The Voter Fraud Lie

Andrew Cohen:

Jonathan Chait, in a smart recent New York magazine piece titled "2012 or Never," offered some numbers supporting the theory. "Every year," Chait wrote, "the nonwhite proportion of the electorate grows by about half a percentage point -- meaning that in every presidential election, the minority share of the vote increases by 2 percent, a huge amount in a closely divided country." This explains, for example, why Colorado, Nevada, and Arizona are turning purple instead of staying red. "By 2020," Chait writes, "nonwhite voters should rise from a quarter of the 2008 electorate to one third. In 30 years, "nonwhites will outnumber whites."
Which is why "whites," and especially white men, seem so determined this election cycle to make it harder for nonwhites to exercise their right to vote. The news from the front this week is telling. On Wednesday, in Pennsylvania, GOP Governor Tom Corbett raced to sign a bill that requires photo identification of voters. The day before, in Texas, GOP Attorney General Greg Abbott amended the Lone Star State's complaint against the federal government to seek to strike down the pre-clearance section of the Voting Rights Act, which had in turn been used by the Justice Department to block Texas' recent efforts at a stringent new voter-ID law.
In Wisconsin, meanwhile, a state court judge on Monday blocked the state's new voter ID law, ruling that it unconstitutionally created a new (and lower) class of citizen-voter. Even the Human Rights Council of the United Nations has been dragged into the controversy, by the NAACP, to the great consternation of conservative bloggers and conspiracy theorists. It's all happening because lawmakers are dissatisfied with less onerous identification requirements -- like those just enacted in Virginia -- which allow registered voters to produce a wide range of documentation to establish that they are who they say they are.

What really doesn't make sense to me is that Republicans push for tougher rules for people showing up to vote, but they make it easier to vote absentee.  Talk about an opportunity for fraud.  People who take care of their elderly parents could vote their absentee ballots.  Landlords can register their tenants and vote their ballots, if they expect that the people won't vote on their own.  Of course, much like the idea that people will go to multiple precincts and vote, the idea that somebody would risk felony charges to cast 2 or 3 more absentee votes seems pretty unlikely to me.  There are two reasons for Republicans to push this line, suppression of minority votes and the ability to cast doubt on the validity of elections they are more and more likely to lose.  Unless the party changes its direction soon, they will be explaining away their election losses with imaginary vote fraud, and the true believers will think the election was stolen.