Republicans nationwide are pushing laws they claim are intended to “stop voter fraud” which they imply is committed mostly by nonwhites and non-Republicans. But in the rare instances of voter fraud and misrepresentation that I’ve seen, the only people committing it are all Republicans. Here are a few examples:

— Roxanne Rubin, a registered Republican, tried to vote twice at two separate locations in Las Vegas — and got caught.

— A temporary employee at the Clackamas County, Oregon elections office is under investigation for ballot-tampering — namely, for filling out straight Republican tickets on the uncompleted portions of ballots turned in to the county for next week’s election.

— Back in February, Republican operative and former Indiana Secretary of State Charlie White, whose state in 2008 was the first in the nation to pass the voter-restriction laws the GOP keeps claiming without real evidence will stop fraud, got a slap on the wrist (one year’s home detention) on his conviction for six counts of voter fraud — fraud that the new GOP law had failed, unsurprisingly, to stop.

— Republican operative Nathan Sproul’s company, Strategic Allied Consulting, has been tied to acts of voter fraud, ballot dumping, and misrepresentation in several states nationwide, states like Florida, Virginia, and Colorado.

— Speaking of misrepresentation: One of the favorite anecdotes of Minnesota Republicans pushing the “Voter ID” voter suppression amendment is The Laundromat Story, which is about a bunch of people who allegedly tried to vote using a laundromat (or in the latest version, a “coin-operated laundry”) in the small town of Harris as their residence. The tale has several problems, not least of which are these three: The people telling the story keep shifting the year it happened (from 2006 to 2008 to 2010), there was never a formal complaint filed to the proper authorities about such an incident, and the laundromat in question stopped being a laundromat before 2006 (it’s been a private residence for several years now).

With regard to crimes committed and bogosities told in connection with the ballot box, Republicans might want to remove the load-bearing beams from their own eyes before complaining about the dust specks in anyone else’s eyes.