Who is voting this November and why should you bother?

Frank Apisa wrote:

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American conservatism is fast becoming the enemy of all humanity, cj.

I realize you cannot see that...and surely you think that those of us who feel that way are out of line...

...but American conservatism is becoming the enemy of all humanity...and of all sound reasoning.

I'm constantly impressed by the certainty of small-minded progressives that they (alone) can speak with certainty for all mankind and as well can preempt all sound reasoning.

I'm pretty sure of myself (indeed, occasionaly a bit overbearing) and have an unusually broad range of experience in life, but would never express such a claim. There's simply too much I don't know out there. Why do I suspect Frank has an inadequate appreciation for the limits of his knowledge, understanding and experience?

What's even more puzzling is how they attract members. By any measure of logic, they should be extinct.

There's a laugh. Republicans take away the vote from many thousands of honest voters and then blame Democrats. The only people I know of caught voting illegally were a very small number of Republicans.

How Common Is Fraud?

Election fraud does exist, but hasn’t been shown to be widespread. The New York Times reported in 2007 that a five-year crackdown on such fraud by the Bush administration’s Justice Department had produced 70 convictions at the federal level, including 40 campaign workers or government workers convicted of vote-buying, intimidation or ballot forgery, and 23 cases of multiple voting or voting by ineligible voters. But the Times described these as unconnected incidents and said the Justice Department had turned up no evidence of "any organized effort to skew federal elections."

Bush administration officials have pushed hard to find such evidence, too hard in one case, according to an investigation by the Department of Justice’s internal watchdogs, the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) and Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR). Their report into the firing of nine United States attorneys concluded that the "real reason" for the firing of New Mexico’s U.S. Attorney David Iglesias was "complaints about Iglesias’s handling of voter fraud and public corruption matters." The complaints included gripes by state Republican Party officials who believed that widespread fraud by Democrats had prevented George Bush from winning the state in the 2000 presidential election. Iglesias launched a task force that worked with the FBI but found that "there was insufficient evidence in any of the cases the Task Force reviewed to support criminal prosecution by the [U.S. Attorney's Office] or state authorities," according to the report of the OIG and OPR. These included cases involving ACORN workers. Republicans charged that Iglesias was showing insufficient rigor in prosecuting the cases.