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Good grief.
As anticipated, Charlie Webster’s personal vendetta to apprehend possible perpetrators of voter fraud from a list of 206 students within the Maine collegiate community has resulted in a bust for the Maine McCarthy.
Following months of asinine accusations, Webster officially missed his kick on Wednesday when Maine’s Secretary of State, Charlie Summers, removed the ball from play, revealing the uneventful outcome of his investigation into Webster’s faulty claims.
According to a Thursday story in The Maine Campus, of the 206 students on the list, two of the names turned out to be duplicates and 77 were confirmed to be registered only in Maine.
Thus, Summers took to the remaining 127 presumed culprits in search of some sort of voter fraudulence.
The specifics of his findings were as follows: 44 of the 127 were registered solely in the state of Maine, making it so the majority of students listed as voting in two states only registered in one.
The only apparent wrong they perpetrated was voting in Webster’s state.
Webster did find 77 actively registered in Maine and their home state, and five students cast votes both in Maine as well as their home state in the same year, but in different elections, Summers said. Though it could lead to fraud (but only potentially), no law was violated.
In the words of Rep. Emily Cain, D-Orono, the House minority leader, “Students of Maine were vindicated today.”
Victory indeed is ours.
The problem is students didn’t want to get in the ring.
Webster said he didn’t expect his list to yield any sinister results for college students, but turned virtually an entire demographic against him by coming up with a list of their peers.
Another piece of Summers’ investigation did yield one case of proven voter fraud — when a citizen of El Salvador voted in 2002 in Portland. Perhaps more attention should be focused where the proven case was found. Surely, it doesn’t stand alone.
Voting is a personal choice for students. Many vote at home and many identify as Orono citizens. It isn’t up to Webster or anyone else to examine motives.
Over time degradation will take to the reputation of Webster, the boy who cried fraud. The fiasco is over, but it is a pox on Webster’s character that won’t cease to exist.
That’s what happens when you go barking up the wrong tree loud enough to alert the neighborhood. After a while, people grow indifferent to the racket.
