Well of course there’s
voter fraud
Stuffing the ballot box is as old as the republic. It’s a time-honored tradition, especially in
big cities across this country.
It’s ludicrous when someone says there’s no proof. There’s plenty of proof. But that’s the argument raised by opponents
of tightening voting rules through such things as the recent spate of voter ID
laws. They say that unless you can prove
widespread voting fraud, you have no right to put procedures in place to
prevent it.
That’s tantamount to claiming it’s not a crime if you don’t
get caught. Sadly, too many people in
this country hold to that belief.
It’s part of the great divide in America: those who believe there are rules everyone
should follow; and those who think the rules only apply to you if you are
unlucky enough to get caught.
When someone or some group is caught, it’s often dismissed
as insignificant; a one-off that doesn’t prove anything. When ACORN was caught padding voter
registrations, and providing a bounty to part-timers to sign up as many names –
not real people – as possible, it was a mere anomaly, not a pattern. When bulk registration forms were sent to
Pennsylvania prisons in the last election that, too, was an oversight. When a woman running for Congress was found
to have illegally voted in two states in the past two national elections, so
what?
And when a county in Wisconsin recorded more votes than
people registered, well that doesn’t prove anything, either.
Really?
Let’s face facts:
voter fraud is rampant. Voter ID
laws requiring photo IDs are a start, but the wholesale fraud in multiple
registrations and abuse of absentee ballots is where we really need to go. Until we have a solution to those, there’s no
integrity in the vote.
There are virtually no controls on these. There’s nothing to prevent someone from
harvesting registrations and absentee ballots in nursing homes, among the
mentally ill, or even having a student vote where they go to school in one
state while also voting by absentee ballot in their “home” state.
There’s also almost nothing to address the “dead” vote –
which in most cities reliably votes the straight Democrat ticket. Or the “vacant lot” vote, which is also a
usually predictable element of the Democrat base. Efforts
to purge voter rolls of the dead as well as convicted felons – which most often
happen in Republican-controlled states – are broadly opposed by Democrats.
Go figure.
There is an answer.
It’s a national identity card, preferably with biometrics like a scan of
a finger print. One to every citizen. Couple that with a national database of who
has that card and their photo -- and whether they are in fact dead or alive -- and states would have a fighting chance to stop
voter fraud.
When someone tried to register in one state, you could
quickly see if they were who they said they were, and also whether they were
already registered there or somewhere else.
In terms of absentee ballots, you’d need to include a
photocopy of your national ID with your ballot.
That would stop the abuse of registering and voting as John Smith, J. Smith, J.P.
Smith, etc.
Would it be hard to get everyone signed up and equipped with
a card? Of course, but it would be worth
whatever we had to spend. And worth it
to overcome whatever obstacles placed before it.
Democrats and the ACLU will naturally oppose it, probably on
the grounds that it’s an invasion of privacy.
That’s a weak argument, but if you see how whipped up they are about requiring
a picture-ID to vote – not a very high threshold – you can imagine how hard
they’ll fight against an ID with teeth.
It’s the step we need to take to insure that our
one-person-one-vote standard means something.
Is there anything more valuable to our democracy?
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