Trump Voter Commits Election Fraud

For years Republicans have been claiming that the country is rife with election fraud as an excuse to place more restrictions on minorities and Democrats to suppress their votes. Now there's a bona fide instance of fraudulent voting. By a Trump supporter.

A woman in Iowa was arrested this week on suspicion of voting twice in the general election, court and police records show.

Terri Lynn Rote, a 55-year-old Des Moines resident, was booked Thursday on a first-degree charge of election misconduct, according to Polk County Jail records. The charge is considered a Class D felony under Iowa state law.

Rote was released Friday after posting $5,000 bond. A preliminary hearing is scheduled for Nov. 7.

The Des Moines Register reported that Rote is a registered Republican who cast two ballots in the general election: an early-voting ballot at the Polk County Election Office and another at a county satellite voting location, according to police records.

Rote hadn’t planned on voting twice but said it was “a spur-of-the-moment thing” when she walked by the satellite voting location, she told The Washington Post in a phone interview Saturday.

“I don’t know what came over me,” Rote said.

She added she has been a supporter of Donald Trump since early in his campaign, after Republican candidate Mike Huckabee dropped out of the primary race.

Rote told Iowa Public Radio that she cast her first ballot for Trump but feared it would be changed to a vote for Hillary Clinton.

“The polls are rigged,” Rote told the radio station.

Leigh Munsil, an editor for the Blaze, noted on Twitter that Rote was the same woman who had caucused for Trump earlier this year.

This kind of fraud is exactly that Trump is implicitly telling his voters to commit. When he says the polls are rigged, he's actually telling his voters to rig the polls. Since Hillary is cheating, the logic goes, Trump supporters have to cheat too. And so they are.

Trump has also told his supporters to "monitor" the polls. This is nothing but a blatant attempt to harass and intimidate minority voters. Trump is asking his supporters to threaten minorities with violence if they show up to exercise their constitutional rights.

The Republican Party of New Mexico is even harassing their own voters, threatening to expose them if they vote for Democrats. The Republicans sent out a mailer that stated, "When the Democrats win the election and you didn't do your part to stop it... Your neighbors will know." Now, how could they know? It's supposed to be a secret ballot. How can the Republican Party know how you voted, unless they commit a crime to find out?

The fact is, over the last four presidential elections there has been a significant amount of manipulation of elections by Republican officials: in 2000 in Jeb Bush's Florida Republican operatives threw a hundred thousand voters off the rolls in coordination with George Bush's Texas. In 2004 Ohio closed polling stations in minority areas, creating huge delays that prevented thousands of people from voting. Bush won those states by the tiniest of margins; there's no question that manipulations by Republican officials threw both those elections to Bush.

The Bush administration fired US attorneys who wouldn't play the voter suppression game at the behest of Karl Rove, who was forced to resign when the scandal was revealed. Voter ID laws were passed explicitly to prevent minorities and Democrats from voting in Texas and Pennsylvania (Republicans in both states acknowledged this publicly). In states like Ohio Republicans gerrymandered Democrats into a few crazy-shaped districts to pack them with 90% Democrats, while creating a large number of districts with only 55-60% Republicans to allow them to win more House seats, even though there are more Democrats in the state.

In the 2012 election Democratic House candidates nationwide got a million more votes than Republicans, but because of gerrymandering Republicans won a substantial majority of House seats. In 2008, before the gerrymandering, Democrats won the majority.

The fact is, in-person voter fraud is vanishingly rare. The vast majority of fraud by voters is committed with absentee ballots. The most common fraud is children or nursing home staff filling out absentee ballots for senile elderly, or parents filling out absentee ballots for children who are away at college. This kind of fraud is favored by rich white people, and voter ID laws do absolutely nothing to prevent it.

The wealthy can commit fraud by voting in multiple jurisdictions: rich New Yorkers like Donald Trump will vote absentee in New York and in person in Florida. Anne Coulter got in hot water a few years back for lying on voter registration forms. Typically, they claim residency in one state to get special tax treatment on their homes (homesteading), but then vote in another jurisdiction. A national voter registration database would fix this (and also the problem with people remaining on voter rolls for years after they move to another state), but for some strange reason Republicans resist this.

So when Trump says that the election is rigged, in one way it's true: Republicans officials have been rigging elections for at least the last 20 years. Since Trump has pissed off so many in the Republican establishment, he's afraid they'll use their clout to make him lose.