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Comments from an AP history
and government teacher in Raleigh, NC.
e-mail betsynewmark AT gmail.com
Commissions earned from selling items through Amazon will go towards buying materials for my classes. Thank you.
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Monday, November 03, 2008
Why we need to take voter registration fraud seriously
When people raise a fuss about the shenanigans of ACORN in registering fake people, the rejoinder has been that ACORN just can't help themselves because of a few dishonest people they hired to register people. And even if the high number of fake forms are a scandal, this is really about registration fraud and not actual voters. However, it is not that hard to turn a fraudulent registration into a fraudulent vote. John Fund, who has written extensively on voter fraud, writes today in Politico about how ACORN's cries of innocence are just not believable."How would you know if people using fake names had cast votes in states without strict ID laws?" says GOP Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, who this year won a major Supreme Court case upholding his state's photo identification law. "It's almost impossible to detect and once the fraudulent voter leaves the precinct or casts an absentee ballot, that vote is thrown in with other secret ballots there's no way to trace it."And once those people have been registered under fake names, it isn't that difficult to turn those registrations into votes. John Fund tells us how it has been done in the past.
Anita MonCrief, an ACORN whistle-blower who worked for both it and its Project Vote registration affiliate from 2005 until early this year, agrees. "It's ludicrous to say that fake registrations can't become fraudulent votes," she told me. "I assure you that if you can get them on the rolls you can get them to vote, especially using absentee ballots." MonCrief, a 29-year old University of Alabama graduate who wanted to become part of the civil rights movement, worked as a strategic consultant for ACORN as well as a development associate with Project Vote and sat in on meetings with the national staffs of both groups. She has given me documents that back up many of her statements, including one that indicates that the goal of ACORN's New Mexico affiliate was that only 40 percent of its submitted registrations had to be valid.
MonCrief also told me that some ACORN affiliates had a conscious strategy of flooding voter registration offices with suspect last-minute forms in part to create confusion and chaos that would make it more likely suspect voters would be allowed to cast ballots by overworked officials. Nate Toller, who worked on ACORN registration drives and headed an ACORN campaign against Wal-Mart in California until 2006, agrees. "There's no quality control on purpose, no checks and balances," he told me.Other states provide other examples. Marybeth Brehany of Sioux City, Iowa, filed a sworn affidavit stating that she has discovered that several individuals unknown to her had registered to vote at her address. One of them, a David Loepp, had already requested and received an absentee ballot at his new address in, of all places, Rome, Italy. A 2005 Tennessee state Senate race was voided after evidence of voting by felons, nonresidents and the deceased who had been registered illegally. A Washington State Superior Court judge found that the state's 2004 gubernatorial race, which Democrat Christine Gregoire won by 133 votes, had included at least 1,678 illegal votes.He has several more examples. This is why people have become very cynical about the voting process. The Supreme Court has upheld photo ID laws for registering and voting in Indiana. Even Jimmy Carter has spoken out about the importance of guarding against fraud.
Perhaps the clearest look at how fraudulent registrations can be converted into votes comes from Wisconsin. Earlier this year, the Milwaukee Police Department's Special Investigation Unit released a stunning 67-page report detailing an "illegal organized attempt to influence the outcome" of the 2004 presidential election.
It noted many documented cases of staffers for a presidential campaign and an allied 527 group who illegally voted. Those involved in the scheme "represent multiple levels of both the organizations, from upper management to the street level canvassers." The task force report found many ineligible voters had cast ballots, ineligible felons not only had voted but also worked at the polls, transient college students had cast illegal votes along with day-trippers from nearby Chicago, and homeless voters may well have voted more than once.
The Milwaukee police report explained just how easy it is to cast an illegal vote without ever being detected., "Michael A. Smith can become Mike Smith, M.A. Smith, or Mickey Smith, depending on the person reviewing the Same Day registration card, and unless a specific allegation is made against one of those name variants, the new name would just be added to the overall database. Even if the new system were capable of discerning the differences in recorded names, the finding would not be discovered until after any multiple ballots had been cast and recorded." Indeed, the task force found that 1,100 registration cards filled in by voters were declared invalid or untraceable by election officials.
Another way that fraudulent registrations can be converted into illegal votes is when groups like ACORN either purposely or recklessly sign up visitors from out-of-state or felons who are ineligible to vote. The New York Daily News reported in August, 2004 on how some 46,000 New Yorkers are registered to vote in both the city and Florida, what it called a "shocking finding" because it "found that between 400 and 1,000 registered voters have voted twice in at least one election, a federal offense punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine," and noted that "efforts to prevent people from registering in more than one state rely mostly on the honor system."He and other supporters of stricter safeguards to protect voter integrity recognize there are two civil rights in play here. One is the right to cast a ballot without fear or intimidation or artificial barriers. We fought a great struggle in the 1960s to eliminate poll taxes, literacy tests and pass a Voting Rights Act to protect the right to vote. But all Americans have another civil right — the right not to have their ballot canceled out by someone who shouldn't be voting, is voting twice or may not even exist. You can be just as surely disenfranchised by someone canceling out your vote as if someone blocked your entry into a courthouse door where a polling place was located.Even if the numbers are small, we've seen enough times that elections can be decided by small differences and it is well past time that we put in more safeguards against this type of fraud endangering our system.
As Glenn Reynolds writes today in the New York Post, if it had been the NRA registering Mickey Mouse and turning in thousands and thousands of fraudulent voter registrations, the reaction in the press would probably not have been so ho hum. It is yet another storyline that the media has mostly yawned about, like the millions of dollars in contributions that Obama has accepted from unidentified donors, that would be totally different if the story concerned a Republican.Labels: Election 2008
6 comments
Comments:
When people raise a fuss about the shenanigans of ACORN in registering fake people, the rejoinder has been that ACORN just can't help themselves because of a few dishonest people they hired to register people. And even if the high number of fake forms are a scandal, this is really about registration fraud and not actual voters. However, it is not that hard to turn a fraudulent registration into a fraudulent vote. John Fund, who has written extensively on voter fraud, writes today in Politico about how ACORN's cries of innocence are just not believable.
As Glenn Reynolds writes today in the New York Post, if it had been the NRA registering Mickey Mouse and turning in thousands and thousands of fraudulent voter registrations, the reaction in the press would probably not have been so ho hum. It is yet another storyline that the media has mostly yawned about, like the millions of dollars in contributions that Obama has accepted from unidentified donors, that would be totally different if the story concerned a Republican.
6 comments
When people raise a fuss about the shenanigans of ACORN in registering fake people, the rejoinder has been that ACORN just can't help themselves because of a few dishonest people they hired to register people. And even if the high number of fake forms are a scandal, this is really about registration fraud and not actual voters. However, it is not that hard to turn a fraudulent registration into a fraudulent vote. John Fund, who has written extensively on voter fraud, writes today in Politico about how ACORN's cries of innocence are just not believable.
"How would you know if people using fake names had cast votes in states without strict ID laws?" says GOP Indiana Secretary of State Todd Rokita, who this year won a major Supreme Court case upholding his state's photo identification law. "It's almost impossible to detect and once the fraudulent voter leaves the precinct or casts an absentee ballot, that vote is thrown in with other secret ballots there's no way to trace it."And once those people have been registered under fake names, it isn't that difficult to turn those registrations into votes. John Fund tells us how it has been done in the past.
Anita MonCrief, an ACORN whistle-blower who worked for both it and its Project Vote registration affiliate from 2005 until early this year, agrees. "It's ludicrous to say that fake registrations can't become fraudulent votes," she told me. "I assure you that if you can get them on the rolls you can get them to vote, especially using absentee ballots." MonCrief, a 29-year old University of Alabama graduate who wanted to become part of the civil rights movement, worked as a strategic consultant for ACORN as well as a development associate with Project Vote and sat in on meetings with the national staffs of both groups. She has given me documents that back up many of her statements, including one that indicates that the goal of ACORN's New Mexico affiliate was that only 40 percent of its submitted registrations had to be valid.
MonCrief also told me that some ACORN affiliates had a conscious strategy of flooding voter registration offices with suspect last-minute forms in part to create confusion and chaos that would make it more likely suspect voters would be allowed to cast ballots by overworked officials. Nate Toller, who worked on ACORN registration drives and headed an ACORN campaign against Wal-Mart in California until 2006, agrees. "There's no quality control on purpose, no checks and balances," he told me.
Other states provide other examples. Marybeth Brehany of Sioux City, Iowa, filed a sworn affidavit stating that she has discovered that several individuals unknown to her had registered to vote at her address. One of them, a David Loepp, had already requested and received an absentee ballot at his new address in, of all places, Rome, Italy. A 2005 Tennessee state Senate race was voided after evidence of voting by felons, nonresidents and the deceased who had been registered illegally. A Washington State Superior Court judge found that the state's 2004 gubernatorial race, which Democrat Christine Gregoire won by 133 votes, had included at least 1,678 illegal votes.He has several more examples. This is why people have become very cynical about the voting process. The Supreme Court has upheld photo ID laws for registering and voting in Indiana. Even Jimmy Carter has spoken out about the importance of guarding against fraud.
Perhaps the clearest look at how fraudulent registrations can be converted into votes comes from Wisconsin. Earlier this year, the Milwaukee Police Department's Special Investigation Unit released a stunning 67-page report detailing an "illegal organized attempt to influence the outcome" of the 2004 presidential election.
It noted many documented cases of staffers for a presidential campaign and an allied 527 group who illegally voted. Those involved in the scheme "represent multiple levels of both the organizations, from upper management to the street level canvassers." The task force report found many ineligible voters had cast ballots, ineligible felons not only had voted but also worked at the polls, transient college students had cast illegal votes along with day-trippers from nearby Chicago, and homeless voters may well have voted more than once.
The Milwaukee police report explained just how easy it is to cast an illegal vote without ever being detected., "Michael A. Smith can become Mike Smith, M.A. Smith, or Mickey Smith, depending on the person reviewing the Same Day registration card, and unless a specific allegation is made against one of those name variants, the new name would just be added to the overall database. Even if the new system were capable of discerning the differences in recorded names, the finding would not be discovered until after any multiple ballots had been cast and recorded." Indeed, the task force found that 1,100 registration cards filled in by voters were declared invalid or untraceable by election officials.
Another way that fraudulent registrations can be converted into illegal votes is when groups like ACORN either purposely or recklessly sign up visitors from out-of-state or felons who are ineligible to vote. The New York Daily News reported in August, 2004 on how some 46,000 New Yorkers are registered to vote in both the city and Florida, what it called a "shocking finding" because it "found that between 400 and 1,000 registered voters have voted twice in at least one election, a federal offense punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine," and noted that "efforts to prevent people from registering in more than one state rely mostly on the honor system."
He and other supporters of stricter safeguards to protect voter integrity recognize there are two civil rights in play here. One is the right to cast a ballot without fear or intimidation or artificial barriers. We fought a great struggle in the 1960s to eliminate poll taxes, literacy tests and pass a Voting Rights Act to protect the right to vote. But all Americans have another civil right — the right not to have their ballot canceled out by someone who shouldn't be voting, is voting twice or may not even exist. You can be just as surely disenfranchised by someone canceling out your vote as if someone blocked your entry into a courthouse door where a polling place was located.Even if the numbers are small, we've seen enough times that elections can be decided by small differences and it is well past time that we put in more safeguards against this type of fraud endangering our system.
As Glenn Reynolds writes today in the New York Post, if it had been the NRA registering Mickey Mouse and turning in thousands and thousands of fraudulent voter registrations, the reaction in the press would probably not have been so ho hum. It is yet another storyline that the media has mostly yawned about, like the millions of dollars in contributions that Obama has accepted from unidentified donors, that would be totally different if the story concerned a Republican.
Labels: Election 2008
Comments:
""How would you know if people using fake names had cast votes in states without strict ID laws?"
By the Registrar doing his job, and checking the registration before adding the application to the Electoral Roll.
"It's almost impossible to detect and once the fraudulent voter leaves the precinct or casts an absentee ballot, that vote is thrown in with other secret ballots there's no way to trace it."
Well, apart from the unique serial number which every ballot has, and which is recorded as the ballot is given to the voter.
So in summary, the major contention of this blog post is ... well, fraudulent.
Perhaps someone who believe in the tooth fairy (sorry, in "voter fraud") can produce some evidence. Waving your hands and saying "there isn't any evidence" is not evidence.
John Fund, in the first paragraph of his citation, clearly refers to two different cases that resulted in one election being overturned and the other being identified as decided by fraudulent votes. Complain to them!
bill and jaw bone,
Enough of your denials. The evidence is starting to trickle in. Will you now please just go away?
http://www.newsnet5.com/news/17859950/detail.html?rss=nn5&psp=news
Wake me up if there is actual "evidence", as opposed to allegations like the ones you reported inequitus.
"But this isn't the first time we've uncovered dead voters. Two years ago, another 5 On Your Side investigation exposed 13,000 dead voters registered in Cuyahoga County."
Wow! So dead people aren't automatically purged from the rolls. Yawn. They should be.
"More than two dozen of them cast ballots."
OK, that sounds serious. Surely that's fraud?
But then they start backpedalling
"Those 27 people appear to be dead voters.In many of the cases this time, the dead were counted because of technical mistakes.
In one case, a wife signed in the wrong place and her deceased husband was counted as the voter."
In another case, the spouse wrote "deceased" against the voter's name, and rabble-rousing rightwingers claimed it was the signature of a voter!
Seriously, these are pathetic - evidence of nothing except your ability to spin.
Jaw Bone,
"By the Registrar doing his job, and checking the registration before adding the application to the Electoral Roll."
And who can doubt that the average Democratic Machine Registrar can be counted upon to not do his job? ^_^
Sorry dude, but the fact is that in Chicago I've too many Democratic friends who bragged about the way these things you speak of were circumvented by them to think you are doing anything but blowing smoke when you speak of them. :P
Would you care to try again? o_O
No one takes voter fraud seriously, or the fact that the left-wing lluminati allow their candidates to run around with terrorist, and choose to turn the other cheek.
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