The latest discovery of illegal double voting in Virginia and Maryland will give Attorney General Eric Holder yet another opportunity to ignore voter fraud, which he has continually dismissed as an inconsequential problem.
In June, I wrote about how the U.S. Justice Department was totally uninterested in investigating or prosecuting possible non-citizens who had illegally registered and voted in Fairfax County, Virginia, where I formerly was a member of the electoral board.
While I was still on the board in 2011, we sent a letter to both the Justice Department and the county prosecutor, Raymond F. Morrogh (D.) informing them that in checking with the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles, we discovered 278 registered voters who, when they got their driver’s license, informed the DMV that they were not U.S. citizens; 117 of them had actually voted in multiple elections. Registration and voting by non-citizens are serious violations of both state and federal law.
Neither the Justice Department nor Murrogh did anything about this. The lone Democrat on our electoral board even voted against turning this information over to prosecutors, and the local Democratic party successfully lobbied local judges to make sure I was not reappointed to the board. Trying to ensure the integrity of the election process was apparently just too much for them.
Now, the current board has discovered 17 individuals who voted in both Fairfax County and Montgomery County, Maryland, in the 2012 election and “in some instances, on multiple occasions going back for a considerable period of time,” according to letters the board sent to the Justice Department, Morrogh, and Virginia attorney general Mark Herring on Aug. 22.
This is not a case of voters with the same name being mistakenly confused as the same individual. All 17 voters were identified by their full name, date of birth, and Social Security number, according to the Virginia Voters Alliance (VVA), a citizens’ organization that turned these names over to the electoral board.
It was the VVA — along with another citizens’ group dedicated to election integrity, Election Integrity Maryland (EIM) — that did the research on the voter files in Virginia and Maryland to find these illegal voters. And this may be only the tip of the iceberg: VVA and EIM turned the names of 43,893 individuals who appear to be registered in both states over to the State Boards of Elections in Virginia and Maryland. Fairfax County alone has more than 10,000 such duplicate registrations. These 17 voters are only a subset of at least 164 voters their research showed voted in both states in the 2012 election.
This in a state in which the 2013 attorney general’s race was won by Democrat Mark Herring by fewer than 1,000 votes out of 2.2 million cast, and the 2005 attorney general’s race was decided by fewer than 400 votes.
Will Eric Holder, Mark Herring, or Commonwealth attorney Raymond Morrogh do anything about this voter fraud? Or will they ignore it like both Holder and Morrogh did before? After all, Holder claims that efforts to curb voter fraud are merely attempts to deprive individuals of their right to vote — or in this case, their right to vote twice.