Brad Friedman Byon 8/10/2013, 9:05am PT

With these 300 fraudulent votes created by one Republican candidate alone, that's 300 more fraudulent votes than have ever been created by ACORN or anybody who has ever worked for them.

But, of course, you're unlikely to hear that, or even this story itself, from the tenacious Fox "News" "voter fraud special investigative unit" or the GOP clowns who help them disinform American voters.

From Nick Wing at Huffington Post...

In the midst of his 2012 GOP primary campaign for a Massachusetts state House seat, Jack Villamaino changed the party affiliation of nearly 300 people in his town of East Longmeadow. Days later, the same number of absentee ballot requests were dropped off at the town clerk’s office, a list that was almost a “name-for-name match” for those whose registration information Villamaino had altered. Earlier this week, Villamaino pleaded guilty to felony charges of stealing ballots and changing the party affiliation of 280 Democrats during his campaign for state representative. A judge sentenced him to a year in jail, only four months of which he'll be forced to serve behind bars. The remainder of that sentence will be suspended, and Villamaino will also be required to serve a year of probation.

According to the article, "Villamaino, a former East Longmeadow Board of Selectmen chairman who resigned last year amid the scandal, ultimately lost his Republican primary, and the GOP candidate subsequently lost to the Democrat in the race."

Three very quick points of note here...

1) This case --- just so you know, in the event that Fox "News" does end up running something on it --- does not actually involve voter fraud at all. The voters here did nothing wrong. It's election fraud. As usual, election fraud cases most often involve insiders manipulating votes, most frequently via absentee ballot. That type of fraud is not deterred in any way by the disenfranchising polling place Photo ID restriction laws that Republicans demand be enacted in order to deter "voter fraud". Those GOP laws are not meant to deter voter fraud, they are meant to deter legal Democratic-leaning voters from casting their legal vote. (There are only 10 known cases of in-person, polling place impersonation --- the only type of fraud that might be deterred by Photo ID laws --- among thousands of cases of election-related fraud out of hundreds of millions of votes cast in all 50 states since 2000, according to this recent exhaustive report by a non-partisan news consortium.) Photo ID laws do nothing to prevent absentee ballot fraud, despite the fact that it is the most common type of election fraud.

2) It isn't only Republicans who try to mess with absentee ballots. Democrats also try to mess with them, as seen, for example, in this recent case out of New York involving a Dutchess County Democratic election commissioner accused (though not yet convicted) of 94 criminal counts involved with absentee balloting. Of course, at the same time, buried in that same story, is the fact that Dutchess County's "former Republican election commissioner, David Gamache, has pleaded not guilty in a separate indictment." (Cases like these are just one of the reasons The BRAD BLOG has long argued that the move to more and more Vote-by-Mail is a terrible idea for democracy.)

3) Finally, go back and read the very first sentence of this article. Thanks.

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