Handel's Lying Rhetoric On Voter Fraud in Action

More than willing to lie and stir up bigotry to win.


So, the other day I decided to vote in the Kennesaw City Council elections.

Unfortunately, it turned out that while I have a Kennesaw address, I'm not actually districted to vote for Kennesaw's council elections -- which will make a very odd conversation if I ever have to explain why I was on Kennesaw City's Youth Council, an actual government position that I reported to under the Kennesaw City Council.

Anyway, an elderly, white woman after voting went over to a seated poll worker (also an elderly person, which seems to be the only kind of poll worker in Cobb County) and asked him, "Did you see anyone vote twice?"

He looked up at her, confused. "You voted twice?"

She looked down at him, "No, I mean did you see anyone vote twice? I heard there were lots of people who voted twice in the Presidential election."

"No, I don't think so." replied the man.

"I guess that doesn't ever happen around here," the woman went on. "It would never happen around here."

"No, it wouldn't," the man concluded.

The underlying premise of the conversation that I feel the woman was getting at was that President Obama won the election because a ton of people decided to vote twice. And those people of course weren't from mostly-white Kennesaw. That would never happen "around here."

The implication is the same canard that Handel and other GOP politicians who don't give a damn about the truth keep foisting on their base -- the Democrats are breaking electoral rules to have their (minority and "illegal immigrant") base vote in ways and in a number of times they're not allowed to.

Of course, there's no actual evidence behind any of this. But that's not the point. The point is to mobilize a base of ignorant voters behind lies that tell them that these racial minority and foreign others are taking over their country. It doesn't matter whether it's true or not. It's just bigotry, and that's a strategy that's worked for them since Nixon's southern strategy.

The worst part is, the Republican Party has been involved for years in election fraud efforts to suppress the voting rights of registered, legal voters -- and none of that is getting nearly as much play in the press as their nonsense conspiracy theories about undocumented immigrants voting or minorities voting multiple times to elect Obama.