All’s fair in fraud and felony

Voter suppression — there’s nothing new about it, but when the support for it comes from people who think testing city water for arsenic is “too much government,” you have to expect odd, snarling noises from the cynics. Pennsylvania’s latest attempt to reserve the right to vote for the landed gentry, posing as a reaction to voter fraud that might possibly occur but actually does not seem to have, has Pandagon snickering and me barking  — and for good reason. Government intervening in the free exercise of a constitutional right is different I guess, because the goal of keeping Pennsylvania for “real” Americans sanctifies a little bit of  double-think:

[T]he argument seems to be that the state can impair a constitutional right because… well, because they can. It doesn’t really matter why, it just makes a kind of instinctual sense, like how vaccines cause autism or how evolution can’t exist because I’ve never seen a thing evolve in front of my eyes despite staring at it and chanting “evolve” for hours on end,

wrote Jesse Taylor yesterday.

Meanwhile, back in Florida, where excluding “undesirables” from the voter rolls is a tradition of long standing, former Florida Republican Party Chair Jim Greer is suing the “whack-a-do, right-wing crazies” that filed criminal fraud charges against him in 2010 in a plot to force saner Republicans including former Governor Charlie Crist out of the party and suppress the African-American vote by once again purging voter rolls.

Florida, of course, bans ex-felons from voting for life for those without good connections in the GOP, like Governor Scott of the Fourteen Felonies, so if one wrote a bad check in 1956 or was found with an ounce or so of cannabis in 1968, one can go fish forever. In fact, if your name sounds like someone else who did, and you live in Florida, you may have been illegally banned from voting in the 2000 election by a similar voter roll purge that targeted minority voters and probably put George Bush in the White House. You may be banned once again and you won’t likely know until you show up at the polls.

It’s funny how consistently the voter fraud circus parade neglects to mention the voting machine “problems” in Ohio. Again, I’m a cynic, so I find it easy to believe that GOP tampering is treated differently in the post-Bush, Tea Party era. Remember those “unhackable” Diebold machines that took only minutes to hack, delivering more Republican votes than could be accounted for by registered voters — and delivering Ohio for Bush, as the CEO openly boasted before being forced to resign over accounting fraud? I wonder if he’s still on the voter rolls.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)