ONLY 4 STATES CAN STOP VOTE
FRAUD
'No
systematic oversight of the system' exists, by Leo Hohmann, 12/1/16 WND
The raging debate about voter fraud
has been hijacked by the left, says a leading expert on the issue, and the left
is driving the narrative in a false direction using slick deception. The
question is: What will President-elect Donald Trump do about it?
When people think about “voter
fraud,” they tend to think about the dead voting, people voting in multiple precincts
or party machines paying homeless people to cast ballots.
While those are all legitimate
concerns, the mass fraud happens long before the vote is cast – at the point of
registration – says Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation
and co-author of the book, “Who’s
Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk.” By centering the debate on “voter
ID” laws, the left has been able to divert attention away from the real source
of the problem – lax voter-registration laws.
Only seven states have strict photo
ID voter laws. But even these are not enough to stop non-citizen green-card
holders from illegally registering to vote and providing their driver’s
licenses when they show up to cast a fraudulent vote.
Only 4 states require proof of
citizenship to register
The heart of the matter comes down
voter registration, which is based on an “honor system,” Spakovsky said.
“Nobody is checking to make sure those registering to vote are citizens.”
Right now, there are only four
states that require residents to provide proof of citizenship, such as a birth
certificate or passport, when they register to vote. Those states are Alabama, Arizona, Georgia and Kansas –
all of which backed Trump in November. Trump
may be right about winning popular legal vote
Here are some immigration numbers
that have a direct impact on the integrity of the voting system: The United
States is currently bringing in a record 1.3 million legal immigrants per year,
most of them on green cards and increasingly from hostile nations like Somalia,
Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Syria. A green card allows a foreign
national to reside legally and permanently in the United States, as well as
providing the right to work, obtain a driver’s license, purchase a gun and even
serve in the U.S. military. But one of the few privileges not afforded to the
green-card holder is the right to vote.
Problem is, once you’ve afford all
these other rights to the foreign national who’s here on a green card, what’s
to stop him from registering to vote? There is no system in place to do that. Even the strictest voter ID law
would not catch that green-card holder who checks off the “U.S. citizen” box on
the voter registration application. He has his driver’s license or military ID
to show at the polls, so he’s good to go.
Contrast that number, 1.3 million
per year getting green cards, with the estimated number of illegal aliens who
sneak across the southern border or overstay their visas – an estimated 450,000
to 500,000 per year. And illegals are also more likely to come in and out of
the country than those with green cards, and they are less likely, unless they
reside in California, to have a valid driver’s license.
So by now, you should start to see,
purely on a mathematical basis, where the greatest potential for fraud exists.
It’s with the green-card holders.
Trump issued a tweet Sunday saying
he would have “won the popular vote” over Hillary Clinton “if you deduct the
millions of people who voted illegally.” That prompted headlines at CNN, the
Washington Post, New York Times, Politico and many other media outlet that all
said, “No proof exists of widespread voter fraud.”
Technically, that’s true. The
question none of these outlets is asking, however, is why is it that no proof
exists? If you ask the wrong questions, you
will get the wrong answers, says Spakovsky. “All these newspapers are going to
a lot of trouble to deny the obvious, and that is the United States has a long
history of voter fraud,” he said.
The Supreme Court recognized the
problem in 2008 when it ruled on a case upholding a voter ID law in Louisiana. “We have a whole file at the
Heritage Foundation of convictions in courts of law, over 700 defendants
convicted of voter fraud,” he added.
System designed to fail?
But let’s assume that, for the sake
of argument, cases like this wouldn’t qualify as “widespread” fraud. To crack
that nut, you have to look at the bigger picture. How do you find proof in a
system that is designed to hide the proof?
“I don’t know if what Donald Trump
says is correct or not because our system is so bad, and it’s so easy for so
many people to fraudulently vote that we will never find out about it,”
Spakovsky told WND “The problem is non-citizens who are clearly registering and
voting all over the country. In the convictions we’ve had, in each case it was
just discovered by accident. There is no systematic oversight of the voter
registration process. It’s all done on the honor system.”
And, in fact, any effort at oversight
by the states has been strongly discouraged by the Obama Justice Department. For example, Florida election
officials wanted access to the Department of Homeland Security’s alien database
a couple of years ago, citing major problems with non-citizens registering to
vote.
The DHS database includes names of
millions of non-citizens, legal and illegal, and Florida wanted access to this
data so it could verify the citizenship of those on its voting rolls. “The
Obama administration did everything it could to prevent access to that
database,” Spakovsky said.
A real and growing problem
In 2014, a
study was conducted by two
professors from Old Dominion University and one from George Mason, based on
survey data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study. This study
estimated 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted illegally in the 2008 presidential
election and 2.2 percent voted in the 2010 midterm congressional elections.
Another poll
by John McLaughlin, based on a sample survey of 800
Hispanics in 2013, found that of foreign-born respondents who were registered
voters, 13 percent admitted they were not U.S. citizens. “If even just half of that 13
percent voted, that’s tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots,” Spakovsky said.
Since 80 percent of non-citizens
vote for Democrats, according to the ODU/George Mason study, non-citizen
participation could have “been large enough to change meaningful election
outcomes including Electoral College votes [in North Carolina in 2008], and Congressional
elections” such as the 2008 race in Minnesota in which Al Franken was elected
to the U.S. Senate, giving “Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote” to pass
Obamacare, Spakovsky concludes.
“So the point Trump is making is
valid in that we have this honor system that is being taken advantage of, and
we need to focus on how to fix the problem. For that, I think it’s great that
Trump is bringing attention to the problem,” he said.
Trump has picked immigration hawk
Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., to be his attorney general, a key position for
cracking down on voter fraud. With Sen. Jeff Sessions taking over as attorney
general in the incoming Trump administration, all bets are off for the
continuation of the status quo. That’s why progressives in the media, leftist
political-science professors and an army of community-organizing groups are
mobilizing against Trump before he even gets in office. They’re terrified he
will reform the system and demand proof of citizenship at the point of voter
registration.
Spakovsky expects Sessions, a former
federal prosecutor who has championed border security and admitting fewer
refugees from hostile nations, to be a bird dog on restoring the integrity of
the election system. “I think very much so,” Spakovsky said. “There are two
things Trump could do to reform the system.”
One is to give states access to the
non-citizen database, and second is to start prosecuting non-citizens who are
caught not only voting but registering to vote. The current administration has basically
ignored cases of non-citizens who have been discovered to have lied on their
registration form by checking the box that says they are U.S. citizens.
Caught red-handed
In 2011, Spakovsky was serving on
the Fairfax County Electoral Board and personally witnessed mass
voter-registration fraud. “We discovered 278 registered in just that one
county, and we took them off the rolls and sent the names to the Obama Justice
Department [at the time headed by Eric Holder], and they did nothing about it,”
Spakovsky said. “Here was 278 cases of potential voter fraud, and they did
nothing to investigate it.
“I predict Sessions will take this
seriously. I think he understands what an issue this is.” There’s much work to
be done at the state level, too, if the system is to be cleaned up.Since it’s entirely legal for
non-citizens, living in the U.S. legally with green cards, to have
drivers’ licenses, the voter ID laws alone are not sufficient to wipe out
fraudulent voting.
A green-card holder simply has to
lie on his voter registration application, check the box claiming to be a
citizen, and he’s a registered voter. There is no system in place to validate
that he checked the citizenship box in good faith.
“Every state needs to pass a law
similar to those four states – Alabama, Arizona, Georgia and Kansas – that says
you have to provide proof of citizenship when you register to vote,” Spakovsky
said.
“They need to be pushed to do it,
and they need to have the U.S. Justice Department supporting them when they get
sued by progressive groups trying to stop them from enacting these laws.” That’s
also something that hasn’t happened under Obama, he said.
“The Kansas law has been stopped in
federal court. The DOJ has done everything it can to assist the leftist groups in
stopping these laws at the state level,” Spakovsky said. “They don’t want the
non-citizen voting stopped.”
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