VivirLatino

Con la Vista al Voto : From now until election day 2010, VivirLatino is going to have at least one post a day looking at the midterm elections and issues around the election including policy and the much hyped Latino vote.

The right wing political machine isn’t just asking Latinos not to vote in order to increase their chances at a power grab. They are accusing non-partisan get out the vote campaigns geared towards Latinos of submitting fraudulent voter registration forms.

False Accusation:

On Friday, Jim Hoft of BigGovernment.com, a website backed by right-wing conspiracy theorist Andrew Breitbart, falsely reports that Mi Familia Vota dropped off 3,000 voter registration forms in Yuma, 65% of which were supposedly found to be invalid. That same day, the same right-wing blogger Jim Hoft posted a similar accusation on conservative blog First Things, claiming that Mi Familia Vota turned in 6,000 fraudulent voter registrations in Colorado—which is a complete misrepresentation of an unrelated court case from 2008 that has nothing to do with voter registration forms submitted by Mi Familia Vota.

Not surprisingly, Michelle Malkin ran the same piece of misinformation on her blog by Monday and was then interviewed by Fox News later that day. All of Malkin’s claims have already been dismissed in an investigation by Media Matters.

Here are the Facts:

* Mi Familia Vota has registered 298 voters in Yuma County Arizona over the past two months. Immediately following the accusation, the Yuma County Recorder stated that she had no reason to expect fraud in any of the voter registration forms dropped of by Mi Familia Vota. She has since gone on the record stating the same.
* Mi Familia Vota has registered 157 voters in Colorado over the past year, of which every single voter file has been deemed valid by their respective county clerks, and the Secretary of State.
* Mi Familia Vota canvassers have been trained in the law and they know the law. Mi Familia Vota takes any accusations of voter fraud very seriously and will be redoubling efforts to review the laws with its canvassers to ensure full compliance with the law in the final days of the Election.

I think that this is less about false accusations of voter fraud and more about fear regarding the power of the changing demographics of the United States. I also don’t think it’s coincidental that these accusations are being launched against organizations who would likely be registering voters that have lived and experienced how anti-immigrant and anti-Latino rhetoric work and where that rhetoric is most clearly coming from. Organizations like Mi Familia Vota, don’t need to be partisan. Such accusations rely on the assumption that Latino could be voters are stupid and cannot make informed decisions. I also think that in these districts, Republicans are setting the groundwork for what their excuse will be if they lose in these key areas. They can blame the undocumented, the Latino, the brown.