Tag Archives: voting

Right to Vote and DoJ

Posted on by
Reply

The Federal Department of Justice has written a letter to letter to Florida’s Secretary of State, Ken Detzner, ordering him to stop trying to purge the Florida voter rolls of ineligible “voters.”  Interestingly, the order is predicated on technical, procedural grounds: five counties in Florida still are subject to the National Voting Rights Act of 1964, and Detzner didn’t say, “Mother, may I?” to DoJ before attempting the purge.

Never mind that an early inspection of the state’s rolls turned up as many as 182,000 folks registered to vote who may not be US citizens.  Never mind that, as the spokesman for the Florida Department of State, Chris Cate, said,

Bottom line is we are firmly committed to doing the right thing and preventing ineligible voters from being able to cast a ballot[.]

Never mind that the state has had in place for months a request to the Department of Homeland Security to match the state’s driver’s license records with the DHS’ databases to facilitate the assessment of citizenship and thereby of voting eligibility.  The DHS has been unresponsive.

This move comes on the heels of Attorney General Eric Holder’s racist speech which he gave to the Council of Black Churches last Wednesday concerning voter eligibility.  The Wall Street Journal had some choice words concerning those racist words from our AG; I won’t go into that here.

But such attacks, together with Advancement Project Co-director, Penda Hair’s ironic remark, which included this

We commend the attorney general of the United States Eric Holder for ensuring that the right to vote, the fundamental pillar of our democracy is protected for all American citizens

make the larger point here.  In the name of protecting the sanctity of an American voter’s ballot, Progressives are actively attacking it.  They pretend not to see that if ineligibles aren’t prevented from voting, the votes of honest Americans are diluted or outright cancelled by ineligible, false, votes.

Al Franken (D, MN), for instance, was elected to the US Senate in 2008 by 312 votes out of 2.9 million votes cast.  In 2004, President George Bush carried Florida by 537 votes out of nearly 6 million cast.  Identifying ineligible voters and getting them off the rolls matters.

I have to ask: what’s the Progressives’ real objection to an honest voter roll?

Voter Fraud

Posted on by
1

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.