Memo to Bob Balink re: Voter Fraud -- there's no "there" there

The Supreme Court is hearing the Indiana voter ID law that voter fraud alarmists like our own El Paso County Clerk Bob Balink likes to hype. The truth? There is no "there" there when it comes to voter fraud of the kind that Republican operatives are claiming:

It's rare to hear the Republican supporters of voter ID laws admit that there's no evidence that voter impersonation, the kind of voter fraud the laws are meant to stop, occurs.

But that's just what happened yesterday when Warren Olney of KCRW's To The Point pressed Todd Rokita (R), Indiana's secretary of state and a named defendant in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board.

Have any cases of voter impersonation been prosecuted in Indiana? was the simple question. And as Olney pressed, Rokita went from one fallback argument to another. It started with this revealing exchange:

Q: ...Have there been cases in Indiana where people represented themselves as somebody else in order to be able to vote?

Rokita: Oh yeah, we suspect it happens all the time.

Q: You suspect?

Rokita: Mm hmm.

Q: Have you got any cases proven?

Rokita: Well, are you saying you want to define whether or not there’s fraud based on whether or not it’s prosecuted? Is that the question?

From there, Rokita argued that there is fraud (it "exists almost on a daily basis"), but that it's nearly impossible to prosecute due to the ephemeral nature of the crime. And it tends not to be a priority for prosecutors due to all the other violent and horrible stuff they need to prosecute. And even if there hasn't been any such voter fraud (and I'm not saying that there isn't), we have a right to protect ourselves from it; "You have the right to build a firehouse before you get burned by the fire."

It bears mentioning here that the Justice Department under George Bush has indeed made prosecuting voter fraud a priority -- and came up empty. That fact hasn't stopped voter ID law proponents from claiming hundreds of demonstrated cases of voter fraud. It's quite a morass of innuendo, but the Brennan Center (which has filed an amicus brief with the law's opponents) undertook the staggering task of disproving every one of those claims one by one. It's a 75 page document (pdf).

This doesn't mean the attempt to tie voter fraud issues to illegal immigrants for political purposes. Bob Balink is on the Republican Party's front lines on this issue.

We will not let him get away with it.