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Joe the Plumber teaches America about voter fraud
Americans owe Joe the Plumber a debt of gratitude this morning -- for helping to show the nation what the real issue with voter fraud, which is not that it's too easy for Americans to cast fradulent ballots, but that it's too hard for legitimate voters like Joe (hey, we're all on a first-name basis now) to make their vote count:
The Toledo Blade reported today that "Joe the Plumber's" name appears on Ohio voter registration rolls with a slight misspelling -- as Worzelbacher, not Wurzelbacher.
And that sort of data-entry error might be enough -- were Joe a new registrant -- to have him disqualified from voting in Ohio, Florida, or Wisconsin this year, depending on the outcome of ongoing litigation.
Purging voters or blocking their registration because of data errors is disenfranchisement by typo," said Michael Waldman, the executive director of the Brennan Center for Justice, a liberal legal group involved in litigation in those states. "Joe is a perfect example. If he were anew voter, he would be being challenged right now as not eligible to vote.""Joe the Plumber is not committing voter fraud by having his name spelled differently on two different lists," he said.
No, he's not. If Republicans believe that voter fraud is truly a widespread problem in America, we want to see the names and the facts about actual votes that were cast illegally. Because mostly what we're seeing instead is good citizens like Joe facing a government hassle on Election Day because of other people's mistakes and laws that err on the side of undemocracy.