(The image of the ballot box is from a website called The Moderate Voice, while the image of the guns is from the website City Limits.)
These two images show just how out of touch with reality the Republicans are these days. They consider voter fraud and gun ownership to be important issues, but the truth is that only one of these is a real issue affecting Americans, while the other is a false issue -- and the Republicans have chosen to address the false issue and obstruct any action being taken on the real issue.
They have passed laws in many states, the Voter ID laws, that are supposed to cure the "problem" of voter fraud. But is that a real problem? No. Professor Justin Levitt of Loyola University Law School, an expert in constitutional law and the law of democracy, has been studying voter fraud. Here is some of what he had to say:
I’ve been tracking allegations of fraudfor years now, including the fraud ID laws are designed to stop. In 2008, when the Supreme Court weighed in on voter ID, I looked at every single allegation put before the Court. And since then, I’ve been following reports wherever they crop up.
To be clear, I’m not just talking about prosecutions. I track any specific, credible allegation that someone may have pretended to be someone else at the polls, in any way that an ID law could fix.
So far, I’ve found about 31 different incidents (some of which involve multiple ballots) since 2000, anywhere in the country.
To put this in perspective, the 31 incidents below come in the context of general, primary, special, and municipal elections from 2000 through 2014. In general and primary elections alone, more than 1 billion ballotswere cast in that period.
Some of these 31 incidents have been thoroughly investigated (including some prosecutions). But many have not. Based on how other claims have turned out, I’d bet that some of the 31 will end up debunked: a problem with matching people from one big computer list to another, or a data entry error, or confusion between two different people with the same name, or someone signing in on the wrong line of a pollbook.
Only 31 cases between 2000 and 2014 -- out of more than a billion votes? That doesn't sound like much of a problem to me. That works out to be an infinitesimal .000000031% of voter fraud during those years that could have been prevented by the GOP Voter ID laws. That certainly sounds like a false issue.
Meanwhile, in that same period between 2000 and 2014, there has been approximately 435,000 gun-related deaths in this country (figuring an average of 30,000 deaths a year and only counting 2014 as half a year). That means it is 14,032 times more likely that a person will be killed by a gun than that a person will commit voter fraud. Any sane person would quickly realize that the gun deaths are a much more important issue -- and the issue that should be addressed by politicians in this country.
This poses the question -- why are the Republicans trying to fix a fake issue and ignoring an important issue (which they could save thousands of lives by fixing)? The answer of course is POLITICS. They know the people least likely to have a picture ID are most likely to be Democratic voters, so keeping those people from voting enhances the Republican chances of being elected. And passing any reasonable gun law (like closing the background check loopholes) would incur the wrath of the NRA, which could lower their chances of being re-elected (especially in a heavily Republican district or in a party primary).
In other words, the Republicans are putting their own political well-being over what is good for the country and would save many thousands of American lives. That's just sad, and they should be ashamed of themselves. Unfortunately, modern right-wing Republican officials have no sense of shame.
The charts below were made with information from ABC News:
