{"id":12399,"date":"2011-12-15T12:23:12","date_gmt":"2011-12-15T17:23:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/?p=12399"},"modified":"2011-12-15T12:24:47","modified_gmt":"2011-12-15T17:24:47","slug":"holder-says-govt-has-responsibility-to-automatically-register-voters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/12399\/holder-says-govt-has-responsibility-to-automatically-register-voters\/","title":{"rendered":"Holder Says Govt. Has Responsibility to Automatically Register Voters"},"content":{"rendered":"

As an addendum to my column on Eric Holder\u2019s disastrous tenure as U.S. Attorney General<\/a>, the AG was kind enough to deliver a speech<\/a> on the Voting Rights Act in Austin, TX, Tuesday night.\u00a0 Though Holder castigated two Republican examples of voter fraud \u2013 both of which were swiftly remedied by the Justice Department \u2013 he (unsurprisingly) failed to mention any investigation into the well-documented voter fraud conducted by supporters of Tim Johnson<\/a> (D-SD) and Al Franken<\/a> (D-MN) during their successful bids for U.S. Senate.<\/p>\n

Omissions aside, Holder made an all-too-typical argument: claiming for government the privilege of taking yet another activity away from otherwise responsible adults.\u00a0 Here\u2019s Holder\u2019s take<\/a>:<\/p>\n

All eligible citizens can and should be automatically registered to vote.\u00a0\u00a0 The ability to vote is a right \u2013 it is not a privilege.\u00a0\u00a0 Under our current system, many voters must follow cumbersome and needlessly complex voter registration rules.\u00a0\u00a0 And every election season, state and local officials have to manually process a crush of new applications \u2013 most of them handwritten \u2013 leaving the system riddled with errors, and, too often, creating chaos at the polls.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, modern technology provides a straightforward fix for these problems \u2013 if we have the political will to bring our election systems into the 21st<\/sup> century.\u00a0\u00a0 It should be the government\u2019s responsibility to automatically register citizens to vote, by compiling \u2013 from databases that already exist \u2013 a list of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction.\u00a0\u00a0 Of course, these lists would be used solely to administer elections \u2013 and would protect essential privacy rights.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So Holder thinks that overburdened, cash-strapped governments can extract accurate registration data while protecting each individual\u2019s privacy rights.\u00a0 (You trust, Big Sis, don\u2019t you?<\/a>)\u00a0 He thinks that registering to vote and casting a ballot are so important that ordinary citizens can\u2019t be counted on to do the process themselves.\u00a0 And he believes, along with his liberal activist friends at the ACLU and ACORN, that the reason for low voter turnout after decades of federal approval of political map drawing, \u201cpublic interest\u201d lawsuits filling the court system, and Motor Voter laws that automatically register licensed drivers to vote is not enough government control over who votes and how often.<\/p>\n

You\u2019ve got to hand it to big government liberals like Holder: at least he\u2019s consistent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As an addendum to my column on Eric Holder\u2019s disastrous tenure as U.S. Attorney General, the AG was kind enough to deliver a speech on the Voting Rights Act in Austin, TX, Tuesday night.\u00a0 Though Holder castigated two Republican examples of voter fraud \u2013 both of which were swiftly remedied by the Justice Department \u2013 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1453,498,3242,3243,3241],"class_list":["post-12399","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-posts","tag-department-of-justice","tag-eric-holder","tag-fraud","tag-registration","tag-voting"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12399"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12399\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12406,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12399\/revisions\/12406"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cfif.org\/v\/freedom_line_blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}