When you’re wrong, you should admit it.
Not Bill Bruch (photo, left), who chairs the GOP’s county organization in Skagit County, Washington. He attacked the news media for debunking his group’s spurious election fraud claims.
A “Skagit Voter Integrity Project” led by his group claimed they found over 3,000 voter registration “anomalies.” This was an amateurish slapdash job. For example, in one of their spreadsheets, they claimed 14 ballots were cast by dead people.
But a Seattle TV station that cross-checked online obituaries against voting records found that all 14 of those voters “cast their last ballots before they died.”
Making sloppy assertions like those is inexcusable. Attacking the media for uncovering it is worse.
KING 5 News provided other examples where the GOP group falsely claimed certain individuals were ineligible to vote (see their story here). Their report red-flagged Marilyn Wheeler, 89, a longtime resident of Mount Vernon, Washington, as someone who “may not be competent to vote.” She told KING 5 News that no one had contacted her, and said, “It’s wrong for anybody to decide that I’m incompetent to vote.” It sure is; only the election office has authority to determine voter eligibility.
She called the GOP group’s research “fraudulent.”
Then there’s the case of a man named Edwardo, who the GOP “researchers” flagged as a non-citizen. Their reasoning? Their report says “this voter has lived here four years and it takes longer than that to become a citizen.” Edwardo told KING 5 News he’s been in the U.S. since 1995 and acquired citizenship. It apparently didn’t occur to the “researchers” that he might have lived someplace else in the U.S. before moving to Mount Vernon.
KING 5 News said, “KING 5’s spot-checks of other anomalies in the report found errors in addresses that the canvassers said didn’t exist, homes that appeared vacant, and members of the military posted overseas — military members are legally allowed to remain registered at their last Washington home address and have their ballot mailed overseas.” Very, very sloppy work.
And it’s not unusual; last month I wrote here about a similar project in Mason County, Washington, that flagged 239 voter registrations “in a report that KING 5 News found riddled with errors (story here).” In that posting, I also mentioned that in Arizona, Republicans flagged 282 “dead voters,” of whom 281 were found alive, and concluded, “In short, don’t believe Republican ‘dead voter’ claims.”
I’m writing about this because Republicans all across the U.S. are carrying out “voter integrity” projects that are nothing more than partisan witch hunts; and as these specific, concrete examples from Washington and Arizona show, when they fail to turn up witches, they manufacture them.
Remember the fable about the boy who cried wolf? Except this time, there’s no wolf at the end of the story.
Related story: In 2020, when Bruch ran for the legislature (he lost, see results here), a local newspaper reported he’d been sued in 1998 for fraud related to a Ponzi scheme, for which default judgments entered against him; lied about not being served with the lawsuits; and was denied a mortgage broker’s license in 2008 because of those judgments (see that story here). This is who the Skagit County Republicans put in charge of their “voter integrity” project — another reason not to believe them.