Are you kidding? The democrats make Republicans look like boy scouts:
Democrats prefer exploiting voter fraud (who would terrorists vote for?)
Chicago Sun-Times ^ | October 19 2004 | JOHN O'SULLIVAN
Here's the first question for your U.S. election night fun quiz as you wait impatiently for the early results: Which candidate would the Sept. 11 terrorists be voting for if they had survived their own attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center?
You think that an unfair question? Not really. Eight of the 19 hijackers could have registered to vote in Virginia and Florida while they were planning their attacks. They were not U.S. citizens, admittedly. They were not even in America legally, having over-stayed their visas. And they certainly did not have the best interests of the nation at heart.
But they could have turned up at the voting booth on Nov. 2 --and it would have been an offense in 33 states for anyone to ask for evidence either of their identity or of their citizenship. If an election official had done so, lawyers for the Democratic National Committee, activist groups for the poor, La Raza, and the media would have been crying ''voter suppression'' and demanding the official be punished. And nothing unusual would have happened.
In recent years voter fraud has been a major problem. It has got ten steadily worse since President Bill Clinton signed the ''Motor Voter'' Act that made voter registration virtually automatic while removing most safeguards against electoral fraud. According to Karen Saranita of the Institute for Fair Elections in California, people have registered their dogs and cats to vote. Illegal immigrants have cast votes in large numbers.
But the sheer scale of fraud in recent years has revived interest. Two new books dealing with it -- Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (Encounter Books) by John Fund of the Wall Street Journal, and If It's Not Close, They Can't Cheat (Nelson Books) by Hugh Hewitt, the talk show host -- have been published. And there are several Web sites that are keeping a careful check of reports of voter fraud around the country. Bill Hobbs of Hobbsonline.com currently lists 54 instances of suspected voter fraud from Ohio to Colorado.
What emerges from their research is that voter fraud is both easy to commit -- and easy to stop. Voter fraud consists of several very simple deceptions:
1. Non-citizens or illegal immigrants voting when they are legally ineligible to do so.
2. Eligible voters voting twice or more, some by registering as themselves in several districts, others by impersonating other voters.
3. Registering nonexistent voters, e.g., the dead, and sending others to the polls in their name.
4. Tampering with the ballot boxes, destroying votes and inserting false votes between the polling and the counting.
Most of these frauds could be prevented by two simple reforms: requiring all potential voters to present evidence of their identity and evidence of their citizenship before being given a ballot paper.
But these reforms are not passed -- and ''reforms'' to make fraud easier to commit and harder to prevent are passed. It is considered poor political etiquette to explain this apparent perversity. But the reason is that voter fraud disproportionately benefits Democrats and their political allies in left wing activist groups and ethnic lobbies.
The Democrats believe that illegal immigrants, non-citizens, citizens who lack enough interest in politics to register, and even convicted felons ineligible to vote are likely to be in their column. So on Election Day the cry goes out from the local Democrat HQ: ''Round up the usual suspects -- and drive them to the voting booth.''
Hence, whenever any attempt to expose or halt voter fraud is attempted, someone like Maria Cardona of the Democratic National Committee will step forward to claim that ''ballot security and preventing voter fraud are just code words for voter intimidation and suppression.'' A civil rights leader will throw in a reference to Jim Crow. A spokesman for La Raza will add that asking for evidence of citizenship discriminates against Hispanic citizens. And a federal judge will rule that any disputed votes should be counted first and maybe examined later.
Last week the Kerry-Edwards campaign went a step further and suggested that local Democrats should ''launch a preemptive strike'' and allege that the GOP was practicing voter intimidation even if neither voter fraud nor voter intimidation were being alleged by anyone. This cynicism is a harbinger of things to come.
The Democrats are said to have 10,000 lawyers already stationed around the nation to handle these battles over fraud and intimidation. (The Republicans have almost as many.) If Nov. 2 is another cliff-hanger, then every close state result will be thrown to the courts to decide. And unless Congress passes the simple reforms suggested above to restore honest elections, that would result not in democracy but simply in a more sophisticated version of voter fraud.
My first question, incidentally, may have been inaccurately phrased. Given that one of the most common techniques of voter fraud is to cast votes on behalf of the dead, maybe I should have written: Which candidate will the Sept. 11 terrorists be voting for on Nov. 2?
And I think I can guess how they will vote. |
