Here
Comes the 2014 Voter Fraud
Progressives and the Justice Department are
doing all they can to stop improvements in election integrity.
By Hans von Spakovsky in
the Wall Street Journal
In
the past few months, a former police chief in Pennsylvania pleaded guilty to
voter fraud in a town-council election. That fraud had flipped the outcome of a
primary election. Former Connecticut legislator Christina Ayala has been
indicted on 19 charges of voter fraud, including voting in districts where she
didn’t reside. (She hasn’t entered a plea.) A Mississippi grand jury indicted
seven individuals for voter fraud in the 2013 Hattiesburg mayoral contest,
which featured voting by ineligible felons and impersonation fraud. A woman in
Polk County, Tenn., was indicted on a charge of vote-buying—a practice that the
local district attorney said had too long “been accepted as part of life”
there.
Now
come the midterm elections on Nov. 4. What is the likelihood that your vote
won’t count? That your vote will, in effect, be canceled or stolen as a
consequence of mistakes by election officials or fraudulent votes cast by
campaign workers or ineligible voters like felons and noncitizens?
Unfortunately,
we can’t know. But one thing is almost certain: Voter fraud will occur. Many
states run a rickety election process, lacking rules to deter people who are
looking to take advantage of the system’s porous security. And too many groups
and individuals—including the NAACP, the American Civil Liberties Union and
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder —are
doing everything they can to prevent states from improving the integrity of the
election process.
Their
refrain is that voter fraud either doesn’t exist or is so insignificant that
nothing needs to be done to improve ballot security. Yet in the U.S. Supreme
Court’s 2008 ruling that upheld Indiana’s voter ID law, Justice John Paul Stevens acknowledged
“flagrant examples of such fraud” throughout the nation’s history and observed
that “not only is the risk of voter fraud real” but also that “it could affect
the outcome of a close election.”
Polling
shows that the November general election will likely have many close races,
particularly on the local level. Nothing new there. In 2014, 16 local races in
Ohio were decided by one vote or through breaking a tie. In 2013, 35 local
races in Ohio were that close.
Voting
by noncitizens alone could swing such races. A new study by two Old Dominion
University professors, based on survey data from the Cooperative Congressional
Election Study, found that 6.4% of all noncitizens voted illegally in the 2008
presidential election, and 2.2% voted in the 2010 midterms.
Since
80% of noncitizens vote Democratic, according to the survey, the authors
concluded that these illegal votes were “large enough to plausibly account for
Democratic victories in a few close elections.” Those that might have been
skewed by noncitizen votes included Al Franken ’s 312-vote win in the Minnesota
race for the U.S. Senate. As a senator, Mr. Franken would cast the 60th vote
needed to make ObamaCare law.
We’ll
never know what role noncitizen voting has played in past elections, but the
problem is real. While states like New York ignore this problem, other states
have passed rules to deal with it.
In
addition to voter ID laws, Kansas and Arizona have put in place new
proof-of-citizenship requirements for registration to prevent illegal voting.
It is a common-sense and needed reform. In recent weeks North Carolina found
more than 100 illegal aliens, still in the country thanks to the Obama
administration’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, registered to
vote. Yet opponents including the League of Women Voters and Common Cause are
challenging citizenship requirements in the courts.
Some
states have also tried to eliminate same-day registration, which is a recipe
for fraud since it prevents election officials from verifying the eligibility
of voters and the accuracy of voter-registration information. States also are
reducing early voting days, a relatively new phenomenon that has its share of
election-administration problems.
These
moves to shore up election integrity have been resisted by progressives at
every turn, claiming without evidence that such efforts suppress minority
turnout. 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. 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 Eric
Holder’s Justice Department in court. The U.S. Supreme Court just upheld a
decision throwing out an injunction against a Texas voter ID law, which was in
place in state elections in 2013 and primary elections this year.
North
Carolina, Ohio and Wisconsin are still battling progressives and the Justice
Department in court over their election rules, although North Carolina and Ohio
also got favorable decisions from the Supreme Court, allowing them to implement
their rules for this election cycle. As John Fund and I outline in our new book
on Attorney General Holder, the Justice Department refuses to enforce the
federal law requiring states to keep accurate voter rolls—even though a 2012
Pew study found that the rolls are riddled with errors and ineligible voters.
How
far are some liberals willing to go in undermining ballot integrity? This
month, the conservative guerrilla filmmaker James O’Keefe caught a director of
the “social change” organization Work for Progress and an employee for the
Greenpeace environmental group voicing their approval of absentee-ballot theft and
fraudulent voting in Colorado. Recent polls indicate that the state’s governor
and U.S. Senate races are statistical ties.
Greenpeace
fired the worker who was caught approving voter fraud, but too many on the left
shrug at the prospect of tainted elections. At a Cincinnati “voting rights”
rally in March, Rev. Al Sharpton and
other liberal activists celebrated Melowese Richardson, who was convicted last
year of voter fraud by using her position as a poll worker to vote more than
once in the 2012 presidential election. Her five-year prison sentence was
amended to five years of probation earlier this year—a delayed wrist-slap that
further erodes respect for the ballot box.
For
too long, America has basically used the honor system in the voter-registration
and election process. That approach is increasingly being revealed as
indefensible in a vibrant democracy, where we should make it easy to vote and
hard to cheat.
Mr. von Spakovsky, a Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow and
former commissioner on the Federal Election Commission, is the co-author, with
John Fund, of “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department”
(HarperCollins/Broadside 2014).
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