Solution Seeks Problem

The need to fight rampant voter fraud is one of those really scary sounding memes the Repubs love to trot out as they try to beat back the tide of Youth and Minority voting that they fervently believe threatens to wash them away at any moment.

Rampant Voter Fraud is also - you guessed it - almost completely baseless.

Here's a good look at the "issue" in The Tennesseean (not exactly a bastion of liberal bias):

“They identified a lot of fraud, but very, very, very, very, very, very little of it could be prevented by identification at the polls,” Levitt said.

The remainder involved vote buying, ballot-box stuffing, problems with absentee ballots, or ex-convicts voting even though laws bar them from doing so. Over the same seven-year time period covered by the cases Levitt reviewed, 400 million votes were cast in general elections.

“If there was evidence of this, we’d know about it,” said Elisabeth MacNamara, president of the League of Women Voters. Her organization, which has affiliates in every state, knows voter registrars, attends election meetings, observes and works at polls and is intimately aware of how the election system works.

It's not about protecting the franchise.  It's about keeping people from voting a certain way - in this case for Democrats - and it stinks.  If a big majority (of either party) showed up in some state houses, the electees might grow some balls, step out of line, and then the Lords of Lucre will lose a big measure of control.  And we can't have that now, can we?

Both Sides Do It

Except when they don't.

I dunno exactly what the score is, but when I look at things in general, I see one side making some large sized efforts to restrict people's rights.

Abortion
Collective Bargaining
Marriage Equality
Religion in Government
DADT
Voting

This is not my Republican Party.  These people are rabid and radical, and I wouldn't trust them to run a coin-operated laundry, much less a government.

From Balloon Juice:

...in my opinion, conservatives and media have succeeded beyond my worst nightmares in convincing people that the fundamental and constitutionally guaranteed right to vote is exactly the same as cashing a check, using an ATM, or purchasing a bus, train or airline ticket. I’m sure I missed one or two comparisons there, although I believe I’ve heard every one. Like everything else under the sun, the franchise is now akin to a commercial transaction.

Both Sides Do It

...except when they don't.

The Southern Strategy
Watergate
IranContra
Willie Horton
The Arkansas Project
McCain's Black Bastard Child
WMD (update: this one can be balanced off by Gulf of Tonkin)
Valerie Plame
Swift Boaters
Max Cleland
Birthers
The Kenyan Usurper
Death Panels

I don't have any problem understanding both Dems and Repubs being at least roughly equal in their venality when it comes to the Pay-To-Play aspects of our system here in the US.  We've allowed a pretty great thing to get almost totally FUBAR.  From that viewpoint, they're dead even.

But when I look at how the 2 sides conduct themselves when they're trying to sell the public on either a candidate or a policy, I see one side getting a lot deeper into the muck.

If you can come up with something Dems have done that can match the whoppers I listed at the top of this post, please apprise me of them so I can check and compare.