The danger of vote fraud
Phyllis Schlafly warns of community organizers dishonestly adding to election rolls
By Phyllis Schlafly
The most provocative line in the Democratic national platform adopted in Denver is: “We oppose laws that require identification in order to vote or register to vote.” Since it’s routine to show an ID in order to board a plane and do dozens of other very ordinary things, what’s the big deal about showing an ID to exercise the most important privilege of citizenship?
That question is answered in the new book by John Fund called “Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy.” Honest elections absolutely depend on preventing the stuffing of the ballot box by people who are not eligible to vote.
Among those who are not eligible to vote are those who are dead, who are not residents of the precincts where they vote, who are registered to vote in another state, who are underage and especially those who are not citizens. Votes cast by any of those can cancel out your vote and, in close elections, decide the winner.
Fund describes how easy it is for unscrupulous politicians to buy voter impersonators with a little cash and get them to cast illegal votes. The 7th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals explained “the extreme difficulty of apprehending a voter impersonator. He enters the polling place, gives a name that is not his own, votes and leaves. If later it is discovered that the name he gave is that of a dead person, no one at the polling place will remember the face of the person who gave that name.”
The Democrats have hysterically fought against voter ID laws in Congress, in state legislatures and in the courts, taking what they thought was their best case, the Indiana law, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. They lost there because they ran into liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, who, hailing from Chicago, was acquainted with many “flagrant examples” of election fraud going back to Mayor Richard Daley’s shenanigans that swung Illinois to John F. Kennedy in 1960.
The National Voter Registration Act (known as the Motor Voter Law), the very first law signed by President Bill Clinton, imposed fraud-friendly rules on the states by requiring them to offer registration to anyone who applies for a driver’s license, to offer mail-in registration with no identification needed, and to make it very difficult to purge dead and moved-away voters from registration rolls. The voter rolls in many U.S. cities now contain more names than the U.S. Census lists as residents over age 18.
The Motor Voter Law, according to Fund, “has fueled an explosion of phantom voters.” In the four years after passage, nearly 26 million names were added to the voter rolls nationwide. One investigation in Indiana showed that hundreds of thousands of names were people who had died, moved away or gone to prison.
Missouri Secretary of State Matt Blunt’s report on the 2000 election showed how the Motor Voter Law facilitated fraud in one district. He reported that votes were illegally cast by 14 who were dead, 68 who voted twice, 79 who were registered from vacant lots, 62 who were federal felons, 52 who were state felons and an undetermined number who were registered from drop-sites where multiple fake names were registered to one person.
Fund’s book makes fascinating reading because of his descriptions of many specific examples of vote fraud that actually determined the outcome of elections. Fund describes in detail some of the more outrageous examples of recent vote fraud in Chicago, Indiana, St. Louis, Seattle, Milwaukee, Mississippi and Georgia.
Fund believes that the biggest opportunity for vote fraud this year is the registration tactics of ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now). ACORN is a classic Saul Alinsky-style community-organizing group, and it has received hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars as well as corporate donations.
It’s no surprise ACORN is closely associated with Barack Obama. Right after graduating from the Harvard Law School, Obama was recruited by ACORN to run a successful voter registration drive for an ACORN affiliate, Project Vote.
ACORN claims that, along with Project Vote, it registered 1.15 million new voters in 2004 and deployed 4,000 get-out-the-vote workers on Election Day.
The job of handling legitimate voters is tremendously complicated by phony registrations and by the tactic of filing new registrations on the last possible day when there is not adequate time to verify them.
In 2008, Obama was a major supporter of a Democratic housing bill that provided $200 million to community groups (such as ACORN) that are counseling homeowners facing foreclosure. ACORN is pledging to spend $35 million this year registering persons who will vote.
With the 2008 elections as close as they are predicted to be, Obama’s best chance to win is to flood new names on the registration rolls who may or may not be eligible voters. It is more important than ever that voter ID be used in order to make sure that ballot boxes are not stuffed by voter impersonators.
Jenny Hatch

Benjamin Franklin: “A republic, if they can keep it”

I’m concerned about the bailouts at taxpayer expense, but I am MORE concerned about Wall Streets response to the bailout news. They should not be so vested in taxpayer money to prop up stock prices. To me, the news that wall street rallied yesterday was the most depressing economic info I have heard in a long time. The financiers should not be so dependent on taxpayer money that the market bounces the way it did when a bailout was announced.
Craig R. Smith said this in an opinion piece at WND Daily today:

“Democrats, at the time, ignored the fact that many loans were being made to completely unqualified borrowers to buy homes they clearly could not afford. Overnight, home ownership in America became a birthright under the Democrats. Discussions with the Congressional Black Caucus and housing executives from Fannie and Freddie were just one example of how the Democratic Party encouraged irresponsible borrowing behavior.

So what do we do now? We must suffer the pain and do the hard yet necessary things to return to reality or we had better get prepared for a whole lot more pain. These problems did not happen overnight and the solutions will not come overnight. But the longer we fool ourselves with feel-good government bailouts, the longer the problem will remain.

Why are we turning to the very perpetrators for the answers to the problems they caused in the first place? Are we crazy? Go back to the same folks who broke it for a fix?

Free markets works when they are operated under accountability. The only effective help the government can offer would be to immediate halt wasteful spending and begin to reduce the national debt. Fiscal responsibility at the government level would do more to instill confidence than any bailout a bureaucrat can offer. Bureaucrat bailouts are designed to bring new contributions into their campaigns. That is a huge part of the problem. Bailouts do not work unless they are accompanied with accountability.

It would be easy enough to kid ourselves and allow the government to throw huge amounts of taxpayer dollars at the problems and pass it all on to future generations. But that would be like putting a band-aid on a gaping wound. The patient will still bleed to death, just at a slower pace.

Accountability, not blame, is required NOW. Sacrifice, not politics, is the necessary cure. I know it isn’t a popular message but it is reality. Americans are willing to do what it takes to strengthen the country if they know they will not be burned once again by politicians who are more interested in power and position than they are about what is best for America.”

I would like to see some accountability, especially for the congressional people who had oversight….

“The lack of oversight provided by Chris Dodd and Barney Frank of the Banking and Financial Services subcommittee is unprecedented and should require the immediate dismissal of both men.”

Jenny Hatch

Only liberals would believe it was a problem if there is not one hundred percent conservative consensus about Palin.
This brings to mind a passage from David Horowitzs bio Radical Son, he said that during his conversion to conservatism he began reading conservative writers and was amazed at the level of debate and disagreement in the conservative world. He was so used to the lock step meme of liberal thought and the absolute smack downs that occurred if a lib writer stepped off the party line.
He said he read a piece by a prominent conservative writer who seriously questioned another conservative and he waited for the fallout from various think tanks etc… and was surprised when it did not come.
Thing is, in the conservative sphere we have lots of room in the marketplace of ideas.
Neo Neo Con has some thoughts on Horowitzs book
And perhaps the best section of her blog is her Leaving the Circle: Political Apostasy catagory.
Jenny Hatch