ELECTION 2012 A ham-handed solution to non-existent problem

rights challenged.

Voter suppression? Intimidation? No way, says Florida Republican Party Chairman Lenny Curry. He blasted Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson for criticizing the effort. Nelson, he said, “asks our public servants to ignore the threat to electoral integrity.”

But the “threat” is very nearly non-existent. Tova Wang, an expert in election law, told U.S. News and World Report in April that the number of people who have been prosecuted successfully for voter fraud is “ridiculously low.” A 2006 report from the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law found documented examples of voter fraud to be “extremely rare” and likened it to one’s chances of being killed by lightning.

The idea that voter fraud is epidemic stems from the occasional highprofile exception and from stunts like GOP activist James O’Keefe’s sending some guy into a polling place to vote under the name of Attorney General Eric Holder.

The demographic trend lines are clearly against the Republican Party. But rather than work to broaden the party’s appeal, some GOP leaders have chosen instead to narrow the other party’s base under the guise of addressing a problem that does not exist. Thus, you get a campaign to gut the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Thus, you get restrictive new Voter ID laws. Thus you get Florida (like New Mexico and Colorado) culling its voter rolls of non-citizens and somehow, apparently by sheer happenstance, targeting those who are most likely to vote for the other party.

Thus, you get Internicola being asked for his papers.

Yes, he provided them. But how many people, in a nation where voter turnout stands at a measly 45.5 percent, are going to make the effort? How many, when repeated obstacles are placed between them and the polling place, are going to give up in frustration? And that, of course, is the whole idea.

This is a thumb on the scales. It is a blatant use of the machinery of government in the cause of voter intimidation and suppression.

George Will

— This state, the first to let government employees unionize, was an incubator of progressivism and gave birth (in 1932 in Madison, the precursor of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees) to its emblematic institution, the government employees union — government organized as a special interest to lobby itself to expand itself. But Wisconsin progressivism is in a dark Peter Pan phase; it is childish without being winsome.

On Tuesday, in this year’s second-most important election, voters will judge the attempt by a populism of the privileged — white-collar labor unions whose members live comfortably above the American median — to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker.

For 16 months, Wisconsin, normally a paragon of Midwestern neighborliness, has been riven by furious attempts to punish