When a campaign only has to steal 50 votes in every precinct to gain a ten million vote advantage nationwide, why don’t we take the security of our elections more seriously? That was the primary message of CPAC’s 2012 voter fraud panel featuring election experts John Fund of The American Spectator, Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote, and Hans von Spakovsky of The Heritage Foundation.
Remember Project Vote, a group interchangeable with ACORN, back in 2008? Of the almost 1.2 million voter registrations forms the group completed that year, almost a third were found to be fraudulent. Back in Barack Obama’s community-organizing days, he president served as executive director for Chicago’s Project Vote back in 1992. After Freedom of Information Act litigation against the “most open and transparent administration in history,” any guesses who Judicial Watch learned has been meeting with White House and Department of Justice officials lately? You guessed it — the good people at Project Vote.
“When an incumbent looks shaky, they always face the temptation of taking advantage of holes in security,” said former Federal Election Commissioner Von Spakovsky.
With groups like Project Vote working with DOJ on national voter registration drives, conservatives have good concern to worry about voter fraud in the 2012 elections.
The panel spent a great deal of time stating the obvious: voter fraud and voter registration fraud are a national problem. Examples ranged from the conviction of a man who was caught voting 12 times in one day to a local Florida news station’s discovery that at least a hundred illegal aliens were voting in just one Florida county alone.
Von Spakovsky listed three common-sense reforms to combat voter fraud which are already underway nationwide: 1) require voter ID, 2) require proof of citizenship, 3) and require a photocopied ID or proof of citizenship with absentee ballots (which are the easiest to cast illegally).
Partisan elected officials aside, just about every demographic group agrees that voter-ID requirements are a good idea. The panel noted that even some former partisans on voter ID are reversing course on the issue. Retired Alabama Rep. Artur Davis recently admitted that voter fraud was a problem in his state, explaining that “you knew that you were going to lose a certain number of absentee ballots…and you know that’s the way politics was practiced.”
The critics of Voter ID generally fall back on the argument that advocates only intend to disenfranchise minority voters? The panel flipped the left’s desperate “racism” critique on its head, noting that the majority of voter fraud involves the stealing of minority votes through fraud in Democratic primary races. Minorities are being victimized, but it clearly isn’t at the hand of honest election advocates.
