Voter Suppression - Part 2

I recently wrote about voter suppression, focussing on Florida. Today on MSNBC's The Cycle, the topic was debated in a broader sense. As expected, the three "lefties" Steve Kornacki, Toure and Krystal Ball opined that the new voter ID laws were just a cover for suppressing votes, and in so doing, disenfranchising legitimate voters; voters who tend vote Democratic - the poor, the elderly, the young and people of color. The one "righty", S.E. Cupp came to the defense of the laws by suggesting that they're not about voter suppression, but voter fraud. One panelist ridiculed this point of view using the statistic that there have been only 87 instances of voter fraud among the last three-hundred million votes cast. Cupp's response was something like, "well, what are we going to do about those 87?"

Now I don't know about the source or veracity of the 87 fraud instances of 300 million votes. But here are some facts I pointed out in my blog regarding Florida, a state with about 12 million voters:

• ACLU reported only 49 voter fraud investigations in Florida since 2008;
• Orlando Sentinel reported since 2000 there were 178 alleged voter fraud allegations resulting 11 arrests and 7 convictions.

In Pennsylvania, which also passed a voter ID law under the guise of voter fraud, I wrote that the Republican speaker of the Pennsylvania house said "it's gonna allow Governor Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania". What I learned later was that the Governor who signed that law, Tom Corbett, was Pennsylvania Attorney General from January 2005 through January 2011. Proving unequivocally that voter fraud is running amok in Pennsylvania, during that span Corbett's office prosecuted not one case of voter fraud. Not one! 


I guess if his office had prosecuted one case of fraud, S.E. Cupp would ask what we're going to do about that one.