press seeking comment, and House Speaker Robert Moore said he has not heard from the lawmaker. But in an email sent to other Democratic legislators, Hallum apologized for his actions.

"I took some bad advice that led to some bad decisions on my part. I am going to stand up and accept full responsibility for my actions," Hallum wrote. "I am truly sorry because I know this news will have an effect on everyone's upcoming race."

Prosecutors said Hallum and his father, Kent, tasked Carter and Malone with obtaining absentee ballot applications for certain voters and assisting voters in filling out the ballots, "actually completing absentee ballots in some instances without regard to the voter's actual candidate choice."

The ballots were typically placed in unsealed envelopes before being mailed to local election officials.

"If a ballot contained a vote for Hudson Hallum's opponent, it was destroyed," prosecutors said in a bill of information filed with the court.

Prosecutors also accused the four of offering money and food to absentee voters in exchange for their support.

At one point, prosecutors said, Hallum told Carter: "We need to use that black limo and buy a couple cases of some cheap vodka and whiskey to get people to vote."

Hallum won the east Arkansas seat in a special election last year following the resignation of Rep. Fred Smith, who stepped down after he was found guilty of felony theft of property delivered by mistake. A judge later dismissed the theft case, but Smith was blocked from running in the Democratic primary against Hallum for his old seat because he had a conviction at the time he filed.

Smith is now running as the Green Party nominee for the seat. No Republican is running.

Hallum's guilty plea comes as Democrats in Arkansas are struggling to keep the Legislature from falling to Republicans for the first time since Reconstruction. Party leaders were quick to condemn Hallum's actions Wednesday afternoon.

"The sanctity of our elections and the rights of voters to see that every vote is counted fairly and responsibly are some of the basic, fundamental liberties of our democracy. No threat to those liberties can or should be endured," Party spokeswoman Candace Martin said. "Hudson Hallum is taking responsibility for his actions and we hope that will help resolve things in a way to see that such activities will never be tolerated."

Republicans said the case pointed to long-running voter fraud problems in the state.

"The voters' constitutionally guaranteed right to a fair election was stolen by an Arkansas Democrat who was more concerned with winning than upholding the public trust and being a true public servant," state GOP Chairman Doyle Webb said. "This is corruption that a two party system will end."

Prosecutors said in the charging documents that the four tried to conceal the absentee voter fraud by using rental cars when collecting ballots and using coded language such as "gold tokens," ''duct work" and "watermelons" when referring to the absentee ballots.

Sentencing hearings will be held later for the four. The maximum penalty for the conspiracy charge is five years in prison plus a potential fine of $250,000.

Malone resigned his job as a West Memphis police officer, but did not know if he would resign from the Crittenden County Quorum Court or the West Memphis school board, attorney Blake Hendrix said. There was no answer at a number listed for Carter, a West Memphis City Councilman.

Hallum's name will remain on the ballot, but if he wins in November after resigning, a special election will have to be called for the seat, a spokesman for the secretary of state's office said. A court could order election officials to not count any votes cast for Hallum.

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