Sep 14, 2012
John Hawkins
Townhall.com
After George W. Bush defeated Al Gore at the ballot box and in a rare show of fortitude for a Republican, didn't stand by haplessly wringing his hands when Gore tried to lawyer his way into the White House, liberals were outraged. Sure, Gore had never been ahead at any point, but OBVIOUSLY voter fraud had cost Democrats the election. Afterwards, Democrats DEMANDED that we do more to insure the integrity of our elections. Republicans agreed and for a while, we finally had an issue where there was genuine bipartisan agreement. Then came the 2004 elections and many of the same liberals who had requested better, more accurate voting machines claimed the very machines they wanted were being used for fraud because they didn't get the result they wanted. That marked the end of the Left's interest in stopping fraud at the ballot box. On the other hand, Republicans have continued to try to make our elections honest and fair. Towards that end, one of the measures the GOP is pushing for is voter identification. If you need a picture ID to get on a plane, cash a check, buy alcohol, rent a car, get a marriage license, or to get into the Democratic National Convention, then asking for a photo ID to vote is a no-brainer. However, Democrats believe that they benefit from voter fraud; so they oppose any sort of attempt to verify that voters are who they say they are. They can't admit that; so they use two excuses. The first is their patronizing and insulting claim that black Americans are so uniquely stupid and incompetent that you can't expect them to get a photo ID like white people do. It's amazing that in 2012, a major political party would make such a racist argument, but the Democrats do. Their other claim is that voter fraud is so exceedingly rare, so unlikely, such an impossibility that there's no need for any voter identification. According to the Democrats, we can afford to assume that everyone will be honest on Election Day. So, there's no need to take any basic precautions or take any steps to prevent fraud because it just doesn't happen. Well, to the contrary, voter fraud happens all the time and it does sometimes occur on a level large enough to impact close elections. Furthermore, it undoubtedly happens much more than we realize. After all, if poll workers are prevented by law from asking if people are who they say they are, how often are they going to catch people in the act? Afterwards, when you have disinterested government employees or partisan groups scanning voter data to try to find fraud, it's nearly impossible to look at a spread sheet and determine that person X was really person Y. So, if you don't bother to check for voter ID on the front end, you're probably not going to find it on the back end either. When you consider that a dedicated, well prepared team of say a dozen operatives could literally go from polling place to polling place and cast HUNDREDS of fraudulent votes a day with little chance of being caught, it's not a small issue. That's why we should have some system in place other than the Democrats' touching insistence that we can trust everyone to be honest on Election Day because as you're about to see, that's certainly not the case.
1) James O' Keefe's Project Veritas shows how easy voter fraud is without Identification: When an undercover conservative reporter can vote as Ben Jealous, Bill Maher, or David Brock if he wants, there's a hole as wide as the Grand Canyon in the system.
James O’Keefe’s new video shows Project Veritas going into poll locations in DC on April 3, being offered ballots for Ben Jealous, President & CEO of the NAACP; one Bill Maher; and David Brock (Project Veritas says they could not verify whether the David Brock for which they were offered a ballot was the same David Brock as the Media Matters president). Hilariously, Project Veritas also shows that you can’t get into Media Matters without showing ID. The video also depicts Project Veritas going to a polling place and asking about Alicia Menendez, daughter of New Jersey Senator Robert Menendez (D) and political commentator on MSNBC; a poll worker asks to see ID, preventing Project Veritas from being offered Menendez’s ballot.
2) What If Mohammed Atta had been the deciding vote in an election? As John Fund has noted, even the 9/11 hijackers were registered to vote.
John Hawkins: Here’s something from your book that a lot of people may not know: “Eight of the 19 hijackers who attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon had registered to vote.” How did that happen?
John Fund: The Motor Voter Act of 1993, which was the first piece of legislation that Bill Clinton signed into law, mandated that states have to accept postcard voter registrations and also offer people applying for drivers’ licenses the chance to register to vote. Several of the hijackers — they registered to vote when they got drivers’ licenses and other false ID. I have no evidence they voted, but they were registered. They certainly could have voted.
3) You can thank illegal votes from felons for Al Franken: But, but, but the first two examples don't show any actual voter fraud. They just show that it’s incredibly EASY to commit voter fraud. Is there an example of it swinging an election? Absolutely. If it wasn't for fraudulent votes, Al Franken would be doing his obnoxious stand up routines in a comedy club right now instead of the U.S. Senate.
In the '08 campaign, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman was running for re-election against Democrat Al Franken. It was impossibly close...After the first canvass, Coleman's lead was down to 206 votes. That was followed by months of wrangling and litigation. In the end, Franken was declared the winner by 312 votes. He was sworn into office in July 2009, eight months after the election. During the controversy a conservative group called Minnesota Majority began to look into claims of voter fraud. Comparing criminal records with voting rolls, the group identified 1,099 felons -- all ineligible to vote -- who had voted in the Franken-Coleman race. Minnesota Majority took the information to prosecutors across the state, many of whom showed no interest in pursuing it. But Minnesota law requires authorities to investigate such leads. And so far, Fund and von Spakovsky report, 177 people have been convicted -- not just accused, but convicted -- of voting fraudulently in the Senate race. Another 66 are awaiting trial. "The numbers aren't greater," the authors say, "because the standard for convicting someone of voter fraud in Minnesota is that they must have been both ineligible, and 'knowingly' voted unlawfully." The accused can get off by claiming not to have known they did anything wrong. Still, that's a total of 243 people either convicted of voter fraud or awaiting trial in an election that was decided by 312 votes. With 1,099 examples identified by Minnesota Majority, and with evidence suggesting that felons, when they do vote, strongly favor Democrats, it doesn't require a leap to suggest there might one day be proof that Al Franken was elected on the strength of voter fraud.
4) Democratic Congressional candidate Wendy Rosen commits voter fraud: Wendy Rosen was running for Congress in Maryland this year. Unfortunately, her campaign hit a little snag. Oopsy!
Wendy Rosen dropped from her race against Republican Rep. Andy Harris (R-MD) today after it was discovered she had been voting in two states in recent elections – Maryland and Florida. Rosen said she was saddened to leave the race in Maryland.
5) Albany mayoral candidate Paul Etheridge commits voter fraud: Wendy Rosen is obviously some sort of freak, right? Certainly, there couldn't be another Democrat running for office who engaged in fraud, could there?
Former New Albany mayoral candidate Paul Etheridge was arrested Thursday and charged with three felony counts of voter fraud. Etheridge finished third in the Democratic Party mayoral primary in 2011, and it was during that election cycle the alleged fraud occurred, Floyd County Prosecutor Keith Henderson announced during a Thursday press conference. Arrested on the same charges for the alleged incidents — which all involved the handling and casting of absentee ballots — was Joshua A. Clemons, of Floyd County. The charges the two are facing — which are all class D felonies each carrying six months to three years of jail time — are solicitation for a fraudulent absentee ballot, forgery of official ballot endorsement and fraudulent delivery of a ballot.
6) A NAACP official is headed to jail for 5 years over voter fraud: Well, those are just politicians. We all know they're liars! It's not a big surprise that they might be engaged in voter fraud. But, how can anyone support voter ID or other measures to secure the ballot when even the NAACP opposes it? Well, about that...
While NAACP President Benjamin Jealous lashed out at new state laws requiring photo ID for voting, an NAACP executive sits in prison, sentenced for carrying out a massive voter fraud scheme. In a story ignored by the national media, in April a Tunica County, Miss., jury convicted NAACP official Lessadolla Sowers on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots. Sowers is identified on an NAACP website as a member of the Tunica County NAACP Executive Committee. Sowers received a five-year prison term for each of the 10 counts, but Circuit Court Judge Charles Webster permitted Sowers to serve those terms concurrently... ...Sowers was found guilty of voting in the names of Carrie Collins, Walter Howard, Sheena Shelton, Alberta Pickett, Draper Cotton and Eddie Davis. She was also convicted of voting in the names of four dead persons: James L. Young, Dora Price, Dorothy Harris, and David Ross. ….The NAACP has had other problems with voter fraud. The NAACP National Voter Fund registered a dead man to vote in Lake County, Ohio, in 2004. That same year, out of 325 voter registration cards filed by the NAACP in Cleveland, 48 were flagged as fraudulent.
7) John Kennedy won his Democratic Primary in 1960 via voter fraud: You might say, "Well, what difference does all of this really make?" A few people cheating here and there can't have a big impact. Not true. According to the late, great Robert Novak, John F. Kennedy won his Democratic primary in 1960 via voter fraud.
John Hawkins: In the book, you talk about a couple of incidents where the Democrats rigged votes. In one district, you watched as they literally told people that they couldn’t vote anything other than a straight Democratic ticket.
Robert Novak: That was outside of Chicago, yes.
John Hawkins: You also said that without question, John F. Kennedy rigged the West Virginia Democratic primary in (1960), but that the Wall Street Journal killed the story. Do you think that sort of thing is still occurring with great regularity and do you wish the Journal had reported the story when it happened?
Robert Novak: In my opinion, they should have. They sent two reporters down to West Virginia for six weeks and they came back with a carefully documented story on voter fraud in West Virginia, buying votes, and how he beat Humphrey in the primary and therefore got the nomination. But, Ed Kilgore, the President of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal, a very conservative man, said it wasn’t the business of the Wall Street Journal to decide the nominee of the Democratic Party and he killed the story. That story didn’t come out for many, many years — 30-40 years. It was kept secret all that time. Does it happen now? I don’t really know. I got a feeling it happens less often, but that incident was kept secret all those years until it was uncovered in an anti-Kennedy book by a liberal correspondent and I felt that I wasn’t bound to secrecy any more.
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