Category Archives: rights

Voter Fraud

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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.

He Must Be Doing Something Right

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According to The Wall Street Journal, our ambassador to the People’s Republic of China thinks the Chinese performance on human rights is in the wane part of a cyclical trend.

Ambassador Gary Locke told television interviewer Charlie Rose in an interview that aired on Monday that China is significantly cracking down on dissent. He said Chinese leaders were afraid they could face uprisings similar to last year’s Arab Spring.

The human-rights climate “has always ebbed and flowed in China, up and down, but we seem to be in a down period and it’s getting worse.”

Some of the renewing trends that prompted Locke’s comments include these:

[F]ollowing anonymous online calls for an Arab World-style Jasmine Revolution in China, security forces detained or confined to their homes dozens of lawyers, artists, writers and other political activists.

and

Religious followers, particularly Tibetan Buddhists, Muslims and Christians who worship in unauthorized churches, have also been targeted….

The Chinese reacted badly to this, which tells me that Ambassador Locke isn’t far wrong.  China’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Liu Weimin, disputed Locke’s assertion, saying in part,

Some people always take viewpoints of the minority in China as the mainstream public opinion, and I think this is entirely wrong.  If it is this way, should we take the views of those in the Occupy Wall Street movement as society’s mainstream public point of view?

As an aside, I wonder why he didn’t single out the Tea Party movement.  Maybe he understands something that our Democrats don’t….

An Example of Centrally Managed “Capitalism”

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In the People’s Republic of China, reports The Wall Street Journal, the urban population has, for the first time in Chinese history, now exceeded the rural population.  This situation serves as a backdrop for some of the problems in China’s centrally managed economy.

One problem involves access of the newly migrated people to public services in their new cities—accesses their already resident neighbors have.  It seems Chinese can only have access to public services in the towns and villages they’ve just left, because that’s where their families have been registered.  Under China’s household registration system—intended to rationmanage access to such services so as to prevent their being overwhelmed—only registered households can avail themselves of the public’s weal.

More importantly, such property rights as a Chinese citizen might have, have gone by the boards.  It seems that city—and village—managers are seizing farmers’ land that lies on the margins of the rapidly growing cities, and on the edges of the just departed villages, too.  In fact, farmers on the outskirts often are willy-nilly uprooted and moved into apartment complexes so their land, including the old homestead, can be consolidated into larger tracts.  Bigger farmers know better how to run the farmland, after all, and more lucratively, developers can take the land out of production and turn it into shopping malls and luxury homes for the growing populations of middle class and wealthy.  Just to rub salt into the farmers’ wounds, the urban leadership pays the farmers a token for their land (it’s not an outright confiscation), and then charges market rates as they flip the land to developers, pocketing the difference—ostensibly for the town or city budget.

The Chinese government seems powerless to stop this.  The local central managers insist they need the income from their land flips to “maintain growth, service debt and top up their budgets.”  Further, pressure to continue the practice will continue: Beijing intends to build an additional 36 million units of affordable “social housing” just in the next 5 years.  Those buildings have to sit somewhere.  And this doesn’t consider the ordinary housing building that will occur for those who don’t need “social housing,” or all the building for all the supporting infrastructure—schools, shopping malls, government buildings, roads and streets, and the like—that will go up along with all that housing construction.

Hmm….

Government “Largesse”

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A remark attributed to Margaret Thatcher from her beginnings in British politics in the late ’40s or early ’50s comes to mind.  She said, in essence,

[I]f you do not provide [for a rainy day–or for any other purpose] you cannot be certain that anyone else will.

This truism would seem self-evident, but I’m going to expound on it a little, anyway.  In the end, “you” is not all of us, but each of us.  Government is what is all of us, acting in concert through the mechanism of representatives we elect for the purpose.

If we, individually, do not provide for our own future, but depend on government—all of us—to do so, then none of us will be capable of providing.  If none of us is providing for ourselves, then we will not have the resources to help any other who has not provided, or cannot provide.  Rely on government?  Government can’t provide for any of us without taking from at least some of us.  That taking is not different in its effect on us from our own conscious decision not to provide for ourselves: what must be taken is exactly that which we would have put by for ourselves.

There’s more to this, though, than just the pecuniary aspect, and that is the morality of relying on “anyone else” to provide.  Leaving the matter to government (for instance), rather than to “anyone else” means ultimately that we must have the government provide for us—we will have become dependent on government, rather than reliant on ourselves.   Worse, a habit of dependency will develop, and the dependents will lose their ability to provide for themselves.

This does not change when that dependency is on “anyone else” instead of on government; it remains dependency.  Of course this is different from an occasional hand up.  From the perspective of Thatcher’s “you,” each of us (but not all of us) is that “anyone else,” and it certainly is our individual duty to offer a hand up (not a handout) to “you” in an hour of need.  Just as it is the duty of “you” not to make asking for, or accepting, such hands up so habitual that they become handouts, and “you” become dependent.

Voter ID and What It Means to Be American

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The right to vote is held by all Americans to be a precious right, central to our American democracy.  The 14th Amendment to our social compact’s blueprint, our Constitution, makes this clear:

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States[.]

and [emphasis added]

…the right to vote at any election…male inhabitants of such State, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the United States….

The 15th and 19th Amendments extend this, making clear that the right to vote is any American citizen’s right, regardless of race or gender.  Notice that: the right to vote is a citizen’s right, and this right is not to be abridged in any way.

To support this, and to reduce the ability for one party or another to perpetrate voter fraud and thereby harm the sanctity of the citizens’ voting, the several States are actively enacting laws, centered on requiring photo IDs, to ensure that a prospective voter is both who he claims to be and a citizen and so eligible to vote.

Some argue that this is onerous and discriminatory: the elderly, the young, blacks, and so on do not possess photo IDs—one example offered being that many of these do not drive and so do not have the photo ID of a driver’s license.  These also argue that it’s too hard to get a photo ID at the last moment, on the way to a polling booth on the day of an election.  This is nonsense.  It’s just too easy to get a photo ID, including one that has the form of a driver’s license: it’s an ID any state issues to non-drivers explicitly for the purpose of identification.  The argument that it takes too much time to get a photo ID is little more than an insult to those who wish to get one; it says these people are too stupid to understand that there is an upcoming election, and so it’s time now, rather than later, to get the ID.  Further, the argument is fatuous.  The time spent getting the ID is a one-time cost—the IDs are renewable with even less expenditure of time, usually doable through the mail on the State government’s initiative.  The voter generally needs to do nothing more to renew his ID than to answer his mail.

Others argue that IDs of any sort are unnecessary.  Non-citizen immigrants, legal or not, as members in good standing of their communities, should be allowed a voice in the direction of their communities: they should be allowed to vote in elections.  Thus, with anyone allowed to vote, there is no need of any proof of ID or of eligibility.  This is a powerful argument on its face, but the argument is just that superficial.  Non-citizens are not members of their communities; they’re visitors.  They may be highly welcomed, and they may be highly productive and economically contributory, but the fact remains that, as non-citizens, they can only be visitors.  This does not leave them voiceless in the communities, though.  They are free to express themselves to their neighbors, they are free to take part in discourse in the public square, they are free to engage in any and all of the debates about our future that might occur.  But they cannot vote on the outcomes of those debates: they are not citizens, and so they cannot be members of their communities.

And yet the present administration objects to protecting this quintessential American right.  Instead, it’s launching, through Eric Holder’s DoJ, a campaign to block State photo ID laws on the basis of their alleged discriminatory nature.  Aside from this naked attempt to intimidate the States into diluting, rather than protecting, citizens’ rights to vote, though, it’s purely hypocritical: Holder doesn’t even mean it himself.  As Power Line has noted,

…people lined up to enter the LBJ Library to hear AG Holder rail against voter ID laws.   As each person entered the library they were required to present their photo IDs in order to be allowed in to hear the speech.

Non-citizens are, by definition, not Americans.  They may be here—they’re very likely here—under entirely legitimate means and doing very good work in the communities in which they live, but they’re not American.  Voting in an American election is part of what it means to be an American.  It’s wrong to attempt to dilute this fundamental right, this basic aspect of citizenship, by watering down the effect of an American’s vote, through which an American expresses his desire concerning the direction of his community and of his country, by allowing noncitizens to vote, also.  Indeed, such a dilution would seem to be an unconstitutional abridgment of the citizen’s right.