Voter Fraud 'Minimal'...Oh, Really?

In the wake of Attorney General Eric Holder's declaration of war speech against voter ID laws, a number of the usual suspects stepped in to try to backup his claim that voter fraud was negligible, including, of course, Pravda-on-the-Hudson. They even have a demonstrably cooked 'study' or two to cite.

After my article yesterday on Eric Holder's racist and hypocritical rant, I decided to look through the spam filter and found a number of e-mails from the usual trolls citing the same nonsense. Since none of them met guidelines, being either obscene or containing ad hominem attacks on me or my readers (ones from these particular URLs never meet guidelines, trust me) and since none of them seriously tried to debate the points I raised, I didn't even bother publishing them since they added nothing to the mix.

However, since the 'negligible' argument is being megaphoned by their bylined pals on the Left, I think it's worth addressing.

First of all, 'negligible' is a subjective judgment, based on who's counting. For instance, in 2009 there were a total of 13,257 new cases of AIDS originating from heterosexual contact reported in the US. As a percentage of the US population, that works out to about .000043%, something most mathematicians would call negligible. However, the government spends millions of dollars each year promoting the safe sex message and urging condom use, and if you notice, the ads almost always feature heterosexual couples or females, who have an even lower incidence of AIDS from heterosexual contact then do males. Of course, if you or one of your loved ones is part of the statistic, it's tremendously important to you and if you were to ask someone from the Department of Health and Human Services, they'd undoubtedly tell you that even one case is too many and justifies the most stringent methods at prevention.

Since voter fraud is an infection of our democracy, shouldn't we be as concerned about preventing it?

Actually, the incidents of voter fraud, particularly when it comes to fraudulent registration are rampant and easy to find with a simple internet search. And the interesting thing you find as you get into it is that the reported instances are a lot lower than they might be simply because elected officials and their appointees charged with enforcing the laws on this ( almost always Democrats) frequently fail to investigate and prosecute.

An example I'm personally familiar with involves Bob Dornan, a long time conservative California Republican congressman whose district was redrawn by the Democrat majority in Sacramento. In 1996, Dornan was defeated for re-election by Democrat Loretta Sanchez by a mere 984 votes.

Congressman Dornan charged that there had been massive election fraud in his district involving non-citizens. Dornan did his own investigation and said that that there were at least 1,789 illegal voters, and perhaps more. According to John Funds' book Stealing Elections, the INS did an investigation on its own in 1996 into alleged Motor Voter fraud in California's Forty-sixth Congressional District and found that based on registrations that didn't match up: "4,023 illegal voters possibly cast ballots in the disputed election between Republican Robert Dornan and Democrat Loretta Sanchez." (p. 24).

The House Contested Elections Committee in the Spring of 1997 did a cursory investigation of its own and came up with proof that 547 non-citizens voted in Orange County and that 303 more had been registered to vote in the 46th District by Hermandad Nacional Mexicana, a non profit funded with government grants that actively registered non-citizens to vote and instructed them
on how to mark their absentee ballots.

So at the least, you could say that Dornan had a case and that this called for a thorough investigation by the Department of Justice.

The end result? Democrat Attorney General Janet Reno formally declined to investigate, based on her subjective judgment that 'not enough fraud occurred' to change the results and of course, possibly unseat a Democrat member of Congress.

Want more? One of the most recent well-publicized voter fraud cases occurred in the Washington State governor’s race in November 2004 in which Democrat Christine Gregoire allegedly defeated Republican Dino Rossi by just 129 votes after weeks of vote counting.

Later, the Washington State Superior Court found that 1,400 felons voted illegally, along with illegal votes cast by 53 dead people, two non-citizens and 27 double votes. Since Washington State does not have party voter registration, there was no way of proving exactly how they voted, so the judge ruled there was not enough proof to void the election. However, it's worth mentioning that almost all of the violations occurred in the Democrat stronghold of King County. You might remember that one,because it involved a number of voters claiming the address of the State Democrat party headquarters in Seattle their 'residence'. A similar tactic seems to have been used in this recent case in Wisconsin.

There are numerous other incidents I could cite. For instance, you could spend hours reading about President Obama's old friends at ACORN.

The core of the problem stems from a really bad piece of legislation, passed,of course by a Democrat-dominated Congress. President Clinton's National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) known as the Motor-Voter law makes voter registration virtually automatic when you apply for a driver's license and called for distributing registration applications in state welfare offices. Under this law, the information supplied by the applicant for a license doubles as information for voter registration unless the applicant indicates that he/she doesn't want to be registered. It also has restrictions that prevent states from culling the rolls in a timely manner to eliminate dead people and people whom may no longer be residents in the area or whom have lost their voting rights due to felony convictions.

Since several states now issue driver's licenses to illegal aliens, the voting rolls have become clogged with a number of people who are not entitled to vote. There was a move in Congress to change the law to not include voter registration for non-citizens in 1998. It was narrowly defeated, with nearly every Democrat in Congress voting against.

It's also worth mentioning that for illegal aliens, a voter registration card is one of the proofs of citizenship legally allowed to be used to help establish identity for the purposes of 'legal' employment. That and a social security card are all you need.

And then, there's my own experience. When I drove my elderly mother to the polls in California to vote I stood in line next to her. After my mom finished signing in, the poll worker asked me my name, to which I responded jokingly 'Chauffeur'. My mom told the pol worker "That's my son", after which the poll worker responded "I'll mark him down as living at the same address' and handed me a ballot. I was not even asked for an ID. And yes, I gave it back to the poll worker.

The other side to voter fraud is vote suppression. Again, the chief culprits seem to be Democrats and the chief victims military voters stationed overseas.

It's pretty well known that Al Gore and his team used technicalities and friendly Democrat appointed officials to disqualify the ballots of almost 2,000 members of our military serving overseas in the 2000 Florida presidential election.

What's less well known is that this process wasn't limited to Florida, and was so egregious by the 2008 election that Congress passed the Federal Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (the MOVE Act), which among other things mandated that ballots be in the hands of our military no less than 45 days prior to elections.

Eric Holder and the Obama Department of Justice dealt with that prior to the 2010 midterms by by engaging in a systematic campaign to encourage states to seek waivers not to comply with the laws and suppress the military vote, a constituency that was perceived by them as largely Republican.As you might expect,Congress found out in a subsequent investigation when it was too late to do anything about it that the worst offenders were states and counties run by Democrats. In fact, the Justice Department employee who was the chief contact person in encouraging jurisdictions not to comply with the law was actually promoted.

Voter fraud 'negligible'? Again, I guess it depends on who's counting. And of course, who benefits.

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