Pants on Fire # 12: Voter Fraud

The Lie: The Democratic Party and some of its leaders and members have been and are continuing to break the laws about voter registration and identification and actual voting, to skew the elections throughout the country toward their own national, state, and local candidates.

The Truth: In fact, it is the Republican Party and its operatives now committing this crime in several places throughout the country.

In fact, the Republicans have been doing this officially by making it harder to register to vote and by restricting open voting days in areas where minorities, old people, and college students (those who tend to vote Democratic) predominate. When challenged in court, they have fought back in appeals courts. When they have lost there, they have restricted voting times even more.

And now it has been revealed that they have been doing it unofficially and illegally: A man working for the Republican National Party has been arrested in Harrisonburg, Virginia, for destroying voter registration application forms.

“Prosecutors charged him with four counts of destruction of voter registration applications, eight counts of failing to disclose voter registration applications and one count of obstruction of justice,” according to TPM Muckraker.  "Colin Small, a 23-year-old resident of Phoenixville, Pa., worked for Pinpoint, a company hired to register voters on behalf of the Republican Party of Virginia."

Here's his mugshot. At first, as the report quoted above said, he was thought to be working for the Republican Party of Virginia. However, it was later determined that he was actually working for the Republican National Party. 

These are the same people going around accusing Chicago politicians of having dead people vote, Democrats in general of "voting early and often," and minorities of voting illegally. 

More from the Salon.com article:

"According to FEC filings obtained by CBS 6 in Richmond last month, the Virginia Republican Party reportedly paid some $500,000 to Strategic for registration work before the state GOP claimed to have fired them, several days after the fraudulent forms collected by Strategic and submitted to county Supervisors of Elections by the Florida GOP began to surface in the Sunshine State. As we now know, only Sproul was fired. The voter registration operation itself continued.

"Small, the man arrested on Thursday and charged with eight felony counts and five misdemeanors after allegedly having been found to have tossed at least eight registration forms into a dumpster in Harrisonburg, Va. (Rockingham County), was reportedly working for an operation named PinPoint on behalf of the Virginia GOP, according to Reilly at TPM."

Even though people in Virginia do not register by political party, their voter registration people were specifically trained to filter out Democratic- and Obama-leaning voters by pretending to be taking a "poll," asking who they thought they would vote for---and then throwing out the registration forms of those who said they would be voting Democratic.

This is true voter fraud.

Just as bad, in Madame L's opinion, is  the fact that the Republican Party keeps trying to distance itself from these companies it has hired to conduct voter registration and so-called information campaigns, pretending to have fired those responsible for fraud, while continuing to support these groups. These people have even been hired by the Romney campaign. Madame L is outraged and she thinks all her Dear Readers should be, too.