I am too lazy to do a real diary, but let’s just say the voter fraud that is being caught is all in the favor of Republicans, and all of the voter suppression that is going on is 100% Republican.
A 74-year-old woman tasked with opening envelopes sent by Miami-Dade County voters with their completed mail ballots was arrested Friday after co-workers caught her illegally marking ballots, resulting in an unknown — but small — number of fraudulent votes being cast for mayoral candidate Raquel Regalado.
This woman was either an employee or a volunteer for the elections board. Her job was to open up the envelopes containing mail-in ballots, count the pages, then hand them to a second employee who would then run the ballots through the optical scanner. Apparently, this “volunteer” happened to have a pen in her pocket, and she was caught marking ballots for one of the Republicans running for Mayor.
Regalado, a Republican, is running for the nonpartisan mayor’s post against incumbent Carlos Gimenez, who is also a Republican. As strong mayor, Gimenez appointed Elections Supervisor Christina White and is ultimately in charge of her department.
Granted it’s R vs R in this election, so no D’s were directly harmed. My assumption — if she detected an undervote (no vote for Mayor), she would mark that ballot. Only 2 ballots were caught, but who knows how many others were altered before she was caught.
Again — R’s have to be delighted in some ways with their people being caught committing voter fraud, because it gives them excuses to pass more voting restrictions. However, no sort of photo id would have protected the vote here. First, these were vote-by-mail, the way that R’s get around ever having to produce a photo id. Second, it wasn’t the voter committing the fraud, it was someone on the inside.
If you can’t win, cheat, I guess that’s the motto. I was super steamed up in 2004 after the Sununu campaign in NH got busted committing fraud — and there were no penalties. Yes, some people went to jail before being released on a technicality. But even had the conviction stood, Sununu would not have lost his Senate seat. The system simply doesn’t penalize the cheaters. I get why. If, hypothetically, cheaters paid big penalties, then every time a D won election, the R’s would accuse them of cheating. Long court battle ensues, most of the time there would be an acquittal, but sometimes you'd get an Oregon-style jury who would convict just because the jury was R’s and the candidate was a D.
Still, I hope this woman rots in jail for a while. Even though I don’t care much about who is the mayor of Miami.
