Nothing says dysfunctional quite like a stolen election. I nominate this as one of the more depressing developments of 2011:
Four Democratic officials and political operatives have pleaded guilty to voter fraud-related felony charges in an alleged scheme to steal an election in Troy, N.Y., FoxNews.com reports.
The group forged signatures on applications for absentee ballots and on the ballots themselves in a 2009 primary of the Working Families Party, which was affiliated with now-defunct community group ACORN.
Voters whose signatures were forged expressed outrage to Fox. “I feel extremely violated,” said Brian Suozzo.
This is a larger story than four political operatives in New York. J. Christian Adams, a former Department of Justice lawyer, documents shocking cases of voter fraud in his book Injustice. John Fund’s Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy cites elections decided by voters from a precinct that shouldn’t be voting: the cemetery.
Nobody should be more vigilant about voter fraud than the Attorney General of the United States, yet Eric Holder is charging that attempts to begin to remedy the situation—requiring voters to present identification—is somehow racist. As the Wall Street Journal puts it, Holder “invents fears of ballot suppression.”
Holder claims that voter identification rules disenfranchise minorities, a mindboggling claim given that we are all every day called upon to present identification. Members of minorities should be highly insulted that the AG thinks they can’t get it together to present an ID.
The claim that such rules harm minorities is presented sans evidence by the George Soros-funded Brennan Center and the NAACP, a once-great organization, that has done something that should disturb all citizens:
The NAACP even petitioned the United Nations this month for a human-rights ruling on what President Benjamin Jealous called a "tidal wave of assaults on the right to vote." He meant in America, not Cuba or North Korea. The American Civil Liberties Union has sued to challenge a voter ID law in Wisconsin.
Several states have adopted voter ID laws and the Department of Justice is reviewing them. The Voting Rights Act requires that the plans be cleared by the DOJ, perfectly understandable given the voting rights abuses carried on against minorities in the past in the South. But we find ourselves confronting a situation in which laws passed to end previous abuses will be used to protect contemporary abuses. And there is no evidence that minorities are harmed by the ID requirement:
Plaintiffs put up by liberal lawsuit shops routinely claim that ID laws endanger the rights of hundreds of thousands, but lawsuits in Indiana and Georgia were dismissed because they couldn't produce a single eligible voter who'd been turned away due to the ID requirement. Turnout has risen in states that have passed the voter ID laws, with no adverse impact on minorities. …
Thirty states now require some form of ID at the polls, and one goal of Mr. Holder's attack is to intimidate other states that want to toughen their laws. He's probably also signaling that Justice will strike down the Texas and South Carolina statutes. This would please the Democratic Party's left while not-so-subtly inventing a threat of Republican racism to drive minority turnout in 2012. Mr. Holder's voter ID alarums are one more reason he's earning a reputation for politicized, partial justice.
You wanna know what’s unfair to minority voters? Stealing their votes. As Hans von Spakvosky observes:
As for the constant liberal claims that voter fraud does not occur, one of the Democratic operatives who pled guilty, Anthony DeFiglio, told New York State police investigators “that faking absentee ballots was a commonplace and accepted practice in political circles, all intended to swing an election.”
And whose votes do they steal? DeFiglio was very plain about that: “The people who are targeted live in low-income housing, and there is a sense that they are a lot less likely to ask any questions.”