From Newsweek:

Mark Lloyd, 50, is a salesman in Campbell County, Va. Until a few years ago, he was only peripherally involved with politics. “I’d put signs in my yard, join the local Republicans,” Lloyd says. “But not like now.” When Lloyd “saw that our country was headed straight off to the left” after President Obama’s election, he began devoting every spare minute to local Tea Party activism. He is now chairman of the Lynchburg, Va., Tea Party Patriots. He is also a new breed of activist: an anti–“zombie voter” organizer.

Outrage and perfidy! Preventing the Differently Animated from voting, merely because they are Zombies? How long can these thugs possibly get?

The Zombie Rights Campaign is a non-partisan organization, but if the Tea Party is declaring war upon our constituents then we may have to bend that rule a bit in response.

Reading the full piece, essentially it comes down to this: Tea Party activists are convinced that widespread vote fraud, whereby living people use the names of the recently deceased to vote, actually exists.

As a Poli-Sci degree holder, I can assure you that this is, in fact, total nonsense, and Newsweek to their credit makes that point with facts and figures from various studies. Voter fraud is actually quite rare, compared to the number of votes legitimately cast. Still, and unfortunately, some groups, usually conservative ones here in the United States, use the spectre of this non-threat to agitate for laws restricting the voting franchise, requiring government issued ID cards and so forth to vote, which has the added benefit (to them) of historically depressing voters who tend toward the Democratic party (the urban poor in particular).

Now they’re extending this practice, and disenfranchising Zombies in the name of fighting imaginary fraud!

It’s rare enough that a Zombie is allowed to vote in the first place, but now they will face challenges at the polls, merely because they died (temporarily)?

We here at The Zombie Rights Campaign cannot condemn this practice strenuously enough. Zombies are people too, as our signs declare, and they should not be prevented from voting merely because they were listed, even briefly, as ‘deceased’ in state records. One needs a mind to vote, not a pulse!

The ZRC will be monitoring election day coverage to see how this story develops.

Tags: Social Justice

This entry was posted by John Sears on Monday, November 1st, 2010 at 11:23 pm and is filed under ZRC News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.