Across the country, Republican legislatures are restricting access to the ballot, taking away American citizens’ right to vote.
It’s necessary, they say, to prevent voting fraud.
By Republicans.
I don’t recall reading about any cases of fraudulent votes cast for Biden in 2020, although there may have been a couple that flew under my radar. Every voting fraud story I’ve posted in this blog — and there have been several — has implicated Republicans. Today’s story is more of the same.
Rosemarie Hartle of Las Vegas died in 2017 from cancer. Yet “she” voted in the 2020 election. That is, a ballot in her name, appearing to be signed by her, was cast in that election. She was a classic “dead person voting.”
The case became a Republican icon. Here, at last, was proof that “dead people vote.” Her husband, Las Vegas businessman Donald Kirk Hartle (photo below), went on TV and poroclaimed, “That is pretty sickening.” Conservative blowhards like CPAC’s Matt Schlapp inveighed against “hundreds of dead people voting in Clark County” (despite no supporting evidence), and the GOP even ran ads about Rosemarie’s purloined ballot.
It turned out that “Hartle himself … illegally submitted his wife’s ballot.” (Read story here.)
Although charged with two felonies, and facing “up to four years in prison for each count if convicted,” he was allowed to cut a sweetheart plea deal: Pay a $2,000 fine and have only a misdemeanor on his record.
Contrast that with the case of Crystal Mason in Texas.
Before we venture into comparing their cases, let me point out that Hartle is a white man, and Mason is a black woman. Those are material facts.
Mason, who was still on federal parole in 2016 after serving time for committing fraud as a tax preparer, wanted to vote in the 2016 election. She went to a polling place, but her name wasn’t on the voter rolls, so with the assistance of a poll worker, she cast a provisional ballot. Which is allowed under federal law. The ballot wasn’t counted. But Texas authorities prosecuted her anyway, and a white judge sentenced her to 5 years in state prison for illegal voting. (Details here.)
Mason didn’t even vote illegally; she only cast a provisional ballot that wasn’t counted, and did so inadvertently, aided by a poll worker. She got 5 years in prison for that.
Hartle intentionally voted his dead wife’s ballot in order to create a fake narrative about “voting fraud,” and went on TV to promote a false GOP conspiracy theory about illegal voting. He was lying through his teeth. He committed a felony. But unlike Mason, he won’t be saddled with a felony record, or serve a day in jail. Instead, he’s getting kid-glove treatment. From a white judge.
Republican agitators like this guy are crisscrossing the country, stirring up their followers to wage an angry campaign against the academic field of “critical race theory” by falsely claiming it’s taught to schoolchildren. Critical race theory, or CRT as it’s known, posits that systemic racism exists in America. That this is true is so obvious it slaps you in the face. You needn’t look any farther than how the system disparately treated Hartle and Mason.
What was Mason’s terrible crime, deserving of a lengthy prison sentence? Not “illegal voting,” because she didn’t vote, and casting a provisional ballot is legal. She was prosecuted for “voting while black.”
Hartle is far guiltier than she is. His crime is almost beyond words. He isn’t just a lying sack of shit who broke the law; he did it to attack our democracy. And he was bailed out of serious consequences for his crime by America’s systemic racism.
(Click on image below to enlarge)
