With Election Day quickly approaching, Tea Party members have revealed a new campaign strategy &- questioning individual voters at polling places who they believe may be ineligible to vote. This method is the Tea Party’s answer to accusations of voter fraud that ran rampant among conservatives during the 2006 election, a problem which the Tea Party claims is destructive to both the political process and their own candidates’ chances for success.
Liberal groups immediately responded by denouncing the Tea Party’s method as a scare tactic intended to frighten and intimidate voters, most likely targeting minority groups who are more likely to cast their votes for Democratic candidates.
Although voter fraud is a problem in America, this is the wrong way of dealing with it. Singling out individuals and confronting them in a public place is intimidating, and the process by with these individuals are selected will most likely be discriminatory and unfair. The issue of how to decide who to approach and who not to creates an ambiguous situation that will likely only result in accusations of racism on the part of the Tea Partiers.
Tea Party members may claim that voter fraud is a pressing problem that is running rampant throughout the country, but in reality, the problem is very small. Although voter registration fraud occurs far more often than it should, it is rare that this leads to illegal votes. According to a Justice Department report, only 55 people were convicted of election fraud in the U.S. from October 2002 to September 2005. This is hardly the scandal that some Republicans have made it out to be.
The Tea Party has plenty of other things that they should be focusing on for the upcoming election. Rather than wasting time and energy intimidating voters, which will likely not make much of a difference for them anyway, Tea Party should focus on recruiting voters for their own cause, not scaring off those who support the Democrats. Intimidating potential voters with no basis is nothing more than a cheap scare tactic and should not be tolerated. With voter registration rates on the decline since the 2006 election, political activists should be doing all they can to encourage voting, rather than discouraging it to suit their own agenda.
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