Exactly What Does ‘Expanding Voter Rights’ Mean?

The Washington Free Beacon posted an article today about a group called “Priorities USA” which seeks to expand voter rights. Kamala Harris’ top campaign lawyer is one of their board members. The group is planning a massive $30 million effort to “expand voter rights” leading up to the 2020 elections.

The article reports:

Priorities USA Action, a Washington, D.C.-based group that threw its weight behind Hillary Clinton throughout the 2016 presidential cycle, announced that it will put tens of millions of dollars behind an effort to “fight Republican-backed laws that restrict ballot access,” the Associated Press reports.

Guy Cecil, chairman of Priorities USA, told the AP that most of the money will go towards litigation and that the group will begin its efforts by focusing on Texas and Georgia. “We will look at where is the biggest harm being done and where our work can have the most impact,” Cecil said.

Marc Elias, a partner at the D.C. office of the Perkins Coie law firm who acted as Clinton’s top campaign lawyer, and who is now the top lawyer for the presidential campaign of Kamala Harris, quietly joined the board of Priorities USA’s nonprofit arm in early 2017 to help the group lead its voter-related efforts. Elias was brought in as the group began to shift its focus to fighting state-level voter identification laws.

It is interesting to note that one of the main people behind this effort is George Soros.

The article reports:

“We hope to see these unfair laws, which often disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in our society, repealed,” Soros told the New York Times in 2015.

Soros had identified expanding the electorate by 10 million voters at a top priority, according to hacked documents released the next year. Soros was also the first funder of a large voter mobilization effort for the 2016 elections led by a coalition of progressive organizations.

Soros was one of the top donors to Priorities USA Action throughout the presidential cycle, giving $10.5 million to the group. Soros added $5 million to Priorities during the 2018 election cycle.

Priorities USA and Elias did not respond to inquiries on Elias’s potential upcoming involvement with the multi-million-dollar campaign by press time.

Why are they fighting voter ID laws? An article I posted back in 2011 might provide a clue.

In 2011 I reported on some of the findings of True the Vote in Houston, Texas:

“Vacant lots had several voters registered on them. An eight-bed halfway house had more than 40 voters registered at its address,” Engelbrecht said. “We then decided to look at who was registering the voters.”

“Their work paid off. Two weeks ago the Harris County voter registrar took their work and the findings of his own investigation and handed them over to both the Texas secretary of state’s office and the Harris County district attorney.

“Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Sean Caddle, who formerly worked for the Service Employees International Union. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid. The other registrations included one of a woman who registered six times in the same day; registrations of non-citizens; so many applications from one Houston Voters collector in one day that it was deemed to be beyond human capability; and 1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures.”

This illustrates why we need voter ID (and why the Democrats are fighting it). Every fraudulent vote cancels out the vote of a legal voter. Eliminating voter fraud is the best way to expand voter rights.

 

A Small Step To Insure The Integrity Of The Vote

Reuters is reporting today that the Supreme Court has ruled today in a 5-4 decision that Ohio has the right to purge its voter rolls of infrequent voters.

The article reported:

The state said the policy was needed to keep voting rolls current, clearing out people who have moved away or died.

Under Ohio’s policy, if registered voters miss voting for two years, they are sent registration confirmation notices. If they do not respond and do not vote over the following four years, they are purged.

Republican President Donald Trump’s administration backed Ohio, reversing the stance taken by Democratic former President Barack Obama’s administration against the policy.

“This decision is validation of Ohio’s efforts to clean up the voter rolls and now with the blessing (of the) nation’s highest court, it can serve as a model for other states to use,” Republican Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted said.

Writing for the majority, Justice Samuel Alito said the court was not deciding whether Ohio’s policy “is the ideal method for keeping its voting rolls up to date. The only question before us is whether it violates federal law. It does not.”

Periodically purging voter rolls is common sense. People move, people die, etc. I personally know of one instance where a registered voter decided to check who was registered to vote claiming her home as a residence. She discovered that there were three people registered to vote at her address who she had never heard of.

In September 2010, I posted the following about efforts in Houston to uncover voter fraud:

According to the American Thinker:

“A group of people took it upon themselves to work at polling places in 2008 and observed – and were shocked – by what they perceived to be voter fraud. Their next step was to create a citizen-based grassroots group to collect publicly available voting data and analyze what they found (with the help of donated computers and volunteer helpers). They admit they did not know what they were doing at first but where there is a will there is a way.”

Fox News tells what happened next:

“”The first thing we started to do was look at houses with more than six voters in them” Engelbrecht said, because those houses were the most likely to have fraudulent registrations attached to them. “Most voting districts had 1,800 if they were Republican and 2,400 of these houses if they were Democratic . . .

“”But we came across one with 24,000, and that was where we started looking.”

“Vacant lots had several voters registered on them. An eight-bed halfway house had more than 40 voters registered at its address,” Engelbrecht said. “We then decided to look at who was registering the voters.”

“Their work paid off. Two weeks ago the Harris County voter registrar took their work and the findings of his own investigation and handed them over to both the Texas secretary of state’s office and the Harris County district attorney.

“Most of the findings focused on a group called Houston Votes, a voter registration group headed by Sean Caddle, who formerly worked for the Service Employees International Union. Among the findings were that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations the group submitted appeared to be valid. The other registrations included one of a woman who registered six times in the same day; registrations of non-citizens; so many applications from one Houston Voters collector in one day that it was deemed to be beyond human capability; and 1,597 registrations that named the same person multiple times, often with different signatures.”

Voter fraud is real in America. Purging voter rolls is not the entire solution, but it is a valid first step.

 

 

Additional Support For Voter Identification

Our political views on certain issues are somewhat affected by the area of the country and the particular place we live. I live in Massachusetts. Contrary to what some of our state officials say, there is a problem with voter fraud in this state, as well as in every other state of the union.

It seems natural to me that voters would be required to show some sort of identification when they vote. You need to show identification to buy cigarettes, alcohol, rent a video, board a plane, and apply for welfare or unemployment benefits. If making people show identification would be a hardship for people who are poor, how do they collect their food stamps (which they are entitled to if they are poor)? When I asked my sister about this (she lives in Tennessee), she explained that in the past, excessive requirements had been put on black voters in the south, and many southerners were afraid that voter identification laws would be used to discriminate against minority voters. I understand, but I still think we need some sort of voter identification.

On Saturday, the Washington Examiner reported that Hispanic voters in Colorado, New Mexico and Florida all support laws requiring voters to show identification. During the last Presidential election, voter registration fraud was rampant. When an organization called True The Vote looked into voter registration in Houston, they found that only 1,793 of the 25,000 registrations submitted by a group known as Houston Votes were valid. (see rightwinggranny.com March 24, 2011). Maybe I am naive, but it seems to me that anyone who loves their country would want fair elections. So why do we have stories in the Washington Examiner that explain:

Also in June, a group of Democratic senators, including Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, asked the Justice Department to investigate state photo ID laws.  “These measures have the potential to block millions of eligible American voters,” the Democratic lawmakers wrote.  The senators asked the Justice Department to use its authority under the Voting Rights Act to “closely monitor the legislative process” in states that have passed or are considering passing photo ID laws and to “track any unlawful intent” of proponents of the laws.  The laws “must be subjected to the highest scrutiny as states justify these new barriers to participation,” the senators wrote.  Testifying at a Senate hearing on September 13, Justice Department Civil Rights Division chief Thomas Perez said the Department has begun those investigations and is scrutinizing not just the laws themselves but the motives of those who passed them to discover whether “there is a discriminatory purpose that underlies any action in any state.”

The good news here is that the public supports voter identification. At some point we can hope that our representatives will vote according to the desires of the people they represent.

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