Wednesday, June 3, 2009

Georgia's Fraudulent Voter Scanning Program - Part Deux

A couple of posts ago I addressed the Justice Department's ruling that Georgia's program to scan voter lists for ineligible voters was flawed, because it flagged thousands of eligible voters. Now, Dirk, one of my fellow Georgia bloggers and a nice guy, has put a right wing spin on this ruling to make it appear that the door has been opened for voter fraud, and as I predicted in my post, the fraudulent Republican use of Acorn has reared its head.

All this ruling says is that the program is flawed. It is not a court ruling. All Georgia's Secretary of State has to do is fix it, so that it does what it is supposed to do. Of course the Secretary of State is a Republican, who is running for Governor. She is not about to fix it because it makes for good propaganda. After all she has fooled Dirk and his readers, so she can fool the rest of Republican Georgia.

As I wrote earlier this program was begun prior to last year's election and was specifically programmed to target black and Hispanic eligible voters to ensure that many would be turned away from the polls, since many or most would vote Democratic. Georgia requires a valid picture ID at the polls. It is doubtful that many ineligible voters would have been able to vote anyway as a result. I'm sure that the argument to this would be that they have fake licenses. If my local sheriff's report is any indication, I'd say that this argument would be false. Each week there are numbers of Hispanics who are charged with driving without a license.

There are no statistics to support any accusations of voter fraud, certainly not from illegal aliens. This is simply a Don Quixote windmill fight by the extreme right, which wants to ensure that the voter lists are trimmed of opposing voters and to whip up anti-immigrant feelings and fears.

A couple of people have commented on Dirk's post at this writing. To show how easily people can be fooled check out Dirk's post and read the sadly uninformed comments. One even advances a far fetched prediction that a terrorist organization could run a candidate and bring in illegals to throw the election. In extremely right wing Georgia it would take millions of those illegals to throw an election, but I suppose if your imagination and fear run wild, you could believe such a fantasy.

2 comments:

Dirk said...

Ralph,
There's no being easily fooled about this. Here are the straight facts: the US DOJ themselves helped GA develop the program & OK'd it. Special interests groups like the ACLU & others filed lawsuits. Two Federal courts again OK'd it & allowed GA to proceed with the process as it stood. Now the DOJ backtracks & all of a sudden there's a problem with it. It also can't be alleged that it excluded anyone except those not eligible. Don't have the stats handy right now, but I've seen them, & the number of those whose eligibility was questioned was very small. Between 2004 & 2008, Hispanic/Latino votes cast increased 140% & African American votes increased 42% - both with the verification process in place. The white vote only increased 8%. It's apparent GA's program didn't hinder the minority vote at all.

Dirk
THE FIRST AMENDMENT, NOT POLITICALLY CORRECT II
http://tsalagiman2.blogspot.com/

Georgia Mountain Man said...

Interestingly enough, that's the Secretary of State's story and she's sticking to it. As I said, it won't hurt her at the polls next year.