It's early, but here's my nomination for Coveted Big Con Of The Week!™

Petition signatures are just about due for Ward Connelly's anti-affirmative action initiative in Missouri. [1]

And guess what? Ward's cheating.

From the Rocky Mountain News

A group analyzing thousands of signatures that qualified a November ballot measure backed by Ward Connerly filed a legal challenge claiming more than half are invalid.

[The group]…found about 69,000 signatures that they claim are not valid.

"We've taken an exhaustive review of all of the signatures Connerly submitted and we found it replete with mistakes, errors and ignoring the law," Hughes said.

…Hughes said the problems with the signatures include more than 4,000 duplicate signatures and almost 7,000 signatures were affected because signature gathererers were not Colorado residents — a legal requirement in the state to collect signatures…

...A separate challenge has also been filed against the amendment's backers, claiming Connerly's signature gatherers engaged in misleading practices to collect signatures.

Yesterday's Supreme Court decision upholding Indiana's law imposing strict ID requirements on voters—even though the places where you can get ID's are inaccessible to many poor citizens—was agonizing to me, the kind of thing that keeps me awake nights. Digby well explains why [2]: this is the successful endgame of a decades-long conspiracy among conservatives to make it harder for Democratic-leaning constituencies to vote. The way they set up the scam was to claim that the Democrats are guilty of massive, systematic "voter fraud." In fact, even the Supreme Court, in foolishly upholding the Indiana statute, acknowledgment that precious little such Democratic voter fraud exists. And here's what we learn from the latest Ward Connerly outrage: as usual, the conservatives are projecting. Voter fraud is in fact what they themselves have been perfecting.

Here's a report from the good progressives at Fired Up! Missouri" [3]:

WENTZVILLE – This Sunday Wentzville Police found a Missouri Civil Rights Initiative petitioner named John Wynne...who is wanted in three states (ed. note: Washington, Indiana and Oregon) for voter fraud related charges. Police were responding to a call at Kohl’s Department store about a petitioner and two community volunteers who were educating voters about the damaging impacts of the initiative.

The charges of “obtaining signatures by deception” are misdemeanors that do not warrant extradition so Wentzville Police did not take Mr. Wynne into custody on Sunday. The petitioner has been spotted by community volunteers consistently over the last several weeks and therefore have every reason to believe he is still on the street gathering signatures for MoCRI....

“We wanted to monitor whether John Wynne was gathering signatures honestly, but he was unwilling to have us witness,” said Lara Granich, director of Missouri Jobs with Justice. “On Sunday we followed him among six sites in two hours in Wentzville and he would leave every time we got within earshot.”

Here's how the New York Times [4] reported the same signature-gathers' techniques in Colorado:

DENVER — Freddie Whitney was walking out of a King Soopers supermarket here this winter when she was approached by three young men.

They politely asked if she was against discrimination and, if so, if she would sign a petition that would legally end the practice in the state. After scanning it briefly, Ms. Whitney, a 78-year-old African-American, signed it.

Chin up, Ward. You look to be heading to defeat in Missouri. But you're already the front-runner for our Coveted Big Con Of The Week!™

Leave your own nominations in the comments, or email me directly at rperlstein@ourfuture.org [5].