Originally posted at The Brad Blog

Last year we spent quite a bit of time detailing what what we described, with much justification, as The Year of GOP Election Fraud.

From the three felony voter fraud convictions of Indiana Sec. of State Charlie White (R), to the admitted ballot petition fraud of the campaign of Newt Gingrich (R) and of the staff of U.S. House Rep. Thaddeus McCotter (R) to the attempted voter fraud by right-wing propagandist James O’Keefe’s co-conspirators, to the registration fraud allegedly committed by employees of the firm hired by the RNC to carry out voter registration in seven key swing states, to the actual apparent voter fraud of the GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney and beyond, it was another year in which the Republican Party pretended there was a massive Democratic voter fraud epidemic in order to institute new polling place voter suppression laws, even while carrying out their own crime spree, which largely went ignored by the very same media covering the GOP attempts to enact polling place photo ID restrictions.

But it wasn’t only the GOP superstars named above who attempted to game the system. Some of their gullible followers, who were distracted and conned into buying into the pretend “Democratic voter fraud” panic, decided to take matters into the their own hands by attempting to double-vote, claiming they were simply “testing the system.”

Two such cases in two different states led to voter fraud felony arrests last November. One of the cases, in Nevada, has now been settled with a guilty plea. The other appears to still be pending in New Mexico against a man who claims he thought his job as a Republican precinct challenger was to challenge the system itself.

Guilty Plea in Nevada

Last week, Roxanne Rubin, a 56-year-old casino worker from Las Vegas, pled guilty to attempting to vote twice. She agreed to pay nearly $2,500 in restitution to the state, to take an “impulse control counseling class”, perform 100 hours of community service and otherwise stay out of trouble for six months.

If all goes well for her, the felony charge will be reduced to a misdemeanor disorderly conduct conviction.

Rubin, a Republican who appears to watch too much Fox “News,” told FBI investigators after her arrest that she simply “wanted to make a point” about the need for polling place Photo ID restrictions by testing the system. She voted once in Henderson, NV during early voting, and then attempted to do so later that same day at another early voting site. When she did, she was told she had already voted. She denied that she had, claiming that the database was wrong.

It wasn’t. Rubin says she was stunned when she was arrested by the FBI some days later at the Riviera hotel-casino where she worked.

She was “willing to risk the penalty in order to expose what she perceived as a weakness in the voting process,” according to investigators, because she “was unhappy with the process; specifically in that her identification was not checked.”

“If Ms. Rubin was trying to demonstrate how easy it is to commit voter fraud, she clearly failed and proved just the opposite,” Nevada’s Democratic Sec. of State Ross Miller said after Rubin’s guilty plea last week.

Jeffrey Segal, the deputy state attorney general who prosecuted the case, said that he knew of no other voters arrested in Nevada or nationally on a similar charge during the 2012 election.

Segal must not be a very good investigator…

Felony Charge in New Mexico

In early December, in one of the same stories in which we covered Rubin’s arrest, we also covered the arrest of a New Mexico man — another Republican — who hadn’t been named at the time, but who also claimed to have been “testing” the system in order to prove how easy it was to double-vote in that state.

He too was wrong.

We now know the man was 40-year-old Marshall Fischer of Silver City. He too watches too much Fox “News.” He says he was drafted as a Republican poll challenger, but somehow came up with the notion that he was supposed to challenge the system itself.

Fischer is now facing a fourth-degree felony count of fraudulent and double-voting after he voted once at the Grant County Convention Center on Election Day before then attempting to vote once again at the National Guard Armory in Santa Clara.

When he gave his name in order to try and vote again after standing in line, he was told that he had already voted and would have to vote with a provisional ballot if he wanted to cast another ballot.

“I never intended to vote again and I did not say I wanted to vote again.” Fischer now claims. “I never touched the provisional ballot. It would be different if I took the ballot and tried to vote, but I didn’t do that. If I had intended on voting twice I would have done that.”

If true, it’s interesting that Fischer did, essentially, what Republican scam artist James O’Keefe’s compatriots were seen doing on videotape when attempting to prove they could commit voter fraud in New Hampshire last year during that state’s First-in-the-Nation primary.

In that case, O’Keefe’s co-conspirators, who were secretly videotaping themselves as they were hoping to show how they could receive ballots in other people’s names, didn’t actually ask for a ballot, or even touch it when it was offered to them (at least in most cases that O’Keefe bothered to release on video). Rather, they would say something to the poll workers like “is there a Joe Smith on the ballot?” After which, when they were offered a ballot, they would claim to have left their photo ID in the car — even though one is not needed to vote in NH — and subsequently leave the polling place.

However, the excuse that he did not touch the ballot may or may not work for Fischer. The Las Cruces Sun-News notes that according to New Mexico Statute 1-12-9, Conduct of election; fraudulent and double voting, “every person not entitled to vote who fraudulently votes, and every person who votes or offers to vote more than once at any one election, is guilty of a fourth-degree felony.”

Other than those two Republican double-voting cases, however, we’ll just have to wait for the promised report of Republican “voter fraud” fraudster organization True the Vote. As The BRAD BLOG detailed in early December, the group, which had offered dozens of fraudulent and misleading claims of “voter fraud” on their website (and still does), had also claimed to be “busily analyzing the mountain of data that came from all around the country about fraud and irregularities at the polls” during the 2012 election.

Their “report” on all that fraud would be forthcoming, their website promised then as it still does. And yet, it’s almost three full months after the 2012 election and there is still no report from the group on all the “fraud and irregularities at the polls” this year. Could it be because what little “voter fraud” there was this year was actually performed by their fellow Republicans? If we’re going by actual evidence — something that Republicans scammed by the GOP and Fox “News” claims of “voter fraud” may not be familiar with — the answer is likely “yes.”