An Associated Press story on the organized mailing of voter registration forms to dead people, illegal aliens and even pets should phave ut to rest the charge that requiring voter ID for registration and voting amounts to discrimination. An outfit called Voter Participation Center has sent out millions of such forms over the years and claims much success in registering people. Just sign here, send in the form and you can vote--often by absentee ballot. (Dead people would be considered among the most absentee, one supposes, though pets would be a close competitor for that prize.)
"Brenda Charlston (of Seattle) wasn't the only person to get documents for her pet (a dead black labrador retriever): A virginia man said similar documents arrived for his dead dog, Mozart, while a woman in the state received forms for her cat, Scamper."
This constitutes disregard of the law, if not fraud. In a country where self-righteous political passions are running high it is not beyond some people to use such forms to allow voting more than once or to vote for themselves or someone else illegally (e.g., a non-citizen or imprisoned felon or a resident of an alzheimer hospice). Critics who call voter ID racist or otherwise discriminatory assert that no proofs of fraud exist. Actually, this story alone is full of such proofs. Put it this way, if anyone who got a form filled out for an ineligibile person (or pet!), that on its face is fraud.
Yet the Department of Justice under Eric Holder is suing Florida and harrassing other jurisdictions for purging voter rolls. Yet such purging of names of people who have died or moved away is not only justified, but usually required by state law. If someone by some very rare accident finds his name stricken from a voting list, he can show voter ID and get a provisional ballot that then will be cleared and counted. However, there is no recourse when a fraudulent form is registered and a fruadulent ballot based on it is cast and counted. ACCORN, most famously, has been engaged in such practices.
Oddly, while there is intense media interest in wealthy conservatives and the causes they back, there was no mention in the AP story of who funds groups like the Voter Participation Center.
The recent NAACP convention railed against Voter ID laws. But, hypocrisy of hypocrisies, the organization admitted attendees to the convention itself only if they could show government ID!
There is no need for anyone to apologize for defending voting integrity. Once that safeguard goes, tyranny has few obstacles left. It used to be said in Chicago that unless you could win by ten percent or more against the machine, the machine would "find" the ballots it needed to prevail. Is that where we are headed nationally?
UPDATE: A Pennsylvania judge has ruled against opponents of voter-ID. John Fund describes in a National Review article online.
