Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Keith Ellison Apparently Knows What I'm All About

Being a resident of the Fifth District, I follow my Congressman, Keith Ellison, on Twitter.  Or at least I did, until he blocked me today.


Ellison has been a vocal critic of Minnesota’s proposed Voter ID amendment.  He’s also been one of the leading disseminators of false information about the amendment.  The latest lie Keith and his staff have been peddling is that Voter ID will mean that members of the military won’t be able to vote.


I figured that today was apparently “Lie About Voter ID Day” on Twitter, since my timeline began to fill up this morning with all sorts of lies about the amendment- that it would end same day registration, that it would end absentee voting, that Republicans want to restrict the franchise to rich white landowners and put y’all back in chains, etc., etc…


So I wasn’t surprised when Keith started in with the chanting points.  (I’ve captured the whole exchange at Storify.)


It all started pretty mildly:



To which I replied:



Then it started to get weird:



I wasn’t sure exactly what the big lie was.  (I was, however, sure it was big. I could tell by the use of all caps.)


But was Keith saying it was a lie that he didn’t care about voter fraud?  Or was he saying it was a lie that voter fraud cancels out legitimate votes?  I asked him to clarify.


Turns out the lie is that there is any voter fraud at all.



So there you have it. Claims of vote fraud are false. Photo ID advocates are lying about “all this fraud stuff.”  And I know it.


After that, I asked Keith why he and his staff were lying about the Voter ID amendment ending military voting.  That’s when he told me:



And then, the conversation was over.  I was blocked.  I never got to find out what I was all about.  :-(


Hey, but at least he called me sir.