FRAUD

Republicans never get tired of playing an old election-year game: Trying to keep Democrats from voting.
This time, again, the warning cry has gone out about "voter fraud."
This time, the New York Times reports, members of the GOP's Tea Party wing are bent on challenging a national registration campaign for new voters in America's heartland and other places. To prevent fraud, they say.
They lie. What they worry about is how many new Democrats might be discovered out there.
This year, as is the custom, the Tea Party/GOP campaign is based on fear. It's meant to distract the ordinary voter, of course, but most of all it's meant to intimidate the unregistered, perhaps thus-far uninterested voter.
To put it bluntly, their basic, unspoken, shameful purpose is to keep blacks and Latinos away from voting booths. These fear-mongers think if they yell loud enough about rigid screening of new voters, if they warn often enough about jailing for "fraud," it will particularly discourage minority. Democratic-leaning voting.
What they believe may not be true, and it ought not to be, but they've made it a common GOP tactic.
Years ago, I saw it being tried in Denver.
Local Republicans, warning of potential fraud, dispatched a team of the right sort of people -- "suits" -- out into certain precincts as official "poll watchers" on election day.
Well, if any of these proper persons found any fraud, even a scrap, I didn't see it or hear about it, and I was a reporter watching and listening for that.
The answer, of course, is that there isn't and hasn't been any significant fraud in Denver or Colorado. And probably hasn't been any really significant fraud in America's heartland since the end of boss Tom Pendergast's machine in Kansas City when I was a boy.
Our elections may not please you, but they're clean. Stop worrying.