Posted on 11/02/2014 7:39:18 AM PST by afraidfortherepublic
MADISON, Wis. — The mid-term elections are right around the corner, and that means one thing: It’s voter fraud season.
While many on the left see voter fraud as a fantasy — a delusion by right-wing conspiracy theorists — the fact is, stealing votes is very much alive and well in American democracy, election experts say. And the potential for election theft could play a key role in who controls the reins in American politics.
“I don’t know if we are seeing more (voter fraud) than we have in the past, but I do think there are more folks today that understand the holes in the security of our system and are willing to take advantage of that,” national campaign and election law expert Hans von Spakovsky, told Watchdog.org this week.
And if past is prologue, the balance of power in the U.S. Senate and in statehouses and governor’s mansions nationwide could turn on some very thin lines, ripe for manipulation.
Von Spakovsky, former member of the Federal Election Commission and manager of the Election Law Reform Initiative and senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies , detailed myriad issues jeopardizing election integrity this week in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal headlined, “Here Comes the 2014 Voter Fraud.”
In the piece, von Spakovsky asserts progressives and the U.S. Department of Justice are “doing all they can to stop improvements in election integrity.”
Initiatives to restrict or remove same-day registration in some states, passage of voter identification laws and other checks on voter fraud have been vehemently — and expensively — fought by liberal organizations and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder.
“These moves to shore up election integrity have been resisted by progressives at every turn, claiming without evidence that such efforts suppress minority turnout,” von Spakovsky wrote. “While the lawsuits have largely failed to overturn the rules, they have succeeded in delaying their implementation and made it costly for states to improve election security.”
Case in point, the election expert said, South Carolina’s voter ID law will be in place in the November election, but it cost the state $3.5 million in 2012 to beat zU.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department in court.
Critics, such as Brendan Nyhan, an assistant professor of government at Dartmouth College, scoff at the notion of voter fraud.
“At this point, though, we can safely classify widespread voter fraud as a misperception — and one that is far more prevalent than the practice itself,” Nyhan wrote in a piece for the New York Times earlier this year.
He draws from the research of Wisconsin U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman, a progressive who threw out Wisconsin’s voter ID law before a federal appeals court tore apart Adelman’s ruling and reinstated the law, passed by a Republican-controlled legislature in 2011. The U.S. Supreme Court recently intervened and ruled that voter ID could not be rolled out in Tuesday’s general election.
The district court judge examined Wisconsin’s election data and declared that “virtually no voter impersonation occurs” in the state and that “no evidence suggests that voter-impersonation fraud will become a problem at any time in the foreseeable future.”
Perhaps the Milwaukee-based judge forgot about a special investigation into sweeping allegations of fraud in Wisconsin’s largest city following the 2004 presidential election. A report issued in 2008 found that between 4,600 and 5,300 more votes were counted in Milwaukee “than the number of voters recorded as having cast ballots,” wrote election expert John Fund in a 2010 column for the Wall Street Journal.
Fund and von Spakovsky co-authored the book, “Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk.”
“Absentee ballots were cast by people living elsewhere; ineligible felons not only voted but worked at the polls; transient college students cast improper votes; and homeless voters possibly voted more than once,” Fund wrote in the Journal piece.
A Washington Post analysis, released last week, estimates that as much as 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008. The figure was pegged at 2.2 percent in 2010, according to the study, which examined date from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.
Those numbers were “large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections,” the study found.
Exhibit A: The extremely narrow victory of U.S. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., in 2008. Franken won his race by a razor-thin 312 votes.
The consequences are all too real, von Spakovsky said, with huge implications on policy.
“That was a crucial race. Why? Because as you know Al Franken was the 60th vote to pass Obamacare,” the former FEC commissioner said. “So there we have fraud that may have affected every single person in the country.”
Photo courtesy of the Heritage Foundation
ELECTION EXPERT: Former Federal Election Commission member Hans von Spakovsky has written extensively on election integrity issues.
CALL ME AL: A new report on fraud suggests U.S. Sen. Al Franken, D-Minn., potentially could have won his 2008 election with the assistance of non-citizen votes.
“If its not close, they can’t cheat”
Hat Tip to Hugh Hewitt.
VOTE!!!!
This article mentions the election fraud report prepared by the police in Milwaukee after the 2004 election that detailed the large number of non residents who likely voted in that election. Of course it was all brushed under the rug and the task force disbanded, or sent into retirement, when Police Chief Flynn came on board from Boston shortly thereafter.
FReep Mail me if you want on, or off, this Wisconsin interest ping list.
It’s not the margin of error that counts. It’s the margin of fraud.
Voter Fraud = Hanging Offense ,that would fix the problem
Funny how those ‘disenfranchised voters’ have to have proper ID to get welfare, but they ‘cannot obtain’ proper ID to vote.
You beat me to it.
And to paraphrase (I think) Mona Charen’s recent column: We’re being asked to believe that Americans engage in tax evasion, insurance fraud, identity theft and a thousand other petty frauds and crimes, but they’re perfect little angels in the voting booth.
Why not? It got Kennedy elected (Mayor Daley) and has been an operating philosophy ever since the Republic began. If voting meant anything it would be illegal! I know, that's over the top but not a lot.
Voter fraud IS voter suppression.
“At this point, though, we can safely classify widespread voter fraud as a misperception — and one that is far more prevalent than the practice itself,” Nyhan wrote in a piece for the New York Times earlier this year.
What a weird statement. There is only one “globe” but hundreds of millions people believe there is global warming. If a sporting event game is “thrown”, it only happens once but thousands of people will probably suspect it. If a thousand ballots are dumped into a ballot box, that is one incidence of voter fraud but it affects 1000 votes. (Arguably, 1999 votes) That millions of people believe something exists has no bearing whatsoever on whether it does or not, and this scholarly opinion is no more than an entirely typical expression of scholarly ignorance based upon nothing.
Or if he is entirely correct, the qualifier “at this point” is another piece of weaseldom. Voter fraud is in many cases VERY difficult to prove. And by the way, the less ID required, the more the voting time window is opened up, the more machines vs paper ballots are used with unknowable computation & tallying methods and the more corrupt the system becomes, all the way to the very top, ever the more difficult voter fraud is and will remain very hard to prove.
Doesn’t matter if the Republicans get 70% of the vote because the Democrats will later find enough “misplaced” ballots to give them 71% of the vote. (70% + 71% = 141%). And the Republicans would never challange the outcome.
And suddenly Americans fear their electoral process at all levels has been undermined and compromised.
When working for Voter ID in Missisippi I researched the anti-voter ID side. “The Brennan Justice Center” at New York University is a center against not only Voter ID but any measure that would prevent voter/election fraud. The last sentence of one of their papers said it all to me, “Voter ID only makes a difference in a close election anyway”. The left believes they are entitled to steal votes and are entitled to win “close” elections. How many votes are we talking about with those that are stolen through no Voter ID, early voting, un-calibrated machines, absentee mail in voting, voting by mail, motor voter registration, illegals voting, and same day registration and voting? In Minnesota I believe they register and vote same day with no ID to register only someone else without ID or being registered to vouch for them, if I’m wrong about this please let me know, but it would explain franken. All of this ads up in Mississippi before Voter ID my vote was worth only .94% of a vote because of fraud. Of course Republicans found a different ways to devalue my vote in this years Republican primary and runoff.
We read about mexico’s harsh laws against illegally crossing their border and how severe they are and how they’re enforced. How do all these people get here through Mexico without at least a tacit approval from the Mexican government, and probably approved, encouraged and solicited by our government and would have been going on for probably 50 years.
Elections are MADE close by targeting fraud in key districts which throws the Electoral College votes.
Voter fraud = unchecked treason
Don’t forget Lyndon Johnson and Duval County.
From 2009:
VOTE FRAUD: 2,812 Dead Voters
http://www.redstate.com/jrichardson/2009/06/04/minnesota-vote-fraud-2812-dead-voters/
A review of Minnesota’s statewide database of registered voters revealed at least 2,812 deceased individuals voted in last November’s general election, according to a new report by the “traditional values” advocacy group Minnesota Majority.
After obtaining the list of voters who participated in November’s election, the group hired an independent firm who specializes in “death suppression” for direct mailing lists to review the data. The process, which involved matching names and addresses to state death records, bore troubling results.
According to Minnesota statute 201.13, the commissioner of health is to report monthly the name, address, date of birth, and county of residence of voting-age deceased residents to the secretary of state.
Presumably the commissioner of health would not issue incomplete reports (read: no motive), the blame then falls elsewhere – namely, at the feet of Minnesota Secretary of State Mark Ritchie, whose partisan leanings and curious alliance with vote fraud-magnet ACORN are becoming more salient by the day.
Deputy Secretary of State Jim Gelbmann argues the discrepancies unearthed by the group are merely the result of election workers updating the voter database with faulty information and were not instance of voter fraud.
“I would venture—put my reputation on—the fact that there are very few, if any, people impersonating dead people. You’re going to have human error,” he admitted.
But Jeff Davis, president of Minnesota Majority, believes the situation to be far less benign – and legal – than the Ritchie’s staff is willing to admit.
“The first problem with their explanation is that there should not even be deceased individuals on the voter rolls. The second problem with the secretary of state’s explanation is that it basically acknowledges the lack of controls in the way in which voter history updates are being captured and recorded,” he said. Adding, “If the proper controls had been in place, this situation would not have occurred.”
Whether the peculiar case of 2,800+ deceased individuals casting ballots is a matter of fraud, human error, or resurrection is of little importance at the moment.
According to current recount totals, Democrat Al Franken leads Republican Norm Coleman by a mere 312 votes. If the Minnesota Supreme Court rules in favor of Coleman later this month, which most analysts agree won’t be the case, an additional 4,000 votes will be added to the mix.
When you’re down by such a slim margin, like Team Coleman knows all too well, every vote counts. When you live in a democracy, the very hallmark of which is fair and free elections, every vote should count. But when you live in Minnesota, where the chief election officer is a hyper-partisan louse, “every” vote counts, even after you’re dead!
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