Voter fraud. Sounds bad but is nothing compared to the possible software fraud that may or may not exist in our new voting machines. Strange that government can now check your library records, listen in on your phone calls, knows what sites you visit on the Internet and wants to enter your bedroom. When it comes to checking the software on voting machines its hands off.

So, our most basic and precious right can be tampered with by companies both domestic and foreign. Funny that Bush and his gang have little or no interest in that area of voter fraud.

Here in Kentucky, we know from voter fraud. In fact, the secret ballot in the United States was first developed for and used in Louisville because voting fraud was so widespread there.

It's improved so much that in 2004, when republicans tried to recruit "challengers" to intimidate voters in poor and minority precincts in Louisville, the outcry was such they had to back down. Not to mention it was hard to find republicans who lived in those precincts.

Kentucky has had voter ID requirements for more than a decade. You can't get into a polling booth without showing an ID with an address that matches the one on the registration list, and you better be able to sign your name the exact same way you signed it the last time you voted, because the former one is right there in the registration book for comparison.

So the idea that anyone could vote who was not entitled to vote, or vote in the wrong precinct, or vote more than once, or vote in place of somebody else, is so impossible as to be laughable.

Maybe because we've had those protections for so long, or because they apply to everybody in every precinct in every election, but they don't seem to stop anybody from voting.

Now vote BUYING is a whole 'nother game, at which Kentuckians excel. It was common and rarely prosecuted until the Usurper appointed Greg van Tatenhove US Attorney for Kentucky's Eastern District. He started cracking down on vote buying: investigating, indicting, convicting and imprisoning quite a few people - almost all white, middle-class males who may have been registered democrats but voted republican.

The only voter fraud going on in this country is the fraudulent argument republicans are trying to use to scare voters into accepting onerous rules that disenfranchise non-white, non-WASP, non-wealthy non-republicans.

only 45 years ago, the Dixicrats who would become the modern Republican Party did not have to use the term voter fraud to keep the various minority groups, mostly African Americans, from voting.

More honest terms like poll tax, literacy test and Restrictive and Arbitrary Registration Practices (http://www.umich.edu/~lawrace/disenfranchise1.htm) would usually guarantee that only the white people, excuse me I meant to say only the Right People (pun intended) would be allowed to vote. Now the code word is voter fraud

The voter rights division of Justice has devoted large sums of time and money to making sure minority voters have no right to vote:

Staff Opinions Banned In Voting Rights Cases

Criticism of Justice Dept.'s Rights Division Grows

By Dan Eggen

Washington Post Staff Writer

Saturday, December 10, 2005; Page A03

The Justice Department has barred staff attorneys from offering recommendations in major Voting Rights Act cases, marking a significant change in the procedures meant to insulate such decisions from politics, congressional aides and current and former employees familiar with the issue said.

Disclosure of the change comes amid growing public criticism of Justice Department decisions to approve Republican-engineered plans in Texas and Georgia that were found to hurt minority voters by career staff attorneys who analyzed the plans. Political appointees overruled staff findings in both cases.

The policy was implemented in the Georgia case, said a Justice employee who, like others interviewed, spoke on condition of anonymity because of fears of retaliation. A staff memo urged rejecting the state's plan to require photo identification at the polls because it would harm black voters.

Would someone connect the dots already? If voter fraud is so important to Repubs, then let's start with a high profile case usable as a cautionary example-- Anne Coulter.

See http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp/news/article_display.jsp?vnu_content_id=1003346999

Unfortunately the article does not differentiate between the concept of fraud by voters and the more dangerous problems of rigging elections.

There is a limit as to how effective using physical persons to vote multiple times, vote the dead and the like can be. They all require a person to show up and commit an illegal act. During the time the polls are open there is a limit as to how many votes a single person can place since, in general, they would have to go to different polling places to avoid suspicion and arrest. Additionally there is a limit to how many people are willing to break the law for any politician or party.

This boogie man argument is another example of "welfare queen" stereotyping.

Much more dangerous is VOTE FRAUD by rigging the system. In the old days you needed multiple people placed throughout the system to add votes by "stuffing" the ballot boxes. This type of fraud was allegedly honed to a fine edge in the 60's by Mayor Dailey in Chicago. It took a big organization to pull this off but it is much more effective than working with individual voters

With the current crop of computerized voting machines it appears that one person can do the work of many. We have seen the sort of numbers that come out of these machines. More votes than registered voters in the precinct, negative numbers and integer overflows.

This evidence points to massive VOTE FRAUD that you won't see many Republicans rushing out to investigate.

Albuquerque's Voter ID law was recently struck down by the courts. If you voted in person, you had to show a valid ID; if you mailed in an absentee ballot, nada.

Clearly, this was unequal treatment. But it's funny that Republicans seem to be happy as clams with minimal safeguards on the mail-in vote. Mail-in is the easiest way to cheat. If one were an apartment owner, or ran a retirement home, or Alzheimers' facility, for example, one might send for, receive, and vote vast numbers of ballots that might otherwise be wasted on registered Democrats. Retail voter fraud, as it were. Not an option for the average citizen.

You know, the newspapers and police never got around to investigating that "13 year old boy" who received a voter registration in the mail. Who sent in the application? And why were they so stupid as to send it to his home? It was almost as if they wanted this to be a big news story. Coincidentally, I'm sure, the parents and their pro-bono attorneys were from the Republican Party.