All across the nation, the Republican Party is trying to clamp down on voting rights. Citing an imaginary epidemic of voter fraud, they proclaim themselves the guardians of electoral purity.

All righty then. So how do the Republicans fare when they’re running their own electoral process? Badly.

So badly, I wouldn’t put them in charge of a Bingo game, let alone an election.

Rachel Maddow highlighted several instances of GOP incompetence on her February 7 show. The takeaway: Of the contests held to date (primaries and caucuses), only two were relatively trouble-free — New Hampshire and South Carolina. Every other one was seriously flawed. She referred to the whole thing as a “freaking mess.”

Since then, the Maine caucus has added another entry on the bad side of the ledger. On caucus day, Mitt Romney was the announced winner by less than 200 votes over Ron Paul. However… the caucus in Washington County, Maine was called off due to inclement weather. The Paul camp claims to be very strong in Washington County. But while the county GOP chair (a Romney supporter) wants to hold the caucus this weekend, the state chair is refusing. He says the results are final as they currently stand. I guess he doesn’t care that an entire county was disenfranchised.

Once again, a state Republican organization blithely fumbles its process to choose a candidate for the most powerful office in the world. And these are the people who claim to believe in the sanctity of the ballot box.

Just for yuks, we’ll run down the list of other Republican blunders after the jump.

The Iowa fiasco is pretty well known. The “crucial,” “first-in-the-nation,” “bellwether,” insert-your-cliche-here Iowa caucuses were screwed up six ways from Sunday. First, Mitt Romney was named the winner. Then the Iowa GOP broke its own rules by waiting 16 days to finalize the results. Then they announced that, oops, Rick Santorum had a lead. But wait, some precincts are missing, and we can’t really say who won. Oh, all right, Santorum won. And they never did find those missing votes.

Sheesh. On to Florida where, as far as I can tell, the voting went off reasonably well. No hanging chads or anything. But the apportionment of delegates is up in the air. The national GOP had stripped Florida of half its delegates for scheduling its primary so early — but the state party is hoping to reverse that ruling. And second-place finisher Newt Gingrich is appealing the winner-take-all rule, seeking a share of delegates equivalent to his share of the vote. So as of right now, we have no idea how many delegates Florida will have or who they will support.

Then came the Nevada caucus, where the specially-scheduled Sheldon Adelson evening caucus was marred by controversy when party officials tried to impose a religious test on those wishing to vote. And it took two days for the Nevada party to count the votes and release a total, because there was so much confusion to sort through.

The state of Missouri then spent $7 million on a meaningless Republican primary. Following a dispute with the national party,  the state GOP stripped the primary of any role in delegate selection. That’ll happen later. But they held the primary anyway. Way to waste the taxpayers’ money.

On the same day as the meaningless Missouri primary, Colorado and Minnesota held meaningless caucuses. Meaningless because state party rules specifically state that the results of the caucuses have no bearing on the ultimate selection of delegates. Who are, if we need a reminder, the folks who actually go to the convention and pick the GOP nominee.

Looking at this comedy of errors, I can only conclude that the Republican Party doesn’t care the least little bit about clean elections. Which shows, yet again, that their anti-voter-fraud drive is purely and simply an attempt to limit participation. It has nothing to do with principle, because the Republicans routinely ignore the principle in their own house.