For generations Georgia residents were allowed to vote after their funerals. It wasn't actually voter fraud. It was quite legal. The theory was loved ones of the recently deceased would know which candidate and ballot issues that voter would have wanted to support. The family would cast the ballot. The poll watchers would shake their heads sadly, commiserate with the grieving family and duly record the vote, just as if the dead voter was still alive. Dear old dad... sob... would have wanted it this way.

The practice was ended, in part through the opposition of State Senator and future President Jimmy Carter. Today, if a dead person votes in Georgia, a live person is eligible for prosecution.

So it is everywhere in the country. Voting fraud is almost never voter fraud. Paying a hundred or a thousand voters to march down to the local polling place to cast illegal ballots exposes each of them to being found out and charged, along with whoever puts them up to it. And the penalties are harsh.

My daddy used to say if you're going to sell your soul, always demand at least a million dollars. That was in the good old days when a dollar was worth a dollar and people died of starvation when they didn't have one. Same with voting fraud. You have a lot less risk of getting caught and a lot more votes to play games with if you fiddle with the results after the votes have been cast. So stuffing ballot boxes, or transposing numbers on tally sheets, or counting votes of dead people pretty much happens after the polls have closed and before the vote counting is official. In-person voter fraud just doesn't happen.

Republican Senator Kit Bond, here in Missouri, accuses countless black folks of risking prison each election in order to vote illegally. He wants to require voters to produce picture identification, even those who don't drive. His charges of voter fraud have been disproven by so many investigations his actual motive seems transparent. He wants to put non-driving folks through enough extra steps, enough additional effort, to discourage at least some from voting at all. The image of Kit Bond during the 2000 election is vivid in my mind. After an inept election board forced thousands of voters in the city St. Louis to stand in line for hours, Bond was furious that so many stayed around to vote. They MUST be up to something illegal.

Kit Bond's charges of voter fraud have been picked up by other Republicans. Making it harder for minorities to vote is a pastime more favored these days than baseball. Fictitious voter fraud provokes rage.

Contributor fraud is a different matter. Dead people can't vote in Georgia. But dead folks can, and apparently do, contribute to political campaigns in Louisiana. Senator David Vitter is now accepting campaign contributions from a voter who died late last year. Her husband donated more than the maximum allowed by law. So Vitter and a few conservative political action committees are accepting contributions from his deceased wife.

Requiescat In PACs.

In August of 2004 something unusual happened in Australia. A local ABC broadcast took an American controversy, determined that someone was lying, and kinda sorta reported it. On one side were the conservative funded attacks on the war record of decorated veteran John Kerry. On the other were Kerry and those who watched him in action.

Larry Thurlow had indeed served with Kerry for a few moments, the only attacker who actually saw him in Vietnam. Thurlow's swiftboat was near Kerry's as they came under fire. Thurlow claimed it didn't happen: that Kerry was lying. Certainly, one of them was on the wrong side of veracity.

Jim Rassmann, whose life Kerry saved, said flat out that Thurlow was not telling the truth. It was reported in what had become the standard of neutral reporting: he said/she said, but the juxtaposition of the two versions was compelling. In Australia.

Eventually someone thought to look at documents, and son of a gun, Thurlow was lying. A bronze star had been awarded to Thurlow for the same incident, the one he was insisting decades later never happened. In fact no other accuser had served with Kerry except in the sense that they were in the same war. The "doctor" who alleged he had treated Kerry only for minor wounds never had a glimpse of him. It turned out he was an orderly, not a doctor, at the time, and was in a different part of the hospital.

Most of the media of the day covered the story, not as verifiable truth or lie, but as an on-the-other-hand story of two equal sides. Documentation was available to demonstrate conclusively who was lying and who was telling the truth, but that would have violated political neutrality.

These days, exposing falsehoods is slowly becoming fashionable again. Richard Blumenthal, Democratic Senate candidate misleads voters in Connecticut about his military record. It gets reported as a lie. Mark Kirk, Republican Senate candidate lies to Illinois voters about his military record, his teaching career, policy issues, and his boyhood adventures and it all gets reported as a lie, another lie, another lie, and, holy mackerel, more lies.

And yesterday, the Denver Post dug into claims by Dan Maes, the Republican candidate for Governor of Colorado. It wasn't his charge that bicycles are part of a world wide plot, a secret plan of domination in which the city of Denver is a conspirator. No. It's his boast that he was an undercover police agent 25 years ago, helping to put away drug and bookmaking figures. A reporter asked authorities about Maes heroism. Everyone in charge at the time responded "Huh?" Maes says of his claims "Some people are probably taking that a little too literally." Well, duh.

In a few weeks Republicans will triumphantly put Democratic heads on electoral spikes. But there is some chance some future claims will be reported simply as true or false. Or as Dan Maes so succinctly put it, "Those comments might have been incorrect comments."

It’s all part of this population control mentality that we as humans are the disease. He never said that biking is inherently wrong.

 - - Nate Strauch, speaking for Dan Maes (R-CO), August 5, 2010
     On bikes as an international conspiracy for world domination

The radicals feed of each other and need each other to sustain themselves. So we need right now to combat radical voices, that's the only we way we can win this struggle...

They want us to turn ourselves into enemies of the United States. So we wanted to tell them that "we don't listen to you, we're here in the very place you attacked, we're there to rebuild it and to build bridges of understanding."

 - - Imam Shamsi Ali, of Islamic Cultural Center of NY, August 30, 2010

On September 25, 2005, Michael Brown, "Brownie" as he was by then known, was asked the most obvious question in the known universe. Why in the world did the Bush/Cheney administration sit by and watch while area after coastal area of Louisiana went below the waters and people died.

The question took the form of a technical inquiry. Why were three coastal parishes ignored in the emergency proclamation President Bush had issued in response to hurricane Katrina? Actually, the administration had not included ANY coastal parishes, the ones in ... you know ... the most danger. The answer might have gone unnoticed had it not been directly contradicted by available documentation. Michael Brown, Brownie, responded in congressional testimony by passing the buck to the Governor of Louisiana. It was shocking, he said. That's the word he used. Shocking. The Governor had not included those areas in her request for aid.

Except she had. The office of the Governor produced the written request (pdf). And there it was. The request included "all the southeastern parishes including the New Orleans Metropolitan area and the mid state Interstate I-49 corridor and northern parishes along the I-20 corridor." The administration had not noticed that as help went out, excluding only those at death's door.

The testimony was, in all probability, not a lie. It was one more bit of evidence that an incompetent administration put little value on performance. Nobody knows if Nero really fiddled while Rome burned. Marie Antoinette probably never giggled her famous "Let them eat cake" when talking about starving masses in France. But America had actual photos. President Bush eating cake with Senator John McCain. The President looking out in mild curiosity from his aircraft as it circled New Orleans, his I-can-see-my-house moment. And his horrible heck-of-a-job-Brownie speech.

And there was Brownie himself, later revealed in the emails he sent to cronies, desperately begging for advice as thousands died. What shirts should he wear for television interviews? Should he roll up his sleeves? What restaurants would serve a cuisine suitable for his high rank? It was a natural consequence of an administration exclusively concerned with public relations and electoral response. Karl Rove, in a policy discussion, explained that deficits don't matter because his polling showed voters were unconcerned.

Last week Michael Brown had an epiphany. He had figured out what he called a fatal mistake concerning Katrina. While he and others appeared in television interviews, presumably wearing presentable cuff links, boasting about all that was being done, they forgot to include in their talking points all the obstacles they were facing. Without those excuses, the public turned against them. "One of the fatal mistakes I made was not making it clear."

In Michael Brown's wonderful world of interviews and proper shirts, even five years later, getting life-saving help to those at the edge of death remains a minor issue. The fatal mistake was one of incomplete public relations.