Screen shot from a Project Veritas video in which a New Hampshire poll worker hands a ballot to an investigator whom she believes is Reynold Caron, who died months earlier
Liberals love to laugh off voter fraud. It’s “a made-up problem invented by GOP operatives,” Robert Koehler snickered in the Huffington Post on January 5. Regarding ballot hijinks, Democratic national chairwoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz chuckled: “There is almost none.” Attorney General Eric Holder tittered, “In-person voting fraud is uncommon.”
But the recent news is not so funny. One probe recorded on tape how easily anybody can vote on behalf of dead Americans. Elsewhere, the total ballots cast by the dead exceeded the winning margins in several high-profile elections. These cases confirm the urgent need for all voters to prove that they are alive and to identify themselves correctly via photo ID — just as Americans do on non-election days.
James O’Keefe — the conservative video journalist whose hidden-camera sting operation doomed ACORN — struck again during the New Hampshire primary. O’Keefe’s organization, Project Veritas, dispatched three videographers to the Granite State. On January 10, they visited precincts in Manchester and Nashua and asked poll workers, one by one, if their voter rolls bore the names of several deceased people. Believing that O’Keefe’s collaborators were those registered, the poll workers handed out 10 ballots, and never once asked for photo ID.
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“Live Free or Die,” a poll worker reassured one investigator whom she thought was Reynold Caron, who passed away last October 14. “This is New Hampshire. No ID needed.”
O’Keefe’s men immediately gave back each ballot and insisted that they wanted to leave each precinct and return with photo ID, although none was required. O’Keefe’s team members never cast these ballots. They returned them, unmarked, to precinct workers.
All of this is available on videotape at ProjectVeritas.com.
New Hampshire Democrats seem unconcerned that their voter rolls contain the names of dead people and that, absent ID rules, fraudsters conveniently could vote the ballots of the expired. Instead, Democrats want to indict these whistleblowers.
“They should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, if in fact they’re found guilty of some criminal act,” Democratic governor John Lynch told WMUR-TV.
Republicans, however, consider this deadly serious.
“Despite the Governor’s veto of the photo ID bill last year, the House will begin again this year to restore confidence in our elections by passing legislation to require a photo ID,” New Hampshire’s Republican house speaker William O’Brien said on January 13. Following Project Veritas’s revelations, Granite State legislators recently began debating two photo-ID bills.
Meanwhile, South Carolina attorney general Alan Wilson told the U.S. Justice Department on January 19 that his office has documented 953 cases in which ballots have been cast by dead voters in the Palmetto State. Democrats can giggle all they want, but 953 is a potentially game-changing number of votes.
Recall that Willard Mitt Romney originally won the Iowa caucuses by just eight votes, only to have a closer count reveal that Rick Santorum actually prevailed by 34 votes (with eight precincts’ votes still missing).
After an indecisive November 2008 election, Sen. Al Franken (D., Minn.) eventually won a final recount in which he defeated GOP incumbent Norm Coleman by 312 votes.
And, of course, 537 ballots gave George W. Bush Florida’s electoral votes and, consequently, the White House in 2000.
Thus, 953 haunted ballots could have reversed any of these races. Perhaps they already did.
The easiest way to disfranchise the dead is to require every voter to show photo ID. Those who lack identification should get it for free. Reasonable accommodations can be made for the infirm.
And let’s not hear the Left’s scratched record about how mandating photo ID for voters is step one on the road to lynching. If that were true, then demanding photo ID at America’s airports would make the TSA the KKK. The Left’s oft-cited claim that blacks are too befuddled to possess or acquire photo ID is pure racial profiling. Just how lame does the Left think black Americans really are?
ID cards would help cleanse America’s increasingly soiled voting system. Photo IDs also would allow dead people to rest in peace rather than rush to the polls every Election Day.
— New York commentator Deroy Murdock is a nationally syndicated columnist with the Scripps Howard News Service and a media fellow with the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University.
Here in Canada, we have to be enumerated and get on the voters list before an election. This list is then made public so if you are not on the list, you can contact Elections Canada and get your name added. At election time, you still have to show a valid picture ID before casting your vote. It blows my mind that a country that holds itself out as the most technologically advanced in the world, can't even assure their citizenry that only those qualified to vote, can cast a ballot. It's a very good, and very scary question, as to just how many elections have been rigged in your history. I guess crony capitalism is not the only major problem you guys refuse to take steps to eliminate.
Hanging chads, military votes, cartons of smokes...no wonder Fidel Castro offered to help monitor our elections. The problem is that voter fraud, even when declared, slowly winds through our court system - allowing the status quo to entrench.
IDs at the front end of the process is treating the symptoms. Harsh and swift punishments? Who do you penalize and how?
If the payoff for fraud and manipulation were not so grand, the occurrences of fraud and manipulation would be greatly reduced. This whole issue would really become moot if we were to scale back governmental powers and size.
It'd be great if it were that easy. But leaving prosecution up to Eric Holder does not inspire confidence. (Black Panther voter intimidation case, anyone?)
Sheila Jackson Lee is on record just a few days ago saying that voter ID rules are code for racist intent. She never explained how, exactly, but as long as the Left can shout the R word, the usual crop of Republicans will wilt in fear.
I think voter ID laws are essential. One would think that in minority dominated districts, that the fraud would of necessity have the effect of diluting the votes of actual minority voters at the expense of hypothetical voters who don't have IDs.
For all that we shouldn't fall to mocking the actual poll workers, who are obligated to follow the law. They can't decide to require IDs if the law does not require it.
One does wonder why, in this electronic age, there isn't an automatic notification from the state vital statistics office to the voters' registrars.
I see nothing wrong with requiring photo id - but there has to be a way to provide it, free of charge, to those who can't afford it. Otherwise, it could be considered a poll tax.
I couldn't disagree more! If people who aren't Americans (e.g. illegals) can vote, then why can't dead people. My dead Great Aunt Grace was a die-hard Republican. She's dead, but I know she'd vote against Obama this fall, and would therefore offset some of O's big illegal vote (plus some of this other fraudulent vote). I mean, dead people provided a service to this country, they paid taxes, and importantly, they no longer take anything from the country. Dead old people do not consume Social Security nor Medicare. That, after all, is what ObamaCare is really all about. Well, these folks are helping out on both counts. That their vote can't be included is a denial of civil rights. That the ACLU is not fighting this amazes me. They usually are right up any idea like this!
Give it a thought. And by the way, why have criminals ever had their voting rights taken away. If you gave them the right to vote, they likely would vote away the laws they broke, thereby precluding recidivism and further increases in lawlessness down the road. I mean who better to deal with criminal law than criminals. I'm amazed that Axelrod and other Obama scrod have not gone big after this.
The Democrat reply that voter fraud is minimal is laughable. It only seems minimal because it's so easy to get away with, and supposing that it really is minimal, why shouldn't we make an effort at preventing what fraud there is? Imagine the uproar if someone advocated measures to prevent rape on a college campus and the counter-argument was raised that rape hardly ever happens.
We have enacted free-speech suppressing campaign finance laws on the weak justification that they are needed to preserve the "appearance of fair elections." What about enacting laws to prevent vote fraud on precisely the same ground?
If we want to stop it, we should make a movie where the people who vote using the names of the dead are haunted by angry dead people's ghosts to the point of insanity, or they suffer "Omen" like deaths. (Of course the movie would have to be made using a bunch of young Republican kids as the perpetrators and victims to get past the Hollywood censers, but the message, if gruesome enough, might slop over to some of the more timid Democrats.
Surprise! Politics is a dirty, unfair, perverted, ego-centric 'profession' without ethics or regulation. Of all human endeavor in a free society, this is the one thing we should police with a vengeance.
Yes, and photo ID laws are necessary but not sufficient. There are other ways for those who are intent on cheating to do so. For example, it's possible to get into punch cards ahead of time and punch out the candidates you want. A California resident told me that happened to him in 2000. He was handed his card and noticed that Al Gore had already been punched. He asked for another ballot and found the same thing had been done. He happened to notice, but other voters probably didn't. Absentee ballots are also fertile grounds for fraud. Some serious work needs to go into designing a tamper-proof electoral system.
The "dead voter" issue in S.C. has been shown to be more of a problem with clerical records errors, etc. rather than outright fraud. Then on the other hand the US Justice Dept. is trying to prevent S.C. from passing voter I.D. laws. Seems to me that the Dems want dead voters as long as they aren't GOP.
Kentucky has had voter ID requirements as long as I've been an election worker (since 2004). When Indiana got its voter ID law a few years back, the usual suspects set up an awful screeching ... but I've never, *never* heard one thing about people in West Louisville having any trouble voting because "the man" makes them show ID at the polls.
Mr Murdock, thanks for shining the light on this topic. But to flesh out your report from South Carolina, the state passed a voter photo ID law here, only to have the Obama Department of Justice step in and declare it null and void. Two things at play here: (1) the Obama administration once again overstepping its bounds; and (2) the reality that Obama has a vested interest in not cracking down on voter fraud.
I'm confused - isn't ID required to register to vote? How is it people can have an ID to register but at voting time it's too inconvenient?
Having been a poll worker in California, it's clear that voting laws encourage fraud. Not only is ID not required, but an hourly log of all registered voters, highlighting the names of those who already voted, must be posted at the entry of the polling place. We had instances of people just selecting a name and voting. We knew it was fraud because the actual registered voter would come in to vote later.
I wonder how many cases there were where the registered voter didn't come in.
"Ballot-Box Zombies" is certainly a problem and Hornady has the solution. Hornady now has a line of ammo called "Zombie Max" (External Link), intended for the coming zombie apocalypse (like the one referenced at the CDC, External Link). All we need to do is arm each poll worker and, when one of these dead voters shows up, they shoot them in the head! Problem solved. In fact, the problem would be solved in the early voting phase (btw, what's up with "early voting"? Get out of your chair and vote on election day. If you will be out of town, get an absentee ballot).
Seriously though, I have a cold and need some over the counter medicine. I have to show the pharmacist my id to buy cold medicine! I have to show my id to buy alcohol (not at the same time!). Having to pull it out once every 2-years doesn't seem like that much of a problem. The issue is, requiring id's will definitely supress the vote of felons, illegals and the (brain) dead. All Democrat constituencies!
The whole manual system of voting is an anachronism. I can (and do) travel virtually everywhere on the planet. I can walk up to any ATM, withdraw cash, check balances, etc -all with complete security and confidence. Sure, minorities are too lame to get a valid ID, but they can sure whip-out the EBT card when they run low on funds at the casino!
According to a study conducted in Maryland, Mississippi and Indiana by American University's Center for Democracy and Election Management that debunked certain previous contentions of enormous potential disenfrancisement, only about .5% of eligible voters lack the required ID.
Murdock's contention? "Thus, 953 haunted ballots could have reversed any of these races. Perhaps they already did."
Read that number again. 953.
.5% of the registered voters in Indiana is over 21,000 votes.
.5% of the registered voters in Maryland is over 15,000 votes.
.5% of the registered voters in Mississippi is over 8,000 votes.
.5% of the registered voters in South Carolina is over 12,000 votes.
So to the extent Murdock is making an argument based on numbers, he's arguing that it's a good idea to prevent thousands from changing an election result in order to make sure hundreds don't change an election result. Sorry -- I consider that argument preposterous.
I won't even address the inference Murdock asks you to draw that, since O'Keefe could perpetrate fraud, therefore there's fraud.
I favor universal ID. (Sorry, civil libertarians.) At the next census, we should tag every citizen on site like a goose, or maybe just enter their personal info into a portable terminal and issue a photo ID on the spot. In the meantime, cut the crap with the racist voter ID laws.
You interpret 56,000 voters without a photo ID as disenfranchisement of thousands just to fix the problem of a few hundred. It just as easily implies the problem is potentially much bigger than any of the close races Murdock highlights.
I don't see how it's disenfranchisement to require a photo ID when you actually have to go REGISTER (provide personal details) to be allowed to vote in the first place. The ID simply confirms the registration.
Thanks for making me laugh. Love the last line of your column.
I agree with your serious point. Voter ID is important to reduce voter fraud. Our voting privilege is worth whatever trouble it takes to acquire ID. Who enjoys the driver's licensing process? We go to the bother because we want to drive.
