Republicans are gearing up for the 2012 elections by trying to enact as many laws as they can to suppress Democratic votes–requiring photo IDs, shortening early voting periods, and making it harder to register to vote. All of these place a strongly disproportionate disadvantage on voters who most commonly vote for Democrats.

The new laws are based upon unsubstantiated and politically motivated claims of nation-wide voter fraud. It is ironic because the claims themselves are fraudulent; there is no evidence of such widespread voter fraud. Bush spent five years and millions of taxpayer dollars in a nation-wide search to find such fraud and found only 86 prosecutable cases, mostly in small-town elections for sheriff and the like. The claims of nation-wide fraud are mostly based upon temp workers hired by voting advocacy organizations. The temp workers falsify registration forms to get paid more; the false forms are weeded out ahead of time and never result in actual votes cast.

This non-issue is then taken, along with scattered apocryphal stories of voter fraud, to create an imaginary sense of need for controls, passed by right-wing politicians, which will–quite coincidentally we are supposed to believe–favor right-wing politicians. A non-existent crime wave fabricated so that the laws quashing legitimate Democratic votes can be passed. That’s the real election fraud. We need laws to protect us against that.

In the meantime, the greatest case of actual election fraud–Katherine Harris disenfranchising tens of thousands of Democratic voters with a mostly-manufactured “felon’s list” in 2000, resulting in trillions of dollars and thousands of lives lost due to the malfeasance of the Bush presidency–goes wholly unpunished. Quite the contrary–Harris was rewarded with a safe seat in the House.