One of the great things about U.S. citizenship is that our votes all count the same. My vote in a ballot box is no more or no less than that of a millionaire’s vote.
Unfortunately, my vote (and your vote) in the ballot box may amount to only one-sixth of Ohio poll worker Melowese Richardson’s votes.
What’s so special about Ms. Richardson? Well, for starters, Ms. Richardson, who supported President Obama, to put it mildly, may have cast as many as six ballots in the 2012 presidential race.
Ms. Richardson admits to having voted for the president by mail-in ballot and then again in person. She may also have cast absentee ballots for four other people. She admits to at least one. Eliana Johnson writes:
Richardson says she filled out and submitted an absentee ballot on her granddaughter’s behalf, and her granddaughter has confirmed that claim, saying, “It wasn’t a big deal.
The big deal is the American election system, which is in peril when people behave in this fashion.
Richardson is one of several perhaps overly enthusiastic voters being investigated for possible voter fraud in Hamilton County, Ohio.
“I can’t understand these charges against me of voter fraud,” she told Cincinnati’s Channel 9 News. “Have they never heard of . . . overlooking mailing in a ballot or registering to vote at a precinct after you’ve forgotten that you’ve mailed in a ballot or you’ve been told that the ballot may be too late?”
This bodes ill for the electoral system. I heard an Ohio official on TV talking about integrity with regard to the situation. Yeah, that’s part of it. Is it really feasible that a veteran poll worker would not understand what she did was wrong? But there is an aspect of this nobody wants to say aloud: stolen elections.
I’m certainly not saying Ohio was stolen, but, if we don’t clamp down on voter fraud, it won’t be long before a presidential election will be stolen.
Requiring photo IDs at a polling place, something the Obama Justice Department adamantly opposes, is a first step to ensuring the integrity of our elections.
Charlotte Allen has a fine portrait of the “politicized” DOJ under Attorney General Eric Holder in the new Weekly Standard. The Voting Rights section under Holder, as Charlotte notes, is particularly interested in fighting voter ID laws:
Many of the new hires had been directly involved in legal challenges to voter-ID laws, while others had tried to get state laws forbidding voting by convicted felons overturned (federal courts have declined to strike down the felon-disenfranchisement laws, which are permitted by the Fourteenth Amendment). The beefed-up Voting Section under Holder began an aggressive campaign against voter-ID laws, notably in South Carolina and Texas, invoking Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires changes in voting procedures in nine states (mostly in the South) and localities in seven other states to be approved by Justice in a process called “preclearance” before they can take effect. …
According to Who’s Counting?, a book about election fraud by National Review columnist John Fund and Bush-era Civil Rights Division counsel Hans von Spakovsky, Holder’s Justice Department canceled an investigation into allegedly stolen ballots in black-majority Noxubee, Mississippi, and dismissed a Bush-era lawsuit against the state of Missouri for failing to purge registration lists of deceased and no-longer-resident voters as required by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (according to the book, numerous counties in Missouri had more registered voters than residents).
We are in a bad fix when the DOJ doesn’t, at the very least, try to ensure that only the living vote—and that they vote only once.