A new undercover video by conservative activist James O’Keefe appears to show someone going to a Washington, D.C., voting precinct and pretending to be U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (in photo). The person could have signed the voter roll and voted (but didn’t, saying he wanted to go back to his car and get his ID). The video is supposed to be a gotcha on Holder, who has said that voter fraud isn’t a problem. But the fact that it is possible to commit voter fraud doesn’t mean it is a significant problem – which it isn’t, as a number of studies have shown. As Dan Amira of New York Magazine noted: “If you wanted to, you could risk five years in prison and a $10,000 fine to vote for someone else, but we’re not sure why you would.” Why risk all that when the fraudulent vote is highly unlikely to alter the outcome of an election? And getting a large group of people to vote fraudulently would be even more difficult to pull off, which is why it doesn’t happen.
Just as Mitt Romney is closing in on the GOP presidential nomination, a new USA Today/Gallup poll shows him losing ground among independent voters in 12 swing states. Romney has dropped 10 percentage points since last fall, and President Obama now leads him among independents by 9 percentage points. Most of that gap is from independent women, 51 percent of whom favor Obama. GOP challenger Rick Santorum does much worse with independents in swing states, as Obama leads him 53 to 32 percent.
Though George W. Bush’s father and brother Jeb have endorsed Mitt Romney in recent days, the immediate past president is remaining quiet and neutral — living in Texas, giving speeches and working on his presidential library, noted Politico. Republican strategist and former Bush administration official Scott Jennings characterized Bush’s detachment as evidence of his lack of “any insecurities that need to be salved by injecting himself into a presidential primary.” Meanwhile, Democrats including President Obama are happy to bring up the Bush-era wars and the economic downturn that began on his watch.
A new undercover video by conservative activist James O’Keefe appears to show someone going to a Washington, D.C., voting precinct and pretending to be U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder (in photo). The person could have signed the voter roll and voted (but didn’t, saying he wanted to go back to his car and get his ID). The video is supposed to be a gotcha on Holder, who has said that voter fraud isn’t a problem. But the fact that it is possible to commit voter fraud doesn’t mean it is a significant problem – which it isn’t, as a number of studies have shown. As Dan Amira of New York Magazine noted: “If you wanted to, you could risk five years in prison and a $10,000 fine to vote for someone else, but we’re not sure why you would.” Why risk all that when the fraudulent vote is highly unlikely to alter the outcome of an election? And getting a large group of people to vote fraudulently would be even more difficult to pull off, which is why it doesn’t happen.
