Paul Schurick, 54, Ehrlich’s de facto campaign manager, and Julius Henson, 62, a consultant paid by the campaign, were both charged with three counts of conspiracy to violate election laws, one count of influencing votes through fraud and one count of failing to identify the sponsor of the calls. In addition, Schurick was charged on one count of obstruction of justice.
In a statement, the Office of the Maryland State Prosecutor, which obtained the indictments from a Baltimore grand jury, said its investigation is continuing. All but one of the charges handed down Thursday carry maximum prison sentences of five years.
Hat-tip Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen who adds:
As we talked about last week, there is a concerted national effort on the part of many Republican policymakers to make it harder for traditional Democratic voters to participate in the 2012 elections. Under the auspices of rooting out “voter fraud†— a problem that appears to exist largely in the over-active imaginations of GOP activists — Republicans are passing voter-ID measures, approving new laws restricting voter-registration drives, and closing early-voting windows.
If all goes according to plan, going forward, they won’t even need ridiculous schemes like the one in Maryland.
Of course, the new indictments handed down against Ehrlich’s aides in MD (Ehrlich ended up losing the election anyway) are hardly the only examples of GOP election fraud going on out there, even as there are rarely indictments for any of it.
We recently detailed the story of the high-ranking Clay County, KY, election officials (including the County Clerk, a circuit court judge, and the school superintendent — and other members of the County Election Commission) who were sentenced to a combined total of some 150 years in the federal penitentiary jail, for gaming elections for years in the county via buying and selling votes as well as, in 2006, actually changing the votes of voters on electronic touch-screen voting machines.
That’s election fraud. As to actual voter fraud — the thing that Republicans pretend exists in epidemic form, but doesn’t, so they can use the propaganda to bolster implementation of their disenfranchising polling place Photo ID voter suppression schemes — early this week we reported on the new complaint filed against former GOP Governor and current Republican Presidential front-runner Mitt Romney for having committed voter fraud in the state of MA. It appears that Romney voted in MA last year, even though he no longer actually lived there.
The facts of the case highlight Romney as just the latest in a rapidly growing list of high-profile GOP vote fraudsters, as detailed in our article, including Utah’s former Governor Jon Huntsman Jr. (also set to run for the GOP Presidential nominee), Indiana Sec. of State Charlie White (who’s already been indicted for 3 voter fraud related felonies), Missouri’s U.S. Rep. Todd Akin (who’s running for U.S. Senate), and GOP voter fraud queen Ann Coulter.
The complaint against Romney was filed by fellow GOP Presidential candidate Fred Karger, who was my in-studio guest last night on the nationally syndicated Mike Malloy Show (which I’m guest hosting this week and the beginning of next). The audio from my interview with Karger last night about his voter fraud investigation and complaint against Romney, and much more, can be downloaded here [MP3], or listened to online below…
[audio:http://bradblog.com/audio/MikeMalloy_BradFriedman_GuestHost_061611_Hour2.mp3]
Whenever Republicans start crying about voter or election fraud you can bet your life it’s because they are in the process of committing the frauds themselves and need to take the heat off themselves. The problem is having the parties run the elections. We need independent officials running all elections with no input from the parties at all, from districting to setting up polling places and we need national rules and all paper ballots. That’s the only way the fraud is going to stop. Then we also need to make it easier for shutins, elderly and disabled who can’t physically stand in line to vote, maybe make absentee voter forms available at nursing homes and apartment buildings where elderly and disabled reside.
Maybe someone could start putting these kinds of things on ballots across the country so we can fix this. Anyway I hope so.
The irony in all this is that it was the Republican Gov. Robert Ehrlich who was one of the first to directly challenge the privatization of Maryland’s election system by Diebold. At the time, he wrote to the chairman of that state’s Board of Elections, stating “that the voters of Maryland should be allowed to vote a paper ballot…”
We need to return to PAPER BALLOTS and HAND COUNTING until such time as ALL electronic black boxes have completely transparent and incorruptible software and offer at least an audit trail if not a redundant audit trail.
FIRST SECURE OUR ELECTIONS. Then kick out those who were ‘elected’ by fraud… like Prosser in Wisconsin.
Incredible … again.
It seems to me that the odds are, when today’s GOP rages about some complaint, they are mired in the very things they complain the loudest about.
Psychological projection at the group level, I guess.
This is the best blog reporting on election fraud issues in the U.S. Election reformer in Washington state is running for director of elections in the state’s largest county and will need contributions for a successful campaign:
http://partyofcommons.com