JayUtah
Penultimate Amazing
Just another example of Robert's hate for democracy.
Certainly a distaste for the organs of democracy as constituted in the United States. It took me a while to realize the import of what our duct-tape helmed commentator was saying about "carte blanche" to commit voter fraud. There really does appear to be an arrogant belief among radical conservatives that unless they personally police the polling stations, the opposing party(ies) cannot be trusted not to stuff the ballot box. There is no faith in the election workers, no faith in the presently constituted law enforcement, no faith in the courts.
And yes, historically these "poll watching" activities have had the effect of intimidating and disenfranchising legitimate voters, especially those that would tend to favor other parties. Hence what passes under the guise of poll-watching has been shown to function more like poll-filtering, which is electoral fraud.
Few defendants will participate in a consent decree unless it is fairly obvious they will not prevail in court. The consent decree allows the defendant (in most cases) to escape a criminal conviction while accepting that they require special conditions and monitoring to regulate their behavior. While we cannot say that the RNC was guilty of the activities that precipitated the consent decree, we can say that they took the contrite way out.
How about the Professional Fraudsters of the Republican Party who gave Florida and the 2000 election to Bush? Why no mention of that?
That's receding into history far enough to lose relevance. I think it's more important to consider the recent registration activities of Strategic Allied Consulting under contract to the RNC. If you want to talk about electoral fraud in the 2012 election, look there. There are arrests and prosecutions, with a paper trail leading all the way to the top. Would SAC's activities have changed the outcome of the election? Probably not. It's significant only in that the RNC knowingly hired a firm with a history of shady registration practices, who finally got caught at it while holding an RNC contract.
The only legally actionable evidence of systematic attempts at voter fraud by a major political party in the 2012 election are against the RNC.