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If there is a partisan or ideological bent to conservative attempts to de-fang the Left’s fraud snakes, it is born not of racial animus but of a legitimate need for protection of honest ballots.
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| Democratic National Committee Chair Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Florida Democrat, has ripped the scab from a deep wound in American politics. The Left has spent years slinging at conservatives the calumny that we want to block access to the polls by minority groups. The charge is a vile slander. Yet in the space of just two weeks, DNC chiefs have twice gone public with the allegation – race-baiting for all they are worth – in a raw attempt to foment racial tension. Beneath the surface, it’s also an attempt to provide a smokescreen for fraudulent voting.
Wasserman Schultz minced no words on June 5, telling Roland Martin that Republicans “want to literally drag us all the way back to Jim Crow laws and literally — and very transparently — block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote Democratic candidates than Republican candidates.”
She was parroting former DNC Chair Donna Brazile, who on May 17 wrote in USA Today that “from coast to coast, the GOP is engaged in what appears to be a coordinated, expensive effort to block voters from the polls. The motivation is political — a cynical effort to restrict voting by traditionally Democratic-leaning Americans. In more than 30 states, GOP legislators are on the move…. What the GOP is attempting to do is change the rules of the game, leaving only their players on the field.”
But when Wasserman Schultz turned the political explicitly into the racial, even she was quickly forced to acknowledge she had gone too far – only to repeat the slur right away: “Jim Crow was the wrong analogy to use…. But I don’t regret calling attention to the efforts in a number of states with Republican dominated legislatures, including Florida, to restrict access to the ballot box for all kinds of voters, but particularly young voters, African Americans and Hispanic Americans.”
Brazile is complaining about legislative attempts to require voter-ID at the polls, in order to fight illegal voting. The truth is, legislators have every reason to worry about vote fraud. Fraud is appallingly easy – perhaps even with identification. Federal motor-voter laws actually outlaw reasonable safeguards against shenanigans. I just saw first-hand how lax the standards are. On Tuesday, I transferred my driver’s license from Virginia to Alabama. Not once was I asked to provide even a sliver of proof that I actually reside in Alabama, much less in the house I live in. I could have claimed any address I wanted, and gotten away with it.
People attempt illegal voting all the time. Fortunately, some get caught. At the Election Law Center blog, J. Christian Adams keeps track. On June 3, a couple was arrested for vote fraud in Rhode Island. On May 31, trial was set in Texas for a city councilman who falsified dozens of mail-in ballot applications. On May 24 in Mississippi, two people were sentenced for illegal voting. On May 20, there was a vote-fraud story from Wisconsin; on May 18, a different one from Mississippi. May 17, New Jersey; May 10, Ohio; May 3 in Florida; also May 3 in New York, and April 29 in East St. Louis. On the stories go, ad infinitum.
John Fund’s Stealing Elections documents the problem at great length. Among the highlights was his report of the massive Wisconsin vote fraud in 2004, including “ineligible voters casting ballots, felons not only voting but working at the polls, transient college students casting improper votes, and homeless voters possibly voting more than once.” Then there was the case of Ritzy Mekler, the springer spaniel registered to vote in St. Louis for eight years – which still wasn’t as interesting as when USA Today reported that goldfish Princess Nudelman received registration materials in a Chicago suburb. The problem was, poor Princess was a cold fish – cold dead, that is.
The simple fact is that, from ACORN illegalities nationwide to massive abuses in Noxubee County, Miss., from mysteriously “discovered” ballots in a Washington State governor’s race stretching all the way back to the manifest irregularities in Illinois and Texas that snatched the presidency for John F. Kennedy over Richard Nixon, illegal voting overwhelmingly tends to favor the political Left. If there is a partisan or ideological bent to conservative attempts to de-fang the Left’s fraud snakes, it is born not of racial animus but of a legitimate need for protection of honest ballots. If Republicans are, in Wasserman Schultz’s words, trying to “block access to the polls to voters who are more likely to vote Democratic candidates,” then it is only because illegal voters are more likely to vote for Democrats.
Those are “voters” whose access darn well ought to be blocked. Illegal aliens, dogs, dead people and dead goldfish have no business deciding who our public officials are.
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