Voter Truth & Consequences - Maybe!

Can’t the Republican National Committee Challenge Democrat Voter Fraud?

To paraphrase President Reagan's famous line, "Well, there you go again!" I just recently countered a myth about the Pope having JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, to write her rendition of the Holy Bible based on her famous characters. In that blog, I admonished the perpetrators for stealing a copyrighted story by a 'Waterford Whispers News', a satirical website and publishing it as truth and other readers spreading it without the verification of facts.

This one is about a huge blogoshere whoopsie on how facts are twisted to support a conspiracy theory, another disservice to the truth. It is further complicated because the blogger's intent may be honestly, wrongly misguided or just plain malicious; both lead to the same conclusion: the readership gets a specious story that's superficially plausible, but actually wrong because people unknowingly pass it on anyway.

In a nutshell: A 1982 Consent Decree was extended in a March 2012 U.S. Appeals Judge’s ruling denying the RNC their request to “vacate” (i.e., void) the 1982 Consent Decree in a 59-page Appellate ruling. This argument suggests that due to this thirty year old legal agreement between the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee, the RNC is legally barred from stopping voter fraud altogether. The RNC shot themselves in the head!

"The RNC engaged in a process known as “Voter Caging,” which is dubiously legal and highly controversial, but still a method that some officials and partisans use to clean up voter rolls. [still used by all sides of the political spectrum too] The way voter caging works is that some entity (say, the RNC) will send mail to particular addresses throughout a state. If the mail is returned as “undeliverable,” the RNC (or whoever) would then challenge the person living at that address as an invalid voter, because their given address doesn’t actually work, and therefore is presumably not their legal address. This process is controversial (the liberal Brennan Center calls it “notoriously unreliable” because of flaws in the postal system), and is considered illegal if used primarily on minority voters due to the potential for discrimination. That allegation – of racism – is precisely what led to the original Consent Decree."

At the end of this blogger's post, readers are enlisted into actions like quitting the GOP, stopping GOP donations and to spread the word on this travesty. These points only compound the damage that conspiracy theorists foment; it gives them life to grow out and onward even further. 

Bottom line: "No, it is not true that the RNC cannot act to prevent voter fraud, though it is true that it is hobbled [slowed down] in any efforts to do so by a quite arguably out of date legal document that can be, should be, and is being challenged in the court system at this very moment.[with ongoing vigilance into the future] All the conspiracy theorizing on the internet, however, will not transform this inconvenience into a mandate for election theft. Those looking for an explanation for the GOP’s failures had better look at the actual causes of lost elections – namely, bad messaging, poor campaigning, an inferior ground game, or a weak candidate – and leave the conspiracy theorizing about obscure legal documents alone."