Excellent follow-up on the Kirk story regarding his voter ‘integrity’ progject.
And another conservative group with a strong interest in voter fraud efforts was set to host a training meeting for Republican lawyers in Chicago on Tuesday night. The Republican National Lawyers Association, a group closely aligned with the Republican National Committee, hosted an event at the Union League in Chicago, where they provided training to “ensure that the elections are open, fair and honest.” The training focused on “early voting, grace period voting, absentee ballots, Election Day legal issues, canvassing, and recounts” according to an online invitation to the event. Last night, they were scheduled to host another event at the Doubletree Hotel & Conference Center in Bloomington, IL.
The Illinois GOP website also noted the RNLA events on their website, which Brady wrote that the state GOP was “hosting.” In a tweet, Brady connected the voter integrity program with the Kirk campaign. There’s another event scheduled for this upcoming Monday, which will also take place at the Union League Club, according to the website.
TPM is doing great coverage and showing what good investigative journalism can do. One problem with blogger triumphalism is that most of us cannot do this all of the time and a professional organization like TPM can do some real digging.
Voter fraud issues — along with the fallout over the controversy of the Justice Department’s handling of the civil voter intimidation case against members of the New Black Panther Party — have been the RNLA’s bread and butter. The group sends out Vote Fraud Alerts, a member of the organization recently wrote about America’s “voter fraud epidemic,” and the organization has taken a critical view of the community organizing group ACORN, a now-defunct organization that was a piñata for voter fraud issues.
The problem is there isn’t an epidemic, as I’ve discussed before. There are areas that are problems–but even the ACORN example misses the mark because ACORN was notorious for running voter registration drivers with a quota system for the people they hired to register voters. ACORN didn’t vet the signatures until, ironically, the last couple years before it collapsed this year and there was a relatively high rate of registration fraud as employees made up fake people to register. There’s no evidence that these people voted–in fact many of the names were laughably stupid along the lines of Mickey Mouse and were often caught because the addresses didn’t match or conflicted with other people.