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"Trust, but verify."

        -- Ronald Reagan¹
          40th US President

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As each election cycle approaches, more and more articles about alleged voter fraud, voter caging, vote manipulation and voter intimidation begin to come out.

Sometimes, they are simply examples of fear-mongering used to attempt to move the public in one direction or another with regard to Voter Identification laws.

Sometimes, they appear to be conspiracy theories by nutcases.

And sometimes, they turn out to be grounded in reality.

In all cases, you never know what you'll find unless you first look at the facts -- and sometimes getting to those facts takes Herculean efforts.

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"Those who cast the votes decide nothing. Those who count the votes decide everything."

        -- Josef Stalin (1879-1953)
          Georgian Soviet politician

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Why?

Over the fold, some quotes, some reflections, some news about ongoing developments over at the Velvet Revolution and a list of related stories.

This is an Open Thread.

In upholding the Indiana voter suppression, er disenfranchisement, er “ID” law, the US Supreme Court’s decision contained the following head smacking passage (hat tip to BooMan and Adam B):

The record contains no evidence of any such fraud actually occurring in Indiana at any time in its history. Moreover, petitioners argue that provisions of the Indiana Criminal Code punishing such conduct as a felony provide adequate protection against the risk that such conduct will occur in the future. It remains true, however, that flagrant examples of such fraud in other parts of the country have been documented throughout this Nation’s history by respected historians and journalists, that occasional examples have surfaced in recent years, and that Indiana’s own experience with fraudulent voting in the 2003 Democratic primary for East Chicago Mayor -- though perpetrated using absentee ballots and not in-person fraud -- demonstrate that not only is the risk of voter fraud real but that it could affect the outcome of a close election.

Now, I have written a thing or two about election fraud and election integrity issues over the past few years, so I think that I have a bit of a perspective here.

The fact that the US Supreme Court has put the above statement in its opinion is stunning in and of itself. The fact that the discussion about “voter fraud” has centered on the “mysterious evil person who knowingly gives false information in order to vote (or vote in a different precinct)” (oh, the irony there) is one of the biggest problems in the overall area of election integrity.