Three white men and an Asian woman—that’s the face of “voter fraud” in Arizona.

That’s the identifying information the Attorney General’s office supplied me on the FOUR people who have been convicted of voter fraud in Arizona from the 2008 election. For an election that had 2,293,475 Arizona voters go to the polls.

So Arizona, voter fraud in our state is all but non-existent. Just as it’s a tiny, TINY problem anywhere in the nation.

And yet Republicans keep passing laws to make it harder to vote because they claim there’s widespread fraud. No there isn’t.

What we have is a Republican attempt to steal your vote. Their new laws target minorities, the elderly, the poor and students—all groups likely to vote Democratic. And that’s just the list now: if they get away with it, who knows how they’ll try to neuter Democrats in the future.

And now we learn that a former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party owns a firm that is being widely accused of bogus voter registration efforts for the National Republican Party: “registering” people who don’t exist or are dead; turning in only the registration of Republicans, while shredding registrations by Democrats; scamming the system. The first big complaint came out of Florida—thanks to the diligence of county clerks. Within a day, complaints started coming in from several other states. Who knows where this will end up?

But I’ll tell you this: Americans cherish the vote and think those who try to suppress it are beneath contempt. Voter suppression is un-American. It is unpatriotic. It is also illegal. And already we’re seeing it BACKFIRING on Republicans as it propels Democrats to the polls. (I predict we’re going to see a bigger turnout than ever on the Democratic side this year.)

Here’s my bottom line: I don’t want a single person to vote who isn’t a duly registered voter; but I don’t want a single registered voter to be denied the right to vote.