By Peter Ferrara
The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
April 25, 2012
Columnist David Limbaugh, brother of Rush, asks in a recent column, "Can anyone think of an innocuous reason that President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder oppose state voter ID laws?"
The correct answer is definitely "No!" But even Limbaugh dances around the full answer to the question, suggesting only at the end that the lack of a good reason to oppose voter ID suggests that the real motivation is an ulterior motive to rig elections.
Let's be fully frank. It's not just Obama and Holder, true. It's the whole Democrat party. And the transparent reason they oppose Voter ID, and favor loose election laws like Motor Voter, election day registration, mail in registration, online voting, and extended voting over days and even weeks before Election Day is that vote fraud is a central Democrat strategy for "winning" elections.
Protect Your Vote
The American Civil Rights Union (ACRU) is a legal foundation started by the late Robert B. Carleson, the former chief welfare advisor to Ronald Reagan, both when he was Governor of California and President of the United States. Carleson, closely backed by Reagan, spawned a revolution in welfare policy, starting with the famous California welfare reforms originating in 1971, spreading across the country throughout the 1970s, going national with Reagan's reforms as President in 1981, and then culminating in the outrageously successful, fundamental, block grant reforms of the old, New Deal, Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program in 1996.
Today the ACRU serves as a counterpoint to the ACLU, with former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese and other Reagan Administration alumni or associates serving in the organization, including myself, working as General Counsel since the organization's founding in 1998. The Chairman and President since 2006 is Susan A. Carleson, Robert Carleson's widow.
A new project of the ACRU is "Protect Your Vote!" focused on countering vote fraud. It serves at the ACRU website as a one-stop shop covering voting requirements in every state, current state efforts to strengthen ballot security, and the push-back from the left.
The project promotes model legislation for adoption by the states, including mandatory voter ID, mandatory proof of citizenship when registering to vote, and required signature verification and proof of ID when voting by mail. Reform measures would also include modification or repeal of the federal Motor Voter dictates, which require states to register anyone applying for a driver's license without proof of citizenship, to offer mail-in registration with no proof of identity, and to prohibit government employees from challenging any newly registered voters. Motor Voter also hampers states from purging the voter registration rolls of those who have died or moved to another state. The ACRU project also encourages citizens in every state to get involved in the process to protect their vote by volunteering to be poll watchers, help in voter registration drives, and a multitude of other pre-election and election day efforts.
Motor Voter was the first bill passed under the Clinton Administration. It is a transparent attempt to make our electoral system vulnerable to voting by illegal aliens, who would overwhelmingly support Democrats, and to multiple voting organized by unions and left-wing extremist groups like ACORN. There can be no other explanation for such lax policies, as Limbaugh's question suggests.
The ACRU's worthy Protect Your Vote project begins to counter this depreciation of our democracy. It deserves support from everyone who recognizes the current Paul Revere moment calling patriots to action to prevent the still developing Marxist takeover of America.
The Vote Fraud Project
Democrats make the laughable, undocumented, unsupported charge that voter ID and other ballot integrity reforms are just Republican tricks to suppress minority voting, which goes Democrat by wide margins. Our fine Attorney General Eric Holder sagely advises reformers "to resist the temptation to suppress certain votes in the hope of attaining electoral success and, instead, achieve success by appealing to more voters." But that misleading rhetoric is just a smokescreen for vote fraud.
When partisan conspirators challenged the constitutionality of Indiana's voter ID law, the suit was laughed out of court because the plaintiffs could not produce one voter who had been prevented from voting because of the voter ID requirement. Numerous academic studies, cited in the Supreme Court opinion, show no effect of voter ID laws in suppressing voter turnout or participation. In some states that have adopted voter ID, minority voting increased rather than declined in the next election. These are the reasons that the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana's model voter ID law as constitutional.
In that case, the established facts showed that 99 percent of Indiana voters already had the required ID (see, e.g., drivers licenses). Those who were disabled or elderly, who might not drive, were automatically entitled to vote by absentee ballot, which required no voter ID. Those who were too poor to pay any nominal fee for an ID were entitled to a state-issued ID for free. No wonder not a single voter could be found who was not able to vote because of the voter ID requirement.
That is why Limbaugh's question is so apt: Can anyone think of an innocuous reason that President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder oppose state voter ID laws?
Why did Attorney General Holder just blow off the Supreme Court in using the authority of the Voting Rights Act to nullify voter ID laws in South Carolina and Texas? Did he find a single voter in either state who had been prevented from voting because of the requirement? If he had, we would all know his or her name by now.
Holder assures us that a vote fraud problem "does not really exist" in the United States. But video guerilla James O'Keefe schooled Holder on the problem. With the video camera rolling, an O'Keefe associate indicated to a D.C. poll worker that he was Eric Holder, provided Holder's address, and asked for a ballot to vote. Handing the ballot to the white O'Keefe associate, the poll worker waived off an offer to show an ID, saying, "As long as you're in here and you're on our list and that's who you say you are, we're OK."
Sure, a single documented case of easy vote fraud success does not represent a real problem. But the courts in upholding voter ID have noted that a state does not have to wait until vote fraud makes a mockery of its elections before taking action.
But in some jurisdictions that mockery may already be here. As the Washington Times editorialized on April 17:
In April 2011, officials for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) in Nevada pleaded guilty to running an illegal voter-registration scheme. Earlier this month, Democratic Party officials in Indiana were indicted on vote fraud charges for purportedly forging signatures on Barack Obama's 2008 primary petitions. In Virginia, 10 felons were charged with making false statements on voter registration forms."Of course, in the early 1990s, President Obama actually ran ACORN's Project Vote in Illinois.
Early on the morning of June 5, union members in Chicago will be boarding union rented buses to ride to Wisconsin to vote early and often that day for the recall of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker. They will vote in the name of dead people still on the rolls, or those who have moved to other states, or under fraudulently registered names on the rolls through some ACORN-style project. Wisconsin Republicans and conservative activists, maybe with their own video cameras, should be on the lookout for such buses rolling into the state from Illinois.
A February report from the Pew Center on the States found 1.8 million names of dead people still registered to vote on state rolls. Another 2.75 million are registered to vote in more than one state. The study found altogether that 24 million voter registrations, 13 percent of the nation's total, contained major inaccuracies or were otherwise invalid. That's a lot of room for mischief.
Facilitating that Chicago union Wisconsin project, and similar conduct in swing states this fall, is the real reason Holder opposes voter ID. By his official actions as Attorney General, Holder is running a vote fraud conspiracy right out of the AG's office. And that is being done with ACORN Obama's approval.
