The Las Vegas Sun newspaper has an editorial that examines the twisted process of Republican claims of fraud and the result that these lies then encourage Republican voters to engage in electoral fraud.
The story also calls out the current crop of Republician politicians seeking re election on The Big Lie.
Evidence of real voter fraud suggests GOP’s claims are merely projection
For “Stop the steal” Republicans, recent events in Nevada and Pennsylvania reveal a couple of inconvenient truths about voter fraud.
One is that when cheating occurs, which is rare, cases are investigated and violators are prosecuted. That was evidenced last week by an announcement from Nevada Attorney General Aaron Ford that charges had been filed against a Las Vegas man
(Donald Hartle ) for allegedly casting more than one ballot, and by news that Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick had paid a Pennsylvania poll worker a bounty he had offered for evidence of fraudulent voting.
..... The reality about the Big Lie is that it was investigated in state after state after state, and not a single one found evidence of substantial fraud that would have changed the outcome of the election.
Meanwhile, it’s become common to discover that Republicans, not Democrats, are behind the few cases of voter fraud that occur.
That outcome is an essential goal of the Big Lie. By promoting the falsehood, Republican leaders are trying to normalize the idea of voter fraud and provide a permission structure for their followers to commit fraud themselves. The delusion goes like this: The other side is doing it, so we should too. This is how democracies die, and voter fraud charges are the stock-in-trade for would-be dictators across the world for precisely this reason.
That’s certainly the case in Nevada. This year, for instance, 53-year-old Craig Frank of Las Vegas pleaded guilty to voting in both Arkansas and Clark County during the 2016 election. Frank was granted two years probation under a plea bargain. And in the 2012 election, 56-year-old Las Vegas resident Roxanne Rubin was arrested while trying to vote twice at two different polls. Rubin said her purpose in attempting to cast two ballots was “to show how easy it would be to commit voter fraud with just a signature.” Instead, she demonstrated how effective existing voter integrity measures are. Like Frank, she also pleaded guilty under a plea deal, in which she agreed to pay nearly $2,500 to the state, perform community service and complete an impulse control course.
There have been other examples of voter fraud and irregularities, but nothing on the scale that the proponents of the Big Lie would have Americans believe. For example, the GOP alleged that the ballots of 1,506 dead people were cast in Nevada in the 2020 election, but Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske — a Republican — concluded after a review that 10 such cases had occurred. Cegavske’s office referred all 10 of those cases for prosecution. The party affiliation of those 10 are not yet known.
This brings up another reality of voter integrity: The system is overseen by election officials and volunteers, both Republican and Democrat, who are committed to maintaining fair and accurate elections. It’s abhorrent that in promoting the Big Lie, GOP leadership is impugning the work of these individuals and vilifying them to the point where they and their families are being subjected to threats and intimidation by crazed extremists and members of violent right-wing groups.
By promoting the Big Lie, Republicans are trying to normalize the idea of voter fraud and provide a permission structure for their followers to commit fraud themselves ...