Greg Krehbiel
Voter registration fraud
by Greg Krehbiel on 18 December 2009
I heard John Fund speak today at a Federalist Society lunch on the issue of voter registration fraud. It was pretty interesting stuff. According to Fund, our voting system has a lot more problems than hanging chads and such.
The biggest area of fraud seems to be absentee ballots. And ACORN came up frequently as a dirty player.
Fund also has a very low opinion of Obama’s role in all this, mentioned some cases where the Obama justice department has been on the wrong side, and expects things to get worse as Obama is able to replace people at Justice with his cronies.
2009-12-18 » Greg Krehbiel
18 December 2009 @ 6:19 pm
The Obama administration has declared war on fair and free elections.
Imagine a situation where white supremacists were about to be convicted (not answering the charges against them at all) of voter intimidation and the Bush Justice Department steps in to get the cases dismissed? The Bush Attorney General would have been fired and convicted of a crime or Bush would have been impeached.
When it’s Eric Holder and Obama committing such an outrage, the press just goes *yawn*.
We can expect ACORN to continue to use federal funds to commit registration fraud, only Fox News will report it. People will say “nothing to see here, if only Fox News reports it, it must be bogus…”
18 December 2009 @ 8:20 pm
Are these cases of actual voter fraud (in the sense of somebody voting twice, for instance) or imaginary voter fraud (“Hey! That name is on a gravestone!”), or potential voter fraud?
My understanding is that the whole issue is a red herring. Like people losing family farms due to inheritance taxes. It just hasn’t happened in the real world.
Here’s a paper on the subject I don’t have time to read right now.
18 December 2009 @ 9:49 pm
Hey, it’s a paper, and it’s white, so it’s a whitepaper and it’s from the “Brennan Center for Justice” (a “non-partisan” group attached to the NYU Law School), so you know it’s all fair and balanced.
I’m talking about voter fraud as defined by law of which they’ve been found guilty, repeatedly.
Hey, there’s no potential for abuse when non-existing people are registered to vote, is there? Those laws are just formalities. They should be called formality felonies!
And as to that voter intimidation. Why that’s not a problem, is it? There’s no proof that anyone actually didn’t vote or voted differently, so no harm no foul.
I’m so glad there’s nothing to be concerned about here.
19 December 2009 @ 10:04 am
Registration fraud is only a practical problem if it leads to people who are not entitled to vote actually voting, or people voting more then once. If Martians are registered to vote that might be voter fraud in some sense, but so long as they don’t actually vote, it’s not a practical problem. As long as contractors are paid to get people to register, there will be pressure applied to people to register. “All you have to do is register with me and I can pay for my college edgimication.”
A lot of the supposed fraud consists of people who aren’t sure if they are registered registering again. Sometimes that’s because the person trying to get them to register is being paid by the head and puts them under pressure to register, sometimes it’s because they really can’t remember if they are registered. But since they can’t vote twice, it really doesn’t matter.
What was truly comical out here in the real world was when the Republican candidate in Minnesota kept insisting on recounts, and kept losing votes. Maybe if there are real voting irregularities, the Republicans would do better to keep quite?
19 December 2009 @ 1:30 pm
Supposedly non-partisan get-out-the-vote efforts run by ACORN continue to register tens of thousands of fake voters. The Democrats continue to advocate and push for voting requiring no ID at all. Seems like a recipe for real vote fraud, to me.
In any case, ACORN clearly doesn’t take even a minimal level of care to avoid repeatedly committing felony registration fraud. It appears that ACORN is a criminal conspiracy to me (not just for registration fraud, but for problems in many areas, going all the way to the top of the organization) that should be addressed under RICO statutes.
Hey, if it’s no big deal, why don’t the Democrats just lobby to overturn these silly voter registration laws? We know, based on your fine example of Minnesota that everyone is voting for Democrats anyway. (Of course, Franken kept getting more votes when the rules kept changing to favor Franken.) Why go through this silly exercise of attempting to maintain integrity in this process?
19 December 2009 @ 4:28 pm
Fund outlined an interesting scenario that went something like this. I may have some of the details, wrong, and I’m sure the precise rules vary from state to state.
+ The names and addresses of people who have voted with absentee ballots in the past are a matter of public record.
+ People from one party submit registrations for people from the other party to submit an absentee ballot, and they sign the registration with an ugly scrawl.
+ The people are mailed an absentee ballot.
+ When they submit a genuine vote, the person in charge of looking for fraud notes that the signature on the registration differs from the signature on the vote and disqualifies it.
According to Fund, these are the kinds of dirty tricks that ACORN and others have been up to.