http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/some-republicans-acknowledge-leveraging-voter-id-laws-for-political-gain.html 2016-09-16 23:16:39 Some Republicans Acknowledge Leveraging Voter ID Laws for Political Gain A trove of documents reveal Republican politicians drawing on fears of election fraud to prevent voters — usually Democratic — from casting ballots. === As one prominent and much beloved Republican once said — actually, repeatedly said — “There you go again.” Deep in a trove of leaked documents made public this week was the latest example of Republican candor over voter ID laws — this time in Wisconsin. There, as a A senior vice president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Chamber of Commerce, Steve Baas, had a thought. “Do we need to start messaging ‘widespread reports of election fraud’ so we are positively set up for the recount regardless of the final number?” he wrote Scott Jensen, a Republican political tactician and former speaker of the State Assembly, That email exchange, part of documents published by The Guardian on Wednesday with The Wisconsin statute was part of a Yet academic studies and election-law experts broadly agree that voter fraud In unguarded moments, some Republican supporters of the laws have been inclined to agree. In April of this year, Representative Glenn Grothman, Republican of Wisconsin, It was not the first time he cited voter ID requirements’ impact on Democrats; in 2012, speaking about the law’s effect on Also in Wisconsin, Todd Allbaugh, 46, a staff aide to a Republican state legislator, attributed his decision to quit his job in 2015 and leave the party to what he witnessed at a Republican caucus meeting. He In Pennsylvania, the state Republican Party chairman, Robert Gleason, told an interviewer that the state’s voter ID law In that same election, the Republican leader of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Mike Turzai, And also that year, Scott Tranter, a Republican political consultant for Mr. Romney and others, called voter ID laws — and generating long lines at polling places — Don Yelton, a North Carolina Republican Party county precinct chairman, told an interviewer for Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” in 2013 that the state’s voter ID law would “ In Florida, both the state’s former Republican Party chairman, Jim Greer, and its former Republican governor, Charlie Crist, He added, “They never came in to see me and tell me we had a fraud issue. It’s all a marketing ploy.” As for Wisconsin’s law, Similar laws in North Carolina and Texas were struck down this summer by federal courts that called them racially discriminatory. A federal appeals court ruling in the North Carolina case concluded that that state’s election law had targeted African-American voters because they were overwhelmingly Democrats. Of course, no voting system is foolproof. Early this month, a St. Louis judge But such incidents are isolated. And virtually all of them, including the allegations in the St. Louis case, involve schemes like manipulating absentee ballots or falsifying returns that voter ID laws could not detect, much less prevent. The only fraud that such laws might stop — misrepresentation at a polling place to cast an illegal ballot — is vanishingly rare. And for good reason: To swing most elections, dozens or hundreds of fraudsters would have to conspire to commit easily detected felonies at polling places on behalf of their favored candidate. Richard L. “It is a shameful falsehood, given the extremely low rates of voter fraud in the U.S., especially the kind of fraud targeted by Republican voter ID laws,” he wrote. “It undermines faith in the fairness of the electoral process, which is the bedrock of all functioning democracies.” Yet it is now approaching conventional wisdom: