Sunday, October 21, 2012

We Found the Voter Fraud!

Ladies and gentlemen, there's no need to worry.  Do you remember all those reports of voter fraud that Fox News tried to convince us of?  Well it's ok, folks.  We found the fraud!

But let's be honest, we already knew the real voter fraud problem... the problem, to Republicans, was that it wasn't happening.  But that didn't matter.  As the conservatives figured out that they were losing key states (Ohio and Pennsylvania, to start), they rushed to enact voter ID laws.

These laws didn't make sense, and that was ok, as long as they passed.  Sarah Silverman sums up why that was stupid in this lovely, and completely NSFW video.

But wait, there's more, night-time shoppers!

Reports then came out that the GOP voter registration campaign hired a man known as Nathan Sproul.  He was the executive director of the Arizona Republican party, but after that, he made a good career out of ... well, voter fraud.

Examples of Nathan Sproul's firm's sterling accomplishments include posing as democrats and destroying voter registration forms, only registering voters if they vote Republican, and yet they still seem to be paying Nathan Sproul's firms.

Oops.  Also suspected to be connected to Nathan Sproul's firms is this upstanding citizen, who was caught (surprise!) throwing away voter registration forms.

Along with these delightful coincidences, along comes the fact that "in all 234 counties of Texas, the entire states of Hawaii and Oklahoma, half of Washington and Colorado, and certain counties in swing state Ohio" are using electronic voting machines supplied by Hart Intercivic.  Machines supplied by this company have been notoriously unreliable, to the tune of adding 10,000 non-existent votes in the Ft. Worth area alone.

Along with the fact that these machines are, well, fucking awful, is the fact that the majority of the directors of Hart Intercivic come from H.I.G. Capital.  If you didn't know H.I.G. Capital has 49 partners and directors, 11 of whom, including founder Tony Tamer, have work experience listed on their resume with Bain Capital.  H.I.G. Capital employees have given $338,000 to the Mitt Romney campaign, putting them in a solid 11th place for largest donor to the Romney campaign.

As a comparison, Bain Capital, Romney's previous firm, has only given him $268,000.

Not only that, but it appears that Romney himself, along with his wife, son Tagg, and brother G. Scott, are also invested in this company.  And even worse, some Republicans are perfectly ok with this whole idea.

Now, this is infuriating to me.  I've called many of my friends out for being bold conspiracy theorists.  I have friends from a lot of different walks of life, and I love them for who they are.  But dammit, they can be crazy sometimes.  They've accused President Obama of everything from being Muslim to, for whatever reason, trying to make him seem like he didn't care about the recent assassination on the Libyan ambassador.

I know they're wrong.  It's ok. I let that brush by me.

But I cannot understand how this is not a big deal.  I completely agree with this article: if these occurrences were happening in favor of the Democrats, I cannot even imagine the outcry.  It would be Watergate all over again.  Or Lewinsky.  Or [insert famous scandal here].

But it's not.  And that's a problem.

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