There’s no voter fraud, insist Progressives, or at least it’s so trivial a problem that laws requiring a prospective voter to prove he is who he claims to be—so that legitimate voters’ rights aren’t destroyed by the fraud—can only be motivated by racism.

Never mind a Senator from Minnesota who won his election after multiple recounts by a margin easily reached by the lightest touch of fraud.  Never mind a Washington governor who won after demanding recounts until the right count was achieved, and then by a margin easily within reach of vote fraud.  Never mind a President of the United States who won a critical state’s electoral college votes by a similarly fragile, narrow margin.  Now there’s Rensselaer County, New York.

Michael Feit, attorney for local restaurant owner and ex-Troy, NY, city councilman Michael LoPorto, acknowledges “there is no question” that someone tried to steal the 2009 Working Families Party primary election.  He goes one, concerning the guilty pleas of others in this matter:

Jackals prey upon the weakest member of the herd.  That’s what happened here.

Apparently the present case isn’t isolated [emphasis added].

Anthony DeFiglio, a Democratic Committeeman who pleaded guilty to falsifying business records, told state police investigators that such fraud is actually “an ongoing scheme and it occurs on both sides of the aisle. The people who are targeted live in low-income housing and there is a sense that they are a lot less likely to ask any questions… What appears as a huge conspiracy to nonpolitical persons is really a normal political tactic.”

and

Anthony Renna, another longtime Democratic operative and party committeeman, admitted to forging an absentee ballot application. He said the process of handing in forged ballots and fake votes ensures that “ballots are voted correctly.”

“I knew that the actual voters had not voted the ballots or signed the envelopes, but that did not concern me. I am not the ballot police[.]”

An anecdote is not proof of the trend, but the anecdotes add up, and they all say, “Here’s a place to look seriously.”  They all say, “Voter fraud cannot be dismissed lightly.”  Voter identification laws, since they protect the sanctity of an individual’s vote without interfering with the right or ability of those eligible to vote actually to do so, can only be good.  Votes cast by the dead—or in the name of the living, before those voters actually get to the ballot box—may be the Chicago way.  It doesn’t have to be the American way.