Polls were only open for a couple of hours when the first allegations of voter suppression and intimidation came in from Philadelphia. Whether or not those irregularities have an impact on today’s elections is yet to be seen, but election experts already see many avenues for cheating in our current system.
John Fund writes for National Review Online and is author of the new book, “Who’s Counting?: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk.” He says America’s system is an embarrassment.
“We have the sloppiest election system of any industrialized democracy,” said Fund. “The Pew Research Center, which is a non-partisan group, says one out of eight of our voter registrations are either invalid or contain major errors. That’s a problem. They also say we have two million dead people on the voter rolls. Look, I believe the dead deserve honor and respect, but they don’t deserve representation without respiration.”
Fund says another major headache is the four million people registered in more than one state. He says the argument that no one actually votes in more than one state is a terrible excuse.
“A Democratic congressional candidate in Maryland, the nominee of her party, a couple of months ago it was found she had voted in both Florida and Maryland,” he said. “She was very civically engaged and she had to resign her position. We have a lot of underbrush, and when you have underbrush you can have fires and I fear we could have a fraud fire.”
Several states have recently attempted to secure the vote by mandating photo identification to vote. The idea has been approved in some states and is wildly popular across the country, but the Obama administration has led a fight to block the new laws, claiming they suppress the vote and disenfranchise minorities and the poor. Fund says the obstruction from Washington goes even further.
“In Florida there was an effort to get non-citizens off the rolls,” he said. “We discovered (this) through the work of an NBC News affiliate in Ft. Myers, Florida. They went to their county jury records and they found that hundreds of people had claimed that they couldn’t serve on a jury because they were not citizens. But they were registered to vote and in some cases actually voted. They went to the Obama Justice Department and the Department of Homeland Security and said ‘You have the best lists of foreigners living in the country both legally and illegally. Please give us the names so we can cross-reference it with our voter registration rolls.’ The Justice Department refused and they spent ten months trying to get them. Finally, when they took them to court and they were sure to lose in court, the Obama administration finally turned over the records.”
In another case, Fund says the Bush administration was trying to clean up the voter rolls in a Missouri county where the number of registered voters exceeded the number of adults over 18 years of age. The Obama administration quickly dropped the case shortly after coming into office.
For those who say voter fraud could happen but isn’t a real concern because it doesn’t happen, Fund says to look no further than the Project Veritas videos showing a young white man easily getting handed the ballot for Attorney General Eric Holder or others being handed ballots in the names of dead people.
Shoplifting is the analogy Fund likes to use to warn about voter fraud. He says if you have no posted warnings about shoplifting and no video surveillance then you are encouraging shoplifting – and the same goes for voter fraud. And just as simple safeguards help deter shoplifters, the same goes for those looking to create mischief in the electoral system.
