Such libel she perpetrates against a couple of hundred thousand innocent Wisconsin voters!
We're talking about State Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, who, during a post-election interview on WISN-TV in Milwaukee, suggested that the GOP voter-fraud bogeymen gave President Obama his win in the Badger state. Darling said that had the GOP's silly Voter ID law (forestalled temporarily by court order in a pending case) been in place Nov. 6, it would have "absolutely" made a difference in the final tally:
“We’re looking at all sorts of different precincts and all sorts of same-day registrations,” Darling went on. “I know people will go, ‘We don’t have fraud and abuse in our elections.'
Darling's ed herrings aside, here's the obvious logic problem with her wildly irresponsible claim:
Obama carried Wisconsin by some 200,000 votes, nearly the entire adult and child population of the City of Madison. So if lack of the Voter ID law was "absolutely" the difference, logic informs us that Darling thinks 200,000 individuals somehow defauded the system to deny Romney the win.
Darling isn't the only Wisconsin Republican worried that Democrats successfully pulled off massive stealth vote fraud to put Obama over the top. State Sen. Glenn Grothmann, R-West Bend, is considered one of the most conservative elected officials in the nation. But while he doesn't have the protective cloak of faux moderate Darling, he was only slightly more nutty. From DailyKos.com:
After soundly defeating Democratic challenger Tanya Lohr last week in his re-election bid, Grothman told Madison-based radio talk show host John Slyvester that Barack Obama won re-election to the Presidency and Tammy Baldwin won Wisconsin's open U.S. Senate seat thanks to "fraud". However, Grothman gave one last parting shot at Lohr, claiming that the New World Order was behind her campaign!
Continued GOP fear-mongering and meme-spreading aside, just how on god's green earth could at least 200,000 Wisconsin Obama voters have engaged in fraud, especially since no such fraud was noticed by all the existing, time-tested, reliable, non-Voter ID election machinery that checks in new and returning voters before they ever get a ballot?
Indeed, how is it that not a single such instance of fraud was spotted by "True the Vote" conservative observers who showed up at more than one suspicious (in their minds) ward or precinct, looking for expected malfeasance and apparently finding zilch.
Skirting all of that nothingness, Darling slyly suggested on the WISN program that her Republican colleagues are still "looking at" all sorts of indications of -- well,k something. Thus she further implied but did not offer a shred of evidence pointing to fraud by even one voter.
As for 200,000 or more such imagined acts? That's at a level way beyond anything that's reasonably possible, even if you presume it was a mass operation conducted by a vast criminal conspiracy reaching deep into Republican-controlled state government. And never mind the great mass of local election officials, many of whom performed with admirable efficiency on Nov. 6 despite GOP election tinkering that did away with days of early voting opportunities.
So, Senator Dah-Link: Put up or shut up. If you insist on libeling hundreds of thousands of bonafide Wisconsin voters, send proof of your claims to law enforcement and the Government Accountability Board. Otherwise, Wisconsin citizens should feel free to simply deposit your latest, reckless, inflammatory rhetoric in the Joe McCarthy circular file. Same to you, Glenn Grothman, and same to any and all Wisconsin GOP politicos who continue scaring voters with baseless innuendo and outright false claims.
Meanwhile, we're tossing a small dart at WISN-TV host Mike Gousha, who asked Darling the rather lame Voter ID difference-making question and didn't follow up by pointing out the underlying numerical illogic of her reply. Don't be an enabler, Mike. Be a truth seeker.
ADDENDUM: Shortly after I posted this blog on Thursday night, I noticed a ribbon ad running atop the page here at Uppity. It implored readers to help Florida Republican Allan West, a tea party idol, overcome "vote fraud" by his Democratic congressional challenger, who won by nearly 3,000 votes -- a margin so great no automatic recount is required. Leaving aside just why the GOP thinks Uppity readers would support a tea party lunatic, note that West's charges are part of the Republican meme continued in our state by the likes of Darling and Grothman: If Republicans lose in elections, it can only be because of Democratic Party dirty tricks. Of course, a greater example of psychological projection you will not easily find. In Florida, for example, the GOP's vote-suppression campaign included such dirty tricks as using hired guns to register new voters, then throwing away the applications. The outfit under investigation also was hired by the Wisconsin GOP to work in this state. Nevertheless, Allan West, among other GOP hypocrites, claims it's the other side that's to blame for fouling our elections.