You gotta admit, the dude’s got chutzpah
As I wrote about yesterday, disgraced former Republican Congressman Thad McCotter has now been found to have fraudulently falsified nominating petitions not only this year but in 2010, as well. The Detroit Free Press now reveals that the fraud goes back at least EIGHT SIX YEARS (three election cycles) when McCotter filed photocopied and cut-and-paste copied signatures in 2006 and 2008, too. In fact, if the two-year statute of limitations hadn’t run out, McCotter could be looking at jail time.
The staff of former U.S. Rep. Thaddeus McCotter evidently had some practice dummying up petitions in order to get their boss on the ballot.A review of the nominating petitions turned in for McCotter’s elections from 2002 through 2012 shows he did not have enough signatures to qualify to run in at least the 2008, 2010 and 2012 elections. The skullduggery wasn’t detected until this year, when a part-time staffer for the Secretary of State found that of the more than 1,800 signatures turned in by the McCotter campaign for 2012, only 244 were valid. {…}
The 2002 and 2004 petitions were relatively clean with few duplicates, but in 2008, at least 67 of the 177 petition pages submitted were either copies or had been doctored by cutting and pasting dates from other documents onto the petitions.
The 2006 petitions were apparently the source for cut-and-paste jobs in 2008 and 2010. Some of the 2006 petitions, however, also were duplicates.
“It seems like at every election cycle, they expanded on what they had done and used some new tricks,” Daggy said. “They just got more and more emboldened.”
In 2010, at least 73 of the 167 pages turned in were duplicates, which would have invalided more than 1,000 of the signatures. In 2012, both the cut-and-paste and duplicate tricks were used.
The revelations come thanks to the political consulting group Practical Political Consultants out of East Lansing. While the elections bureau does not keep petitions on file, PPC does and they were able to go back through McCotter’s earlier submissions.
What’s stunning is that the fraudulent petitions were never spotted. The fraud was so obvious and there were on 2,000 signatures submitted that you would think it would have been noticed.
One thing is certain: the push by Republicans to make voting harder does nothing to combat the gross election fraud perpetrated by their own politicians. In fact, the voter suppression efforts being pushed under the guise of preventing virtually non-existent voter fraud are just smokescreens for efforts to make sure Democrats have a harder time voting. Meanwhile Republican politicians continue to abuse our election system and to engage in corrupt and illegal behavior, none of which is addressed by voter suppression laws. It makes the fact that the investigation into the Bolger/Schmidt election fraud scheme was stopped before it was finished even more troubling.
It’s shameful and it’s sadly typical of the Republican Party today.
[McCotter image credit: Gage Skidmore | Flickr]
