(Raleigh, NC)—MAR 20, 2013—The NC State Board of Elections has confirmed their intent to prosecute five people on suspicion that they voted in both Florida and NC during the November 2012 election, according VIP-NC Finds Dual Voters in FL & NC, according to the North Carolina chapter of the Voter Integrity Project.

(Raleigh, NC)—MAR 20, 2013—The NC State Board of Elections has confirmed their intent to prosecute five people on suspicion that they voted in both Florida and NC during the November 2012 election, according to email records provided by the Voter Integrity Project of NC, the group that investigated and identified the voters to both states’ election offices earlier last month.

The group initially identified what it thought were 33 potential instances of double voting. Of these, they classified “19 as ‘highly likely,’ six as ‘probable’ and eight as ‘possible’ vote fraud candidates.” The NC Board of Elections, however, determined that several apparent instances of double voting were clerical errors. After a VIP-NC search consuming who knows how many man-hours, the NCBOE confirmed 5 for possible prosecution by matching signatures on voter rolls in NC and FL.

If successfully prosecuted, double voting is punishable as a felony. And it should be.

VIP-NC is frustrated that the state BOE cannot prosecute the five remaining cases itself. That is the purview of local District Attorneys. So VIP-NC is asking the legislature to expand the BOE’s jurisdiction. They don’t want local prosecutors determining whether or not to prosecute alleged voter impersonation fraud — which these five cases are not. The voters who allegedly cast ballots in two states (which is still illegal) did so in their own names. And while alive, too.

The Voter Integrity Project believes these five cases are “only the tip of the iceberg,” says Executive Director, Jay DeLancy.

You remember Jay DeLancy. He’s the amateur sleuth who challenged 550 voters’ registrations in Wake County last year. The Wake County BOE found only 18 that merited further investigation. After the board threw out those remaining 18, DeLancy “snatched his microphone off the board’s table mid-meeting, kicking glass doors open in front of him as he stormed out of the meeting room,” WRAL reported.

On the VIP-NC site, DeLancy dismisses those who insist that voter ID is a solution in search of a problem, saying, “Vote fraud deniers make nice poetry and they give good sound bites, but the idea is as absurd as claiming that no speeding happens on I-40 unless the Highway Patrol writes tickets.”

Except the Highway Patrol is not expected to prevent all speeding. The force is sized and budgeted as a deterrent, to minimize speeding and to prosecute it when they find it. If, for example, the Voter Integrity Project really expected the Patrol to prevent all speeding violations, they had better hand their wallets to the tax man. They would end up creating a lot of those government jobs that government never creates and find themselves living in the police state that tea party members fear.

If on the other hand, DeLancy wants increased enforcement of existing voting laws to eliminate the potential of, say, five double-voters found only after an exhaustive search, fine. Perhaps they’ll also find that funding that enhanced enforcement is cheaper than inconveniencing millions of legitimate North Carolina voters with a Voter ID law instead.

And how many of DeLancy’s five suspects already had photo IDs that played no part in preventing double voting? If the suspects can flit back and forth between their NC and FL addresses by car, the odds are all of them. This will not likely dissuade Republican legislators in Raleigh from passing a Voter ID law in the current session. Their leadership recently abandoned voter fraud as the primary rationale for passing it anyway, which means that for all the pious hand wringing about protecting the integrity of the election process, they never took their own warnings seriously.

If instead of a preventing someone from casting an illegal vote at a polling place, the discussion was about preventing someone from buying a firearm at a gun show illegally, supporters of North Carolina’s Voter Integrity Project might make a very different argument. To wit, they might claim that no amount of legislation would prevent a determined criminal from getting his hands on a gun. Instead, laws passed to stop him will simply interfere with law-abiding Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed right to keep and bear arms.

Just don’t expect them to believe that a Voter ID law will interfere with law-abiding Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Now enter the world of quantum conservatism, where commonsense [...]]]> Quantum mechanics suggests that as you bore down deeper into matter, Newton’s laws break down. You enter a quirky, alternate universe of gluons and quarks, of probabilities and spin, and particles with “flavors” like charm and strangeness where the rules governing ordinary reality no longer apply.

Now enter the world of quantum conservatism, where commonsense rules of logic and evidence do not apply. It is a world of belief, not fact, where up is down, black is white, in is out, wrong is right.

To you and me, a cat locked in a box might be dead or alive. But quantum conservatism finds it easy to argue that Schrödinger’s Cat is both alive and dead … at the same time. For example, quantum conservatism believes government never created a job … and has too many people on its payroll. Quantum conservatism believes in freedom of religion, and that Muslims shouldn’t be able to put up mosques wherever they want to.

Quantum conservatism argues that we should follow the clear language of the Constitution … and that, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States,” are not citizens under the 14th Amendment when those persons are born to undocumented immigrants. Quantum conservatism complains that President Obama hasn’t done anything to curb entitlement spending, and in the next breath complains that Obama cut Medicare. Quantum conservatism (especially in Arizona) believes any employer should be able to fire a woman who uses contraceptives to prevent pregnancy … as well as to fire her if she actually gets pregnant.

And finally, quantum conservatism believes that Kentucky Fried Chicken is a person – headquartered in Louisville, in a bucket.

And that’s my sermon.
(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

The Sun  urged caution in adopting measures aimed at stopping “the phantom menace of voter fraud” when they threaten to disenfranchise “tens of thousands of legitimate Maryland [...]]]> Dueling editorials in the February 24th edition of the Baltimore Sun  revisit the ongoing arguments over the new voter ID laws popping up around the country.

The Sun  urged caution in adopting measures aimed at stopping “the phantom menace of voter fraud” when they threaten to disenfranchise “tens of thousands of legitimate Maryland voters as the cost for uncovering a minuscule number of fraudulent ballots.”

In his op-ed, former Maryland Governor and U.S. Congressman Robert L. Ehrlich, Jr. cited a recent Pew Center on the States report that found “24 million invalid voter registrations and nearly 2 million dead people still on U.S. voter rolls.” That, and the fact that he must produce an ID to get his Claritin D prescription filled, led Ehrlich to wonder why there is not more focus “on fixes to broken election systems around the country.”

Ehrlich joins the ranks of the voter fraud Frighteners (Republicans, typically) convinced that dead voters on inaccurate registration databases and vivid anecdotes of the dead voting are a clear and present — hypothetical — danger to election integrity. Like other Frighteners, Ehrlich of course argues for photo ID laws, while not explaining how voters having their pictures made wipes the dead from state databases, nor why digital signature matching (used to verify absentee ballots) is insufficient for voters who appear at the polls in person.

In a critical response to the Sun ’s editorial board, a letter writer asked why our society treats the “most sacred” of our freedoms “with such little concern.”

Indeed. The Pew study cited by Ehrlich also found that 51 million U.S. citizens – nearly 1 in 4 of the eligible population – are unregistered. Evidently, there is little legislative appetite for helping 1 in 4 Americans to exercise their most sacred of freedoms. Moreover, Pew found that (emphasis mine):

In the 2008 general election, 2.2 million votes were lost because of registration problems, according to a survey by researchers at the California Institute of Technology/Massachusetts Institute of Technology Voting Technology Project. Additionally, 5.7 million people faced a registration related problem that needed to be resolved before voting, according to the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

Evidently, there is little legislative concern for protecting registered voters’ sacred freedoms, either – only for pursuing the phantom menace of voter fraud. As the Sun  observed,

… the Justice Department under President George W. Bush, conducted a massive investigation between 2002 and 2006. Only 120 people were charged and 86 convicted during a period when nearly 200 million votes were cast in federal elections. According to a New York Times  review of the Justice Department’s efforts, just 26 of those cases involved voting by people who were ineligible, multiple voting or registration fraud — the kinds of offenses that an ID law might catch.

A 2005 report by the Brennan Center found the most common causes of voting irregularities were not people impersonating others at the polls but clerical mistakes, computer errors and instances where two people with the same or similar names were flagged as the same person voting twice. The Brennan study warned that voter ID laws are far more likely to prevent legitimate voters from casting ballots than to prevent fraud.

Where is the Frighteners’ concern that their “remedy” might actually interfere more with the sacred freedoms of legitimate voters than it catches actual fraud?

The Brennan finding is consistent with the recent investigation by South Carolina’s State Election Commission into allegations that 900 dead people had voted in the 2010 general election. (Citing manpower costs, the Commission pulled the plug after reviewing 207 of the contested votes.) The Commission found that 95 percent were either alive and eligible or did not actually vote. There was insufficient data to say on the remaining 5 percent, but no evidence of voter fraud:

Of its review of the 207 contested votes cast in 2010, the commission found:

• 106 votes were clerical errors by poll workers – mistakes like marking John Doe Sr. instead of John Doe Jr.

• 56 votes were “bad data matching” – meaning the state Department of Motor Vehicles, which raised concerns about zombie voters, was wrong in assuming the voters were dead.

• 32 votes were “voter participation errors,” meaning someone was credited as voting in an election when they did not, most likely because of a stray mark on the voter rolls that was electronically scanned to record a voter’s participation.

• Three ballots were cast absentee by voters who died before Election Day.

Ehrlich suggested that there needs to be more focus on our broken elections systems, and that is in fact the subject of the Pew report he cited. Pew’s study, titled “Inaccurate, Costly, and Inefficient,” like its 2010 study, “Upgrading Democracy,” focuses on upgrades to a voter registration system with paper-based, 19th-century origins that “has not kept pace with advancing technology and a mobile society.” Canada, for example, spends 12 times less than the U.S. in maintaining a nationalized database: less than 35 cents per voter, and 93 percent of its eligible population is registered. Along with guarding against registration fraud and inaccuracies, technological upgrades would benefit candidates and campaigns, Pew argues, the kind of thing one would think politicians and parties would welcome:

Accurate lists also will allow political campaigns and nonpartisan efforts to avoid wasting time and money reaching out to registrants who have moved, died, are ineligible, or otherwise are no longer voting in a jurisdiction.

Voter lists are inaccurate because of bad data entry, because people register at their new addresses and don’t de-register at their old ones. Neither do relatives typically take death certificates down to the Board of Elections to have their deceased family members removed. Massive home foreclosures in recent years have made matters worse. The flood of election year paper voter registrations delivered by independent groups is a logistical headache. In fact, dead people remain on the voter rolls because states must comply with federal and state law in purging inactive voters from their lists. In North Carolina (where I live) the general guidelines are explained here. Unless the dead person requests to be removed (unlikely), he or she will remain on the list for eight years (four federal election cycles) before being purged. And voter ID laws fix that how?

Keeping a database up to date costs money and manhours. Yet how many Frighteners are so concerned about the dead voting that they are prepared to pay more in taxes – to pay whatever it takes – to keep their sacred registration lists pristine?

I didn’t think so.

Fortunately, Pew’s working group of over three dozen experts from over 20 states believes that a modern registration system could keep lists more accurate and lower costs by pursuing technology upgrades in three areas:

1. Comparing registration lists with other data sources to broaden the base of information used to update and verify voter rolls.

2. Using proven data-matching techniques and security protocols to ensure accuracy and security.

3. Establishing new ways voters can submit information online and minimize manual data entry, resulting in lower costs and fewer errors.

So, did that Pew report recommend photo ID as a plausible fix for the dead voter problem? Uh, no.

Reports of their voting have been greatly exaggerated. A lot of places. Particularly in South Carolina, where Republicans insist zombies have photo IDs to vote — the kind any respectable Undead can obtain where they get their driver’s licenses, at the DMV (Dead Men Voting) office.

The Institute for Southern Studies reports [...]]]> Zombies.

Reports of their voting have been greatly exaggerated. A lot of places. Particularly in South Carolina, where Republicans insist zombies have photo IDs to vote — the kind any respectable Undead can obtain where they get their driver’s licenses, at the DMV (Dead Men Voting) office.

The Institute for Southern Studies reports on efforts that would — in a sane world — put down the dead men voting zombie lie for good.

As was suspected from the beginning, the fevered stories of “zombie voters” turned out to be fantasy. This week, state elections officials reviewed 207 of the supposed 950 cases of dead people voting, and couldn’t confirm fraud in any of them. 106 stemmed from clerical errors at the polls, and another 56 involved bad data — the usual culprits when claims of dead voters have surfaced in the past.

After claims that hundreds of the walking dead had voted in the Republican primary, the Attorney General released the names of only six to the State Election Commission for review.

By early February, the election officials were able to confirm all of the voters were legitimate: five were very much alive, and one had voted before dying. Clerical errors were blamed.

Even as Fox News pressed ahead with its zombie voter headlines, the State Election Commission pressed ahead with its investigation, reporting its findings this week:

In 197 of [the 207 cases examined], the records show no indication of votes being cast fraudulently in the name of deceased voters. Research found each of these cases to be the result of clerical errors, bad data matching, errors in assigning voter participation, or voters dying after being issued an absentee ballot. In 10 cases, the records were insufficient to make a determination.

Alas, this is not a sane world, and the report was no bullet through the brain for these zombies. The South Carolina Republican Party is — unsurprisingly — undeterred, NPR reports:

The state attorney general’s office in South Carolina said in a statement Thursday afternoon that the question of “dead” voters is still being investigated by the State Law Enforcement Division and that no “final answer to this problem” can be determined until that investigation is concluded.

“To give this state’s election process the clean bill of health we would like, we can’t simply rely on the review of some 200 of 950 records … that is unsatisfactory,” the statement said.

That’s why the GOP insists we need Zombie ID. Because we must be absolutely certain. Because absence of evidence is not evidence of absence where the Voting Dead are concerned. The minority-looking people in line in front of you, all around you at the polls — What’s that BEHIND YOU!  — may seem  normal, but what if they’re not? They might be zombies. If we never looked at things and thought of what might be, why we’d all still be out there in the tall grass with the apes.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

More there than [...]]]> Primary voters just gave former Speaker Newt Gingrich the win in the Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, “America’s most conservative state.” Reddest of the red. Buckle of the Bible Belt. CNN welcomed viewers to the Charleston debate this week with “Welcome to the South,” a place “where values matter.”

More there than anywhere else? What values mattered most to South Carolinians who gave Gingrich his win?

Not trust. Why should they trust Newt Gingrich? His three wives can’t.

Not “family values.” Gingrich is on his third marriage and committed adultery with his last two wives. In the soft-focused 1950s of conservative nostalgia, South Carolina Republicans would have dismissed Gingrich as a serial philanderer, and his third wife as a loose woman running for First Homewrecker. But not today. For the modern conservative, values compress to suit the flawed candidate most likely to win (with apologies to Cyril Northcote Parkinson).

Not humility. Mr. “Stand aside everyone! ‘I think grandiose thoughts.’” has compared himself to Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, Charles de Gaulle, the Wright Brothers, the Duke of Wellington, Robert the Bruce, Pericles and Moses. Why shouldn’t Newt want to share that greatness with as many women as want him? As he once said of himself, “I found a way to immerse my insecurities in a cause large enough to justify whatever I wanted it to.”

Fox and Friends  and conservative talk radio would spend weeks flaying any Democratic candidate who said that as a self-centered elitist. Mitt Romney’s not wearing a flag pin in Charleston failed to elicit the patented conservative hissy fit about a lack of patriotism. So what values do matter to South Carolina Republicans?

“[W]e need someone who’s mean,” said Harold Wade from a Charleston suburb. The Washington Post  quotes Debbie Peterson of Piedmont: “I have a little bit of a problem with the divorces, but I need somebody to beat Obama. I like Romney, he is decent and moral, but I just don’t see him beating Obama.”

Maybe what CNN really meant was that the South is the place where values matter … far less than the self-righteousness suggests. As with Gingrich, don’t listen to what they say. Watch what they do. For all the bluster, conservative voters value winners more than virtues, and prefer someone they think will stick it to their ideological foes to someone who is all Bible and no bite.

Presumptive Democratic candidate, President Barack Obama, has high likeability numbers, isn’t known as a philanderer, has one wife, two beautiful children, and one stable family life. Yet if Newt Gingrich wins his party’s nomination, self-described values voters nonetheless will support him this fall, treat Obama as the antichrist, and tie themselves in knots rationalizing why it is consonant with their values to support a man whose baggage has baggage.

Just in time, this case in point, “Newt Gingrich’s three marriages mean he might make a strong president — really,” written by Fox News contributor and Glenn Beck collaborator, psychiatrist Dr. Keith Ablow:

1) Three women have met Mr. Gingrich and been so moved by his emotional energy and intellect that they decided they wanted to spend the rest of their lives with him.

2) Two of these women felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married.

3 ) One of them felt this way even though Mr. Gingrich was already married for the second time, was not exactly her equal in the looks department and had a wife (Marianne) who wanted to make his life without her as painful as possible.

Conclusion: When three women want to sign on for life with a man who is now running for president, I worry more about whether we’ll be clamoring for a third Gingrich term, not whether we’ll want to let him go after one.

“It’s not that I’m a good debater,” Gingrich said in his victory speech on Saturday, “it’s that I articulate the deepest felt values of the American people.” He just doesn’t see any need to live them. In September 2010, ex wife No. 2 (Marianne) told John Richardson of Esquire  that Gingrich told her, “It doesn’t matter what I do. People need to hear what I have to say. There’s no one else who can say what I can say. It doesn’t matter what I live.” Richardson this week added a postscript to the Marianne Gingrich interview, insisting that the focus on Gingrich’s infidelity misses the real problem: “the ferocious and manic drive that … collapsed in a breakdown so severe his own Republican peers had to force him out of power.” That, and her conclusion about his financial ethics and heavy lobbying since leaving Congress — that he chose corruption.

In the end, none of that mattered in the place where “values matter.” In a state where 65 percent of Republican primary voters self-identify as evangelicals or born-again Christians, voters abandoned their standard bearer, Rick Santorum, and overwhelmingly chose to dance with the devil who speaks in dulcet tones — because he looks more like a winner.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Over at Daily Kos, Zwoof has seen a rash of chain emails about “welfare junkies” who are “drug-fueled slackers.” Obligingly, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has introduced the Welfare Reform Act of 2011 to discipline deadbeats on food stamps.

This is old news. It is Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” (1976) [...]]]> So much misdirected anger.

Over at Daily Kos, Zwoof has seen a rash of chain emails about “welfare junkies” who are “drug-fueled slackers.” Obligingly, Sen. Jim DeMint (R-SC) has introduced the Welfare Reform Act of 2011 to discipline deadbeats on food stamps.

This is old news. It is Ronald Reagan’s “welfare queens” (1976) revisited. It is the Lee Atwater/Roger Ailes revolving door, “Willie Horton” campaign ads from 1988. It is the right blaming hurricane victims in New Orleans’ poor Lower Ninth Ward in 2005 for not leaving town in their SUVs and checking into Shreveport or Dallas hotels until Hurricane Katrina blew herself out. It is conservatives blaming the 2008 financial meltdown on the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act. The government, you see, forced private mortgage lenders and Wall Street to fatten themselves on CDOs built from the “liar loans” they invented and sold to shiftless poor people. In the United Kingdom, it is BBC’s 2010 “The Scheme,” a series critics described as “poverty porn,” depicting welfare recipients that London’s tabloid Daily Mail calls “welfare junkies” (Well, what do you know?) and “foul-mouthed, lazy scroungers, cheats, layabouts, drunks, drug addicts” leeching off “the goodwill of taxpayers.”

In 2012, it is Newt Gingrich again calling President Obama “the best food stamp president in American history” at appearances last week in New Hampshire:

“And so I’m prepared if the NAACP invites me, I’ll go to their convention and talk about why the African American community should demand paychecks and not be satisfied with food stamps,” Gingrich said earlier today in Plymouth, N.H.

Echoing Lee Atwater, Gingrich again denied any tinge of racism in his phrasing. “This is not an attack … It’s not negative, it’s a fact.” But Newt knows his Republican base grinds its teeth to nubs over the thought that a lesser someone, somewhere is getting something for nothing from programs that government thugs force god-fearing conservatives to pay for with money they earned with no help from anyone anywhere since being born in little log cabins that they built themselves.

Which brings us to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) program. Food stamps. In 2009, the New York Times reported, “Even in Peoria, Ill. — Everytown, U.S.A. — nearly 40 percent of children receive aid.” In 2009, 94 percent of the program’s budget was spent on benefits. Thirty-two percent of recipients were white, 22 percent were African American, 16 percent Hispanic. Forty-seven percent of recipients were children. Another forty-four percent were nonelderly, working-age adults (ages 18 to 59), and nearly two-thirds of those were women. The rest were 60 years-old or older. SNAP provided food assistance to about 40 million Americans at a cost of $53.6 billion, 1.7 percent of $3.1 trillion in federal expenditures. (FY 2009 budget figures used for consistency among available data sets.)

Just for comparison, the Pentagon had a “base” budget of $515 billion in 2009 to staff and maintain 545,000 facilities at 5,300 sites both in the United States and around the globe (not including tens of billions in GWOT supplementals and other off-budget and “black” budget costs). Thus, it is not easy to determine how much all U.S. security agencies spend on defense annually, nor to separate out how much the Pentagon alone spends just to maintain the offshore portion of our global empire. But drawing on various sources, assumptions, and the fact that one-quarter of U.S. troops are stationed abroad, the Institute for Policy Studies estimated the 2009 costs of our overseas operations (wars included) at $250 billion annually “to maintain troops, equipment, fleets, and bases overseas.”

So, the Pentagon spent almost half of its “base” budget, or (at least) 8 percent of the FY 2009 federal budget to maintain 865 or more military bases scattered among the world’s nearly 200 countries outside the United States. And many of those outposts are in countries most Americans cannot even name or find on a map. Strategic planner Thomas P.M. Barnett (“The Pentagon’s New Map“) calls security America’s greatest export commodity.

Now, if there is something else besides personal weakness conservatives cannot abide, it is deadbeats. So one wonders why they focus so much of their ire on the moral hazard of providing food assistance to American compatriots (mostly children) when they spend five times as much on a wide, multicultural world that sleeps under the very blanket of security they provide, and for which the rest of the world pays nothing.

– Mike Lofgren, former GOP Congressional [...]]]>

This tactic of inducing public distrust of government is not only cynical, it is schizophrenic. For people who profess to revere the Constitution, it is strange that they so caustically denigrate the very federal government that is the material expression of the principles embodied in that document.

– Mike Lofgren, former GOP Congressional staffer

After two and a quarter centuries of progress which saw expansion of the franchise from land-owning white men to blacks, women and eighteen year-olds, many conservatives have decided they have had quite enough “more perfect union,” thank you, and have accelerated their efforts to shrink participation in democratic elections.

In recent days, American Thinker  posted “Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American,” by Matthew Vadum, reflecting conservative concerns about too many of “those people” participating in government of the people, by the people, and for the people. But American Thinker‘s title says it all:

Registering [the poor] to vote is like handing out burglary tools to criminals. It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.

[...]

Encouraging those who burden society to participate in elections isn’t about helping the poor. It’s about helping the poor to help themselves to others’ money. It’s about raw so-called social justice. It’s about moving America ever farther away from the small-government ideals of the Founding Fathers.

The comments section is a trove of anti-democratic sentiment: “I believe that the vote should be limited to people that own property or a business”; “One person one vote is a recipe for political suicide and the Communist’s dream”; “Unless you pay taxes, you should not be permitted to vote”; “We should not only purge welfare slackers and other un-Americans from the voter rolls — including anyone who is unemployed and therefore not a producer, but voting should be proportional depending on net worth or taxes paid”; etc. Such patriots think their views echo the beliefs of the founders. But then, so does owning other human beings.

Thus, efforts by liberal groups and Democrats to make voting easier are met by the right with legislative hurdles that make it harder to participate. Ari Berman’s Rolling Stone  piece, The GOP War on Voting, elaborates on GOP vote suppression efforts:

As the nation gears up for the 2012 presidential election, Republican officials have launched an unprecedented, centrally coordinated campaign to suppress the elements of the Democratic vote that elected Barack Obama in 2008. Just as Dixiecrats once used poll taxes and literacy tests to bar black Southerners from voting, a new crop of GOP governors and state legislators has passed a series of seemingly disconnected measures that could prevent millions of students, minorities, immigrants, ex-convicts and the elderly from casting ballots … In a systematic campaign orchestrated by the American Legislative Exchange Council – and funded in part by David and Charles Koch, the billionaire brothers who bankrolled the Tea Party – 38 states introduced legislation this year designed to impede voters at every step of the electoral process.

In a lengthy Truthout  commentary, “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult,” longtime congressional staffer, Mike Lofgren, provides insider background on the vote suppression effort and details his reasons for leaving his staff job. There is rottenness in both parties, he explains, and Democrats seeking “centrism” may have brought working people NAFTA, the World Trade Organization and permanent most-favored-nation status for China that helped erode the middle class. “But both parties are not rotten in quite the same way,” writes Lofgren. “The Congressional directory now reads like a casebook of lunacy,” on the Republican side, something Beltway pundits are slow to recognize and/or too cowed to say publicly.

“It should have been evident to clear-eyed observers that the Republican Party is becoming less and less like a traditional political party in a representative democracy and becoming more like an apocalyptic cult, or one of the intensely ideological authoritarian parties of 20th century Europe. This trend has several implications, none of them pleasant.”

Oft-repeated sentiments from prominent Republicans (and their media mouthpieces) about who are and who are not “real Americans” underpin the effort to keep their fellow Americans from voting. Republicans have spent 30 years demonizing their neighbors: from Ronald Reagan’s welfare queens, to Muslims and gays, immigrants and intellectuals, to people living in what Americans once proudly considered the cultural melting pots of its largest cities. To anyone, writes Lofgren, “who doesn’t look, think, or talk like the GOP base.” More recently, the enemies list has expanded to include school teachers, public employees, and the nearly half of Americans who — according to carefully parsed propaganda — pay “no taxes.”

Most of the GOP elite probably do not believe all the “paranoid claptrap,” says Lofgren, but that doesn’t keep them from feeding “the worst instincts of their fearful and angry low-information political base with a nod and a wink.” Even as the economy shrinks, the conservative message machine has so assiduously widened its citizenship exclusion zone that paranoid patriots may soon find themselves cut off and surrounded in what the founders’ War Department dubbed “Indian country.”

Lofgren, who spent most of that same 30 years working for the GOP on Capitol Hill, now finds himself exiled among the lessers. He concludes:

This legislative assault is moving in a diametrically opposed direction to 200 years of American history, when the arrow of progress pointed toward more political participation by more citizens. Republicans are among the most shrill in self-righteously lecturing other countries about the wonders of democracy; exporting democracy (albeit at the barrel of a gun) to the Middle East was a signature policy of the Bush administration. But domestically, they don’t want those people  voting.

You can probably guess who those people  are.

As for Lofgren, he retired out of concern for the direction his party is taking America, as well as out of contempt for the “feckless, craven incompetence of Democrats” without the spine to stop them. But retiring, he admits, was also “an act of rational self-interest.” It was fine working on the payroll of an apocalyptic cult so long as its targets were union members and the private sector pensions and health benefits of those people . But once the GOP turned its “decades-long campaign of scorn” against government workers like Lofgren, it was time for him to cash out. “First they came for the communists,” as it were.

The Lofgrens of the Republican Party might long suppress any latent empathy for the struggles of Americans they were hired to serve, but money? Money they understand.

Mitt Romney has been kicking ass on the campaign fundraising trail, leaving his GOP rivals in the dust raising $15-20 million through June 30, 2011:

“Obviously, Romney has leveraged his standing in the polls to raise early money in the race,” said Tobe Berkovitz, a professor at Boston University’s College of Communication.