The Crime of Voter Fraud

The Crime of Voter Fraud

We are entitled to our opinion, as the old cliché goes, but conventional standards of honesty dictate that our opinion should be backed by fact and by evidence. Otherwise hearsay, conspiracy speculation, half-truths extracted from isolated statistics, meaningless factoids and outright lies become the order of the day. Honesty calls for the correction of misinformation and the exposure of lies. Otherwise falsehoods, especially when hatched by interested parties, might threaten the social order and often contribute to a dangerous atmosphere of bigotry and hate.

Such a self-serving lie, one that serves the dual purpose of galvanizing supporters and stoking hatreds against opponents, is promulgated by Democrats who claim that Republicans conspire to disenfranchise black voters. This big lie demonizes and scapegoats Republicans by re-enforcing the false stereotype that they have something against black men and women. The perpetrators of this fraud could care less about fanning the flames of racial division with such a lie as, indeed, this is exactly their intention. They charge racial conspiracy in order to emotionally energize black voters, many of whom appear to be losing interest in their leftist policies and agenda.

This self-serving lie allows the Democrats to turn the tables on reforms being implemented by various states, both liberal and conservative, to reduce voter fraud. Such efforts include a reasonable means to provide registered voters with free ID and the culling from voter rolls of voters who have either died or moved out of state. These attempts to preserve the integrity of one man one vote are opposed by those who engage in voter fraud. The fraudsters change the subject by intoning racist insults against black people by absurdly suggesting that they are not capable of obtaining free voter ID at the voting booth.

Is voter fraud a real problem? The liberal Washington Post, in an Oct. 24, 2014 article entitled: Could non-citizens decide the November Election? found that 6.4% of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2% in 2010. The article speculates that non-citizens in Minnesota may have elected Al Franken, who won his election by only 312 votes, and that non-citizens may have carried North Carolina for Obama in 2008. The Post estimates that 80% of the non-citizen vote went to Democrats. During this election cycle, reports have been verified that in Illinois and Maryland voting machines have been calibrated to vote Democratic. Absentee ballots and voting my mail, which is now done exclusively in Washington State and Colorado, presents obvious opportunities for fraud. There is no way of determining who sent in the ballot and this is exacerbated by millions of ballots mailed to outdated voter lists. Problems also exist around College students voting in their home state by absentee ballot and in the state where they are attending College.

From the time of the American Revolution until the present, hundreds of thousands of American men and women in uniform have sacrificed their lives in order to uphold the principle of one man one vote. The Civil War ended the sweltering oppression of chattel slavery and established the right of blacks to vote. The Civil Rights Acts further insured the integrity of the black vote. Women suffragists struggled to achieve the vote for women. These great advances in terms of enfranchising more Americans are now threatened by those who would deliberately conspire to dilute those sacred votes with self-serving acts of fraud.

By compromising the integrity of the vote they engage not only in a war against women and a racist attack on the integrity of the black vote but they are at war with the most basic institution of American democracy. They are compromising the right of the citizen to have their vote counted in an honest election by which the vote of the citizen is the purest and most basic expression of self-government.