By Steve Gunn
EAGnews.org

WASHINGTON, DC – The National Education Association and other left-wing groups are labeling a billboard campaign meant to deter voter fraud in Wisconsin and Ohio as “voter suppression,” and are preparing to use the controversy as a motivator to get out the Democratic vote.

The NEA also tried to tie the voter fraud billboards to the Mitt Romney campaign, because the company that owns the billboard space that was rented for some of the ads is under the Bain Capital umbrella. Romney has not been involved with Bain Capital since 1999.

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The controversy started when billboards started popping up around Wisconsin and Ohio, two crucial swing states in the presidential election, with the message “Voter fraud is a felony” and a description of the maximum penalty for those convicted, according to a story posted on RedState.com.

Somehow that message riled the teachers union and others on the radical left, perhaps because candidates they favor have benefited from voter fraud in the past. They said the message on the billboards were an attempt to “bully” and “intimidate” people into skipping the election.

NEA officials have tried to tie Romney to the piece, writing that “Clear Channel Outdoor, an affiliate of the Clear Channel media conglomerate owned by Mitt Romney’s Bain Capital since 2008, claims a salesperson mistakenly sold the billboard spaces to an anonymous ‘private family foundation,’ going against company policy.”

That’s pretty much what happened. Clear Channel Outdoor simply rented the space to the foundation that posted the voter fraud messages, then convinced the foundation to cancel its contract and take down the signs when protests mounted. Clear Channel Outdoors went so far as to threaten to expose the identity of the ad buyer unless the contract was cancelled.

We believe the company went out of its way to respond to the concerns of those who objected to the billboards. And frankly we saw nothing wrong with the billboards.

If a person is legally registered to vote, that person is clearly not committing voter fraud and has nothing to worry about. That would be like an innocent citizen feeling threatened by a billboard that read “Bank robbery is a crime.” It wouldn’t happen, because that citizen doesn’t rob banks.

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We do believe there should be a much larger discussion about voter fraud, which has been proven to be a decisive factor in any number of major elections around the nation over the years. Perhaps the most notable recent case was in 2008 in Minnesota, when former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman lost a very close election to Democrat Al Franken.

A subsequent investigation strongly suggested that fraudulent votes put Franken over the top.

In any case, the NEA and other groups, sensing possible trouble for President Obama and other Democrats in the coming election, are using the controversy to try to stir up liberals in Wisconsin and Ohio and motivate them to vote.

They have formed a group called Election Protection and are planning a “counter effort” that will include billboards with an unspecified message.

“Our students’ education is at risk and the quality of public education that our professionals deliver every day is at risk,” union officials wrote in an article about the billboards. “Supporting all voters’ rights and getting out the vote is what we’ve got to do.”

We wonder how the union would have reacted if similar billboards had appeared in states that are considered safe for the Romney campaign. We doubt we would have heard a peep from Big Labor about that.