True the Vote is an initiative developed by citizens for citizens, meant to inspire and equip volunteers for involvement at every stage of our electoral process. We promote ideas that actively protect the rights of legitimate voters, regardless of their political party affiliation.
This article is from the Wall Street Journal appeared in the opinion section on DECEMBER 23, 2011. It shows endemic coordinated efforts from the Leftists supported by sympathetic members of the media that voter fraud is no big deal. Voter fraud as a tool of the left for the purpose of shifting elections has been used for years. Leftists believe in the Alinsky methods that the ends justify any means necessary. How can any one seriously argue that presenting reasonable evidence as to ones identity is racist is such a transparent argument to hide the real intention of purely political motives that even a blind man can see the obvious truth!
Holder's Voter ID Fraud
The AG invents fears of ballot suppression.
In the Attorney General's telling, the movement in the states to require voters to show some ID is a revival of minority disenfranchisement a la Jim Crow. A growing number of minorities, he said in a speech last week, are now worried about "the same disparities, divisions and problems" that beset the country in 1965 and "many Americans, for the first time in their lives . . . now have reason to believe that we are failing to live up" to the promise of democracy for all.
If you haven't heard about this national crisis, perhaps that's because you don't travel in Mr. Holder's political circles. He is merely repeating the howls of groups like the NAACP and the George Soros-funded Brennan Center, which claim without evidence that voter ID laws hurt minorities.
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.
U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder
Mr. Holder says the Civil Rights Division led by Thomas Perez will review the policies and impartially "apply the law." If that's true, Mr. Perez's job should be easy: In 2005, Justice approved a nearly identical law in Georgia. In 2008's Crawford v. Marion County Election Board, the Supreme Court likewise ruled 6-3 that an Indiana law requiring photo ID at the ballot box was constitutional.
The court's liberal lion, then-Justice John Paul Stevens, wrote for the majority that Indiana's law "is unquestionably relevant to the State's interest in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process." Indiana offered free voter ID cards to all citizens, so the inconvenience of picking up an ID at the Department of Motor Vehicles wasn't an undue burden and was reasonably balanced by the state's interest in reducing fraud, Justice Stevens wrote.
That isn't good enough for Mr. Holder, who says his department's priority is to "expand the franchise." But expand it for whom, exactly? The vast majority of voters already have the necessary photo ID, which they need to get through airport security or register for a grocery-store savings card.
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.
In his speech, Mr. Holder highlighted historical attempts to keep voters away from the polls to "gain partisan advantage." But in a case of more recent history, in 2009, Mr. Holder's department dropped a voter intimidation case against the Black Panther Party, in which members stood outside a polling place brandishing nightsticks and threatening voters. Civil-rights lawyer Bartle Bull saw the Panthers in action and called it "the most blatant form of voter intimidation I've ever seen."
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.
The latest
voter-fraud convictions in Troy, N.Y., must be very inconvenient to the
public-affairs propagandists over at the DNC and the NAACP, as well as
liberal media outlets like the New York Times. It just ruins their constant refrain that there is no voter fraud in the United States.
Eric Shawn at FOX News reports
that two Troy city officials, the city clerk and a councilman, along
with two Democratic political operatives, have pled guilty to forging
absentee-ballot signatures and casting fraudulent ballots in the 2009
Working Families Party primary. The WFP is the political party
associated with ACORN.
One of the citizens whose votes were stolen
was stunned at what happened. She said that she was “sure this goes on a
lot in politics, but it’s very rare that they do get caught.” This
voter was right on the money with that observation — fraud is so easy to
commit in our election system that it is rare that fraudsters get
caught and even rarer that they get prosecuted.
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.”
That is exactly what former Alabama
congressman Artur Davis said recently when he admitted that he was wrong
to oppose voter-ID requirements. Davis says the “most aggressive” voter
suppression “is the wholesale manufacture of ballots, at the polls and
absentee, in parts of the Black Belt” of Alabama, which is an area of
very poor black communities. These are the very areas where the NAACP
claims voter fraud does not happen. The NAACP opposes all reasonable
measures to safeguard the voting process for its own constituents, even
going to the extent of defending vote stealers, as the NAACP did
in Greene County, Ala., in the mid-1990s. Small wonder one of its local
officials was recently sentenced to five years in prison for voter
fraud in Tunica County, Mississippi.
In the Troy case, the ease with which voter
signatures were forged without detection shows that signature comparison
by election officials does not work and poses no deterrent to this type
of voter fraud. That is why Kansas combined a voter-ID requirement in
its new election law with a change to its absentee-ballot procedures. If
you want to vote in person in Kansas, you now have to show a photo ID,
and if you request an absentee ballot, you have to provide either a copy
of your photo ID or the driver’s license number from the ID. That helps
confirm that the registered voter — not some political operative like
Anthony DeFiglio — actually requested the absentee ballot.
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