All that Republican screaming about voter fraud and stolen elections can’t quite hide the fact that most cases of actual fraud come from Republicans. The latest case in point: Kim Taylor, the wife of an Iowa county supervisor and former congressional candidate, was just convicted of 52 counts in a ballot fraud case.
Taylor’s husband Jeremy ran in a Republican congressional primary in 2020 and, when he lost that race, ran successfully for county supervisor. Federal prosecutors say that in both races, she “submitted or caused others to submit dozens of voter registrations, absentee ballot request forms, and absentee ballots containing false information. Taylor completed and signed voter forms without voters’ permission and told others that they could sign on behalf of relatives who were not present.”
The Des Moines Register reports that Taylor, a native of Vietnam, targeted “voters of Vietnamese heritage with limited English comprehension.”
The scheme was discovered when two voters requesting absentee ballots learned that they had supposedly already voted absentee. The first, fraudulent absentee ballots were pulled so that the real people could vote for themselves. On election night, election workers realized that they were seeing a lot of absentee ballots with the same handwriting, prompting the investigation.
Jeremy Taylor is an unindicted co-conspirator in his wife’s voter fraud scheme. Kim Taylor was found guilty of 26 counts of providing false information in registering and voting, three counts of fraudulent registration, and 23 counts of fraudulent voting.
Cases involving dozens of counts of voter fraud are unusual—and it’s not because Republicans haven’t been looking for Democrats to charge with the crime—but a common thread in the remarkably few proven cases of voter fraud in recent years is that they’ve mostly been committed by Republicans. In January, a former elections official in upstate New York pleaded guilty to identity theft for a scheme in which he used voter information to request absentee ballots. A local Republican official in Ohio voted in two states, once in the name of his late father. A Pennsylvania Trump voter voted for himself and for his long-dead mother. An Alabama state legislator has been charged with voting in a district where he didn’t live. A North Carolina absentee ballot fraud scheme was so serious an election had to be invalidated.
While it’s incredibly rare for fraud to affect more than a handful of votes, the frequency with which Republicans do it isn’t a coincidence. It’s a direct result of a party that is undermining democracy at every turn and—importantly—telling its voters that the other side is going to cheat anyway, leading them to the conclusion that they might as well cheat, too, since everything is rigged. Most Republicans won’t do it, but the number that do show us the message is being received.
No comments:
Post a Comment