Did Team Walker engage in illegal vote rigging?

The Progressive: Emails released this week appear to show Governor Scott Walker’s top aides engaging in an illegal scheme to “cage” Wisconsin voters in the weeks ahead of the 2010 gubernatorial election.

Voter caging is an illegal campaign practice used to knock voters off the rolls. Neighborhoods with large minority concentrations are most typically targeted by caging operations.

On page 15,037 of WalkerDocs 1, an email exchange between Walker staffers Kelly Rindfleisch and Nicole Simmons spells it out pretty plainly.

“If you come this Saturday I can show you how to cage,” Simmons writes. “That will be priority on the weekend.”

“Outside tea party groups bragged in 2010 that they were joining RNC Chairman Reince Priebus and Wisconsin Republican Party to cage voters for Scott Walker, although Priebus denied the charge,” the report goes on.

At this point, I’m having a hard time understanding why Walker wasn’t charged with anything. Did prosecutors believe they couldn’t prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that Scooter wasn’t just stupid and clueless? Because at this point, that seems to be the governor’s only defense.

Dems to GOP: What’s up with all this election fraud you guys are pulling?

The Hill:

House Democrats on Friday amplified their pressure on the national Republican Party to come clean with its ties to operatives accused of election fraud.

Republicans for years have warned that voting fraud is frequent and Democrats are benefiting from it, but recent fraud allegations against GOP operatives in Florida and Virginia have undermined at least the second half of that argument.

Rep. Charles Gonzalez (Texas), senior Democrat on the House Administration Committee’s subpanel on elections, hasn’t overlooked the recent episodes, calling Friday for the Republican National Committee (RNC) to “give prosecutors and police the facts so they can properly investigate these allegations and bring all appropriate charges.

“We know of hundreds of suspicious registration forms. We know of attempts to destroy legitimate registration forms. We do not know how many other misdeeds remain to be discovered,” he added. “The Republican National Committee needs to act and to do so promptly.”

It’s worth noting that all of this fraud Republicans are connected with would not be stopped by their voter ID laws and voter roll purges. In other words, their voter supression laws are carefully designed not to interfere with their own election fraud efforts.

For the bazillionth time, if Republicans hate election fraud so much, they should stop doing it

Los Angeles Times:

A man who was being paid to register voters by the Republican Party of Virginia was arrested Thursday after he was seen dumping eight registration forms into a dumpster.

Colin Small, 31, was working as a supervisor as part of a registration operation in eight swing states financed by the Republican National Committee. Small, of Phoenixville, Pa., was first hired by Strategic Allied Consulting, a firm that was fired by the party after suspect voter forms surfaced in Florida and other states.

The owner of a store in Harrisonburg, Va., told a local television station that he became suspicious when he saw a car with Pennsylvania plates dump an envelope in back of his store. He recovered the envelope and alerted authorities.

“He made a mistake and he’s being charged with it, which we fully support,” said Sean Spicer, a spokesman for the Republican National Committee. The committee paid more than $3 million to state committees to finance the get-out-the-vote operation.

Two points. First and most obvious, Strategic Allied should be shut down and Sproul should be rotting in prison. Two, dumping voter registrations in a dumpster where they won’t be connected with you is not a “mistake”; i.e., “Oops! I accidentally drove across town to dump these voter registrations in a restaurant dumpster — I’m such a butterfingers!” It’s a deliberate act. It’s a crime.

Republican like to talk a good game, but — form registration fraud to Wall Street corruption to mass shootings — they’re incredibly soft on crime

Fraud scandal ends GOP registration effort

Bloomberg News:

The Republican National Committee ended efforts to sign up new voters before the deadline in key states for the presidential race because of questions raised over registration applications tied to the party.

Republican parties in Florida, Colorado, Nevada, North Carolina and Virginia — all states that both campaigns view as competitive — fired Glen Allen, Virginia-based Strategic Allied Consulting, the company in charge of registrations, said Kirsten Kukowski, a spokeswoman for the Republican National Committee. The national committee also canceled its contract with the company, its only vendor signing up new voters, Kukowski said.

The five states have registration deadlines from Oct. 6 to Oct. 15. Stopping efforts before then could hurt Republican nominee Mitt Romney in his bid to unseat Democratic President Barack Obama, said Lance deHaven-Smith, a Florida State University political science professor in Tallahassee.

“In any swing state that’s going to be significant because these elections are so close,” deHaven-Smith said. “This gives an advantage to Obama.”

For their part, Republicans say this won’t hurt their chances at all, because coincidence is on their side. “It was wrapping up at the same time this happened, so there is no impact,” Kukowski told Bloomberg in an e-mail. That’s almost certainly BS, they’d keep registering voters until the last day they legally could.

It’s nice to see Republican cheating come back to bite them in the ass. They were trying to gain an unfair advantage against Democrats through trickery and fraud. The result: a disadvantage in several swing states in an election projected to be close. You really don’t often see irony and poetic justice this clearly outside of reruns of The Twilight Zone.