Think Progress reports
"yes and Adam Peck on Oct 5, 2012 at 10:10 am
DENVER, Colorado — Republican lawyers have a plan for their candidates who lose on Election Day: send operatives to absentee voters’ homes and challenge their ballots.
Christine Svenson, a vice chair of the Republican National Lawyers Association, warned repeatedly about absentee voter fraud during a panel at the Colorado Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday. To combat such fraud, Svenson recommended that campaigns gather the names of local absentee voters and search their addresses on Google to “make sure that those buildings are not crack houses, row houses, slumlord houses.” For the record, people who live in row houses or who have abusive landlords do not lose their right to vote. Neither do people unfortunate enough to live in the same building as a drug dealer.
At the end of the panel, Svenson was asked how to handle unfavorable election results. Her answer strongly suggested that Republicans should try to change the result of the election by challenging absentee ballots:
"yes and Adam Peck on Oct 5, 2012 at 10:10 am
DENVER, Colorado — Republican lawyers have a plan for their candidates who lose on Election Day: send operatives to absentee voters’ homes and challenge their ballots.Christine Svenson, a vice chair of the Republican National Lawyers Association, warned repeatedly about absentee voter fraud during a panel at the Colorado Conservative Political Action Conference on Thursday. To combat such fraud, Svenson recommended that campaigns gather the names of local absentee voters and search their addresses on Google to “make sure that those buildings are not crack houses, row houses, slumlord houses.” For the record, people who live in row houses or who have abusive landlords do not lose their right to vote. Neither do people unfortunate enough to live in the same building as a drug dealer.
At the end of the panel, Svenson was asked how to handle unfavorable election results. Her answer strongly suggested that Republicans should try to change the result of the election by challenging absentee ballots:
SVENSON: If an election doesn’t go your way, you’ve got an uphill battle. You’ve got to make sure that you get your operatives out on the streets the day after the election, researching. You’ve got to get the list of the individuals who selected absentee ballots, go to those homes, find out — you can even call them, by the way — get affidavits about whether or not they sent them in, but it really hinges around those absentee voters out there, if you can turn them around.
There are a couple of problems with this strategy, by challenging any ballot they must sign a sworn statement indicating who the challenger is and why they want to challenge the ballot so everyone will be aware of who these people are and secondly they are subject to arrest and penalties when and if they make invalid challenges. So unlike the voter purges, where they can cover a whole state with the same BS without any risk, this strategy takes special investigative time and effort to make sure they themselves are not violating the law. Frankly I would like to see some of these republican operatives go to jail if they attempt such a thing.
There are a couple of problems with this strategy, by challenging any ballot they must sign a sworn statement indicating who the challenger is and why they want to challenge the ballot so everyone will be aware of who these people are and secondly they are subject to arrest and penalties when and if they make invalid challenges. So unlike the voter purges, where they can cover a whole state with the same BS without any risk, this strategy takes special investigative time and effort to make sure they themselves are not violating the law. Frankly I would like to see some of these republican operatives go to jail if they attempt such a thing.