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Tag Archives: voter rolls

Moving Toward Election Integrity

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On Tuesday, The U.K. Daily Mail posted an article about H.R.4494, introduced by Republicans to promote election integrity, voter confidence, and faith in elections by removing Federal impediments to, providing State tools for, and establishing voluntary considerations to support effective State administration of Federal elections and improving election administration in the District of Columbia, and for other purposes.

The article reports:

The 224-page package contains nearly 50 standalone bills. It would, in part, give state and local elections officials access to the Social Security death list to help them glean the names of the deceased from voter rolls.

…The legislation would incentivize states enact election security measures similar to Georgia’s – require voter ID, conduct post-election audits and enact other checks on voter eligibility. If they did so, they could be eligible for more election funding through federally funded HAVA Election Security grants.

Under the package Congress would take the reins on Washington, D.C.’s election administration – requiring the city to ask for voter ID and banning non-citizens from voting.

…Since the 2020 election, Georgia, Iowa, Florida and Texas have enacted new election security measures like limiting drop boxes and tightening voter ID requirements, while California, New York, Oregon, Virginia and Washington have rolled back certain voting requirements. 

The Georgia law standardized voting hours from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. or as long as 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. It required two Saturdays of early voting instead of one and made two Sundays optional for early voting. It continued to allow absentee voting without offering a reason but requires a state-issued ID to request a ballot. The bill also banned political groups from handing out water and food to voters waiting in line at the polls and shortens runoff elections from 9 weeks to 4 weeks.

It  also limited ballot drop boxes, requiring them to be placed at early voting locations and only available while the precinct is open. 

After that law was enacted about 56.9 percent of registered voters showed up to vote in the 2022 midterm election – roughly the same percentage as four years earlier in the last midterm election. More people than ever cast ballots overall but the percentage stayed the same due to population growth. 

It is time to clean up our voter rolls and to make sure that the person casting their ballot is who they say they are. That is simply common sense. Unfortunately, there is no way this bill will pass either the Senate or be signed by the President.

How To Improve Election Integrity

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On December 30, Tom Fitton posted the Judicial Watch Weekly Update.

The Update reports some good news about election integrity:

New York City Removes 441,083 Ineligible Names from Voter Rolls Thanks to Judicial Watch!

We just settled a federal election integrity lawsuit against New York City after the city removed 441,083 ineligible names from the voter rolls and promised to take reasonable steps to clean its voter registration lists in the future.

We filed the lawsuit in July after the city failed to clean voter rolls for years. The lawsuit, filed under the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), pointed out that New York City removed only 22 names under federal law over six years (Judicial Watch v Valentine et al. (No.1:22-cv-03952)).

Our suit detailed how New York City’s “own recent data concedes that there were only 22 total” removals under this provision “during a six-year period, in a city of over 5.5 million voters. These are ludicrously small numbers of removals given the sizable populations of these counties.”

Moreover, the “almost complete failure of Kings, Queens, New York, Bronx, and Richmond Counties, over a period of at least six years, to remove voters” under a key provision of federal law “means that there are untold numbers of New York City registrations for voters who are ineligible to vote at their listed address because they have changed residence or are otherwise ineligible to vote.”

The settlement details how the city responded to our notice about its voting roll deficiencies with a massive clean-up:

[The Board of Elections] notified Judicial Watch that, in February 2022, they removed, pursuant to Section 8(d)(1)(B) of the NVRA, 82,802 registrations in Bronx County, 128,093 in Kings County, 145,891 in New York County, 66,010 in Queens County, and 18,287 in Richmond County, for a total of 441,083 registrations.

[The Board of Elections] notified Judicial Watch that going forward they intend to cancel registrations pursuant to Section 8(d)(1(B) in each odd-numbered year in the months following a federal election.

Specifically, the city also agrees to track in detail and report its voter roll maintenance efforts through 2025:

For both 2023 and 2025 … the [Board of Elections] will notify Judicial Watch … on or before March 31, by means of separate excel spreadsheets for Bronx County, Kings County, New York County, Queens County, and Richmond County, of the number of removals, including removals pursuant to … the NVRA, made during the previous two years.

The NVRA requires states to “conduct a general program that makes a reasonable effort to remove” from the rolls “the names of ineligible voters” who have died or changed residence. Among other things, the law requires registrations to be cancelled when voters fail to respond to address confirmation notices and then fail to vote in the next two general federal elections. In 2018, the Supreme Court confirmed that such removals are mandatory (Husted v. A. Philip Randolph Inst. (138 S. Ct. 1833, 1841-42 (2018)).

This historic settlement is a major victory for New York voters who will benefit from cleaner voter rolls and more honest elections. We are pleased that New York City officials quickly acted to remove 441,000 outdated registrations from the rolls. We look forward to working together under this federal lawsuit settlement to ensure New York City maintains cleaner rolls for future elections.

We are a national leader in voting integrity and voting rights. As part of our work, we assembled a team of highly experienced voting rights attorneys who stopped discriminatory elections in Hawaii, and cleaned up voter rolls in California, Ohio, Indiana, and Kentucky, among other achievements.

Please follow the link above to read the entire post. There is some good news here about the future of America’s elections.

Concerns About ERIC

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ERIC (Electronic Registration Information Center) is a voter-roll management system used by many states. Unfortunately, ERIC is not politically neutral.

On Monday, The Federalist posted an article saying that Alabama will withdraw from ERIC.

The article reports:

However, member states may not realize ERIC was started by far-left political activist David Becker, who has dedicated his life to attacking conservatives and advancing left-wing policies. Becker also started the Center for Election Innovation and Research (CEIR), one of two leftist groups that funneled $419 million in grants from Mark Zuckerberg to mostly blue counties of swing states, funding Democratic get-out-the-vote operations from government election offices in 2020. ERIC shares voter roll data – including records of unregistered citizens – with CEIR, which then reportedly creates targeted mailing lists for unregistered but likely Democrat voters and sends them back to the states for voter registration outreach.

Additionally, per government watchdog Verity Vote, ERIC doesn’t actually clean states’ voter rolls, but rather inflates them. Though member states are allegedly required to clean their voter rolls, nothing happens. A March 2022 audit by Michigan’s auditor general found the state’s Bureau of Elections failed to sufficiently clean its voter rolls, though Michigan had joined ERIC in 2019. Likewise, the District of Columbia (another ERIC member) has also been sued for its failure to clean its rolls.

The article concludes:

While Alabama’s outgoing secretary of state, John Merrill, has repeatedly signaled his support for ERIC, Allen campaigned on removing the state from the system. Instead of relying on ERIC to clean Alabama’s voter rolls, Allen plans on using change-of-address information from the United States Postal Service, driver’s license records from the Alabama Law Enforcement Agency, and death records from the Alabama Department of Public Health to maintain accurate rolls.

Alabama is the second ERIC member state to withdraw from the pact. Louisiana suspended its participation in January over similar concerns.

If we are going to have honest elections, we need clean voting rolls. That’s really not that hard. When I moved from Massachusetts to North Carolina, I got a census letter from the town I lived in asking me to confirm that I still lived there. I suppose I could have lied, but it is a relatively small town, and eventually any lie would be discovered. Anyway, letters like that are how they keep their voter rolls updated. I also think that using information from the Post Office, Division of Motor Vehicles, and other public sources would be helpful in keeping voting records straight.

 

Closing The Barn Door After The Horse Has Left

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Yesterday The Washington Examiner reported that Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger is poised to remove more than 100,000 “outdated” names from the state’s voter registration rolls unless those on the list take immediate action.

The article reports:

Some critics, such as Gerald Griggs with the Atlanta NAACP, described the move as a voter purge. Griggs said thousands of voters were improperly removed from the 2019 list. However, state officials noted the removals are required by law and that the maintenance occurs every two years.

Raffensperger’s office also removed 18,486 voter files of dead individuals based on information obtained from Georgia’s Office of Vital Records and the Electronic Registration Information Center.

“These people don’t live in Georgia anymore. Then, you have 18,000 people who passed. So, they are not going to be voting anymore. You need to have accurate voter rolls and proper list maintenance. It also helps your county election directors,” Raffensperger told WSB-TV 2.o

It needs to be mentioned here for those who are concerned that voting laws aimed at reducing voter fraud are disenfranchising voters, that every illegal vote cast cancels out the vote of a legal voter. Therefore, changing voter laws to prevent fraud is actually making sure that the votes of legal voters will be counted. If the people who are being removed from the voter rolls are no longer entitled to vote in Georgia, they need to be removed from the voter rolls. The only reason to keep them on the rolls is to commit voter fraud.

Preventing Dead People From Voting

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It should be the goal of every American to have every legal voter be allowed to vote and every legal vote counted. However, it doesn’t always work that way, and unfortunately there are people who work to keep it from working that way.

The Epoch Times is reporting today that the Public Interest Legal Foundation has won its lawsuit in Pennsylvania, and because of their victory more than 20,000 deceased voters will be removed from the voter rolls in the state.

The article reports:

The lawsuit (pdf) was filed in November and alleged that some 21,000 dead people were still on the state’s voter rolls during the 2020 presidential election. Pennsylvania agreed to compare its voter-registration database with the Social Security Death Index before removing the names from the rolls.

“This marks an important victory for the integrity of elections in Pennsylvania,” Public Interest Legal Foundation President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams said in a statement in announcing the court’s decision. “The Commonwealth’s failure to remove deceased registrants created a vast opportunity for voter fraud and abuse. It is important to not have dead voters active on the rolls for 5, 10, or even 20 years. This settlement fixes that.”

The lawsuit was filed after the Nov. 3 election and when then-candidate Joe Biden took a lead over President Donald Trump in Pennsylvania. Ultimately, the Pennsylvania Secretary of Commonwealth’s office certified the election.

The foundation said it found that 9,212 of the 21,000 voters had been dead for more than five years, and nearly 2,000 voters had been dead for more than 10 years.

We can’t change the results of the last election, but we can close some of the loopholes that allowed cheating so that we can lessen fraud in the next election.

The Fat Lady Hasn’t Sung Yet, Despite What The Media Is Telling You

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Wisconsin is one of the battleground states in the 2020 presidential election. It seems that all is not well in counting votes in Wisconsin.

Just the News posted the following today:

The Constitution allows only for state legislatures to change the ways elections are conducted, but memos show Wisconsin election supervisors made three substantial changes in 2020 that impact potentially tens of thousands of ballots in a battleground state that Joe Biden won by just 20,000.

Records reviewed by Just the News show that an executive branch agency called the Wisconsin Election Commission:

    • permitted local county election clerks to cure spoiled ballots by filling in missing addresses for witnesses even though state law invalidates any ballot without a witness address.
    • exempted as many as 200,000 citizens from voter ID rules by allowing them to claim the COVID-19 pandemic caused them to be “indefinitely confined.”
    • failed to purge 130,000 names from outdated voter rolls as required by law.

The question now is whether those changes — in particular the instructions allowing clerks to cure ballots with missing information — will open the door for the courts to intervene as President Trump looks to contest ballot practices in multiple battleground states. The Trump campaign is seeking a recount in Wisconsin.

“This is a complication thing about elections like this,” said Derek Muller, a professor of law at the Iowa School of Law and an expert in legal election matters. “I’ve seen it in a lot of jurisdictions, what might be sort of a technical violation of the statute, in this case encouragement to county clerks about how to use their judgment on whether or not to cure a ballot.”

The law was changed by the Wisconsin Elections Commission with a directive in October. Their directive was contrary to state law.

There are also some other questions:

Earlier in the fall, the Wisconsin Supreme Court heard arguments from a conservative group arguing that around 130,000 voters should be purged from the voter rolls due to their having moved in between elections. 

The Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty had argued that the Wisconsin Elections Commission was bound by law to remove the voters whose addresses it could not verify. The commission had asked to delay the removal until after the election, citing concerns that some voters might be improperly removed from the rolls. 

A circuit court judge had ruled last year that the elections commission was required to remove the tens of thousands of voters that had been targeted for removal. The commission at the time refused to do so, leading to their being held in contempt of court. 

I think we need a do-over in some states.

About That Mail-In Vote

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The Epoch Times reported yesterday that according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), nearly 350,000 dead registrants remain on voter rolls across 41 states.

The article reports:

The number is a major improvement over the last time an assessment of similar scope was performed in 2012, when a Pew Research report turned up 2 million deceased voters on the rolls.

In the 2016 and 2018 elections, states credited 14,608 registrants for voting after death, the PILF report found. The foundation didn’t count cases where votes could have been cast by living registrants during the early or absentee voting periods.

North Carolina led the United States in both 2016 and 2018 in the number of votes credited to deceased registrants. The second-worst states in both elections registered three times fewer votes cast by dead registrants.

The article concludes:

The Trump administration embarked on a similar audit in 2018 with the formation of the Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity. The commission was forced to disband after facing coordinated resistance from state officials who stonewalled requests for voter roll data. Adams, who was part of the commission, in 2019 picked up where the commission left off.

Three states sued to prevent their data from being released: Illinois, Maine, and Maryland.

The most populous states tend to have the most deceased registrants on voter rolls, the report found. New York, Texas, Michigan, Florida, and California accounted for 51 percent of all of the deceased registrants nationwide.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly criticized the potential for fraud in a mass mail-in vote election. He has instructed voters in North Carolina to vote by mail and then attend a polling place on Election Day to check if their mail-in ballot had been counted and, if it was not, to cast a vote in person. The PILF report found that 22 percent of the double vote credits in Arizona’s 2016 election were due to mail-in and subsequent in-person vote combinations.

The thing to remember when discussing voter fraud is that many of the people currently in office have been helped by voter fraud and do not want to give up power. The status quo that has allowed illegal voting works for many of those in office. They are reluctant to change it.

About That Voter Integrity Thing…

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Yesterday The Daily Signal posted an article reporting that in North Carolina, 16,700 duplicate votes were cast in the 2016 and 2018 elections, according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

The article reports:

Public Interest Legal Foundation made the court filing in the case of Democracy NC et. al. v. North Carolina State Board of Elections, which seeks to suspend North Carolina’s protections for mail-in voters during the presidential election in November in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Specifically, the state’s public voter rolls show that even with election integrity mechanisms in place, voters registered in more than one precinct are credited for voting a second ballot. 

This could be an individual voting twice or someone voting while using someone else’s identity. Such cases largely have resulted from poor maintenance of voter rolls at the local level—for example, not updating the rolls when voters move. 

The audit found that in the 2016 presidential election in North Carolina, about 9,700 voters were credited with voting twice. Of these cases, about half—or 5,000—were mail-in ballots.

Two years later, during the 2018 midterm election, about 7,000 voters were credited with voting twice. Of those, 2,900 were mail-in votes, the audit says.     

It is not clear how many of the same voters voted twice in both elections. 

In one of the most high-profile voter fraud cases in recent years, the North Carolina State Board of Elections decertified the outcome of the 2018 race in the 9th Congressional District and ordered a new election after evidence of absentee ballot fraud emerged. 

The article concludes:

“This is a widespread concern in North Carolina,” J. Christian Adams, president and general counsel of Public Interest Legal Foundation, said in a written statement. “We should be talking about how to strengthen our systems against misdeeds done out of the sight of election officials in 2020 instead of defending an imperfect system from total ruin.”

Those suing, Adams said,  “are only raising the threat of worsening the settled fact that voter fraud is most common in the mail.”

The lawsuit in North Carolina by Democracy NC, the League of Women Voters, and others calls for waiving requirements that voter registration forms be submitted 25 days before an election,  eliminating the witness signature on absentee ballots, allowing ballots to be received in ways other than mail, such as contactless dropboxes, and increasing early voting. 

Voter fraud should be a concern to every voter. Every fraudulent vote cast cancels out the vote of a legitimate voter.

All Cities And States Need To Do This

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On Wednesday The Washington Free Beacon reported that the city of Detroit has removed thousands of deceased and duplicate registrants from its voter rolls after being hit with a lawsuit.

The article reports:

City officials cleaned up the voter rolls after the Public Interest Legal Foundation, a government watchdog, filed suit against them in December. Nearly 2,500 deceased individuals and 4,800 duplicate registrations were removed from the voter rolls. The officials have also moved to review another 16,465 registrants who lacked actual dates of registration.

“This is another win for election integrity,” said J. Christian Adams, the watchdog’s president and general counsel. “This case wasn’t complicated. The City of Detroit could have started to fix these problems before litigation, but didn’t. Other jurisdictions should take note—if you don’t act on solid data that your voter rolls are corrupted with dead and duplicate registrations, you will be sued.”

Debates over voter fraud have appeared as Democrats across the country push for mail-in voting during the coronavirus pandemic. President Donald Trump claimed that mail-in voting will lead to the “most corrupt Election in USA history.” Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, are pressuring Senate Republicans to pass legislation to support such measures. Sen. Roy Blunt (R., Mo.), chair of the Senate Rules Committee, blocked a bill brought forth by Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn.) on the issue, saying he worried it would lead to a “federal takeover of elections.”

The watchdog filed suit against two Detroit officials—City Clerk Janice Winfrey and Director of Elections George Azzouz—after studying Detroit’s voter list maintenance efforts dating back to 2017. Outside liberal groups, such as the New York-based Brennan Center for Justice and League of Women Voters of Michigan, swooped into the city to intervene on behalf of the election officials but ultimately did not play much of a role. Adams’s group dropped the lawsuit after the officials cleaned up the registrations.

Every illegal vote in an election cancels out the vote of a legal voter. If you want your vote to count, encourage your city, town, and state to clean up their voter rolls. Dead people do not have voting rights.

The Fight For Honest Elections

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The goal of elections in America is to have every citizen vote and every citizen’s vote counted. When a non-citizen votes, it cancels out the vote of a citizen. That is one of the arguments for voter id requirements.

Yesterday The Washington Free Beacon posted an article about a recent Texas lawsuit that had to do with voting.

The article reports:

The largest county in Texas settled a lawsuit with a watchdog group after refusing to release records dealing with noncitizens on its voter rolls.

A federal district court in Houston entered a settlement agreement this week between the Harris County voter registrar and the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF). The settlement calls for the county to turn over records on its cancellations of ineligible voters, copies of registration applications that have blank or negative responses to citizenship questions, and all registrar communications with law enforcement regarding ineligible registrants, among other records. Officials from Harris County, the most populous county in Texas, previously testified that “thousands” of noncitizens were discovered on its voter rolls every year.

The settlement comes as the election watchdog group seeks to clean voter rolls in major cities ahead of the November elections. Democrats have pushed back against attempts to clean voter rolls, often calling them “purges.” Individuals removed for ineligibility tend to belong to demographic groups that lean Democrat. Texas has in recent years become a target of national Democrats, who have poured millions into the Lone Star State in attempts to gain power.

The article concludes:

PILF has filed a number of lawsuits in cities across the country in recent months. The group filed a suit against Detroit officials after discovering 2,500 dead registrants on the city’s voter rolls. Nearly 5,000 voters appeared more than once on the rolls, and there were more registered voters than there were eligible voters in the city.

PILF also filed suit against Pittsburgh officials after finding dead voters, duplicate registrants, and 1,500 registrants aged 100 or above (49 marked as being born in the 1800s) on county voter rolls.

It is really sad that Americans do not turn out to vote in high numbers, yet those who come here illegally vote. There is something wrong with that picture.

A Valid Lawsuit

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As North Carolina fights for voter id laws, other states are finding people on the voter rolls that are more than 100 years old. While that is possible, it is somewhat unlikely.

Yesterday Breitbart reported that the Public Interest Legal Foundation has filed a lawsuit against Allegheny County, Pennsylvania. The lawsuit claims that nearly 1,600 dead people are registered to vote in the 2020 election in the county.

The article reports:

The Foundation reviewed birthdates from a portion of the County’s voter registration list against records in the Social Security Death Index. After matching other biographical information, the Foundation found 1,583 deceased registrants whose registrations should have been canceled, yet they remain actively registered to vote in the County. [Emphasis added]

…“One registrant is stated as being born in ‘June 1800,’ the same year Thomas Jefferson won eight of Pennsylvania’s 15 Electoral College votes against President John Adams,” the lawsuit claims.

The lawsuit claims there are 1,178 registered voters who are missing dates of births in Allegheny County, about 193 registered voters who are missing dates of registration, and 35 registered voters with corrupted or out-of-state addresses.

Officials with the Public Interest Legal Foundation are looking to ensure that Allegheny County makes reasonable efforts to maintain their voter rolls, as required by the National Voter Registration Act of 1993.

Unfortunately there are a number of states that have chosen to ignore the requirement to maintain their voter rolls that was part of the National Voter Registration Act of 1993. The act has been used to register large numbers of voters, not all of whom are citizens, with very little effort put into maintaining accurate voter rolls.

The Truth About Purging Voter Rolls

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Yesterday The Daily Signal posted an article about some of the lies the media is telling about purging voter rolls.

The article reports:

Maggie Haberman, the esteemed New York Times reporter, recently tweeted out a Mother Jones article to 1.2 million followers. It was titled: “GOP-Led Voter Purges in Wisconsin and Georgia Could Tip 2020 Elections.”

The chilling piece warns readers that “hundreds of thousands of voters are set to be purged in two key swing states,” which “potentially” gives Republicans “a crucial advantage by shrinking the electorate” in those states.

None of this, of course, is true. Cynical pieces of this genre, an election-time tradition at this point, only allow Democrats to warn of widespread disenfranchisement and preemptively give aggrieved Democrats such as Stacey Abrams a baked-in excuse for losing elections and smearing Republicans.

How many people who fall for these claims understand that both federal law and state law mandate the updating of voter lists?

In Georgia, we already know that hundreds of thousands of “voters” were not purged, because at least 62% of registrations that were canceled recently by the state had surely moved away or died. Either their mail was returned as undeliverable or they had officially changed their address to a different state.

Other registrations were purged because the person hadn’t voted in years. Georgia has automatic registration. I know it’s difficult for some people to believe this, but lots of Americans have no interest in voting.

And Georgia voters can be declared “inactive” if they haven’t participated in elections, contacted officials, responded to officials, or updated their registrations since the 2012 election.

That’s state law. Georgia sends everyone letters explaining how they can fix any potential problems. Georgia, in fact, publishes a list of names online so anyone who has not received a letter can check if they are still registered. Gov. Brian Kemp recently signed a law that lengthens the period before voters become “inactive” from three to nine years.

As Justin Gray, a reporter in Atlanta, notes, the reason you don’t hear complaints from these “hundreds of thousands” of disenfranchised voters is because “most on [the] list are either dead, have moved, or as some told me were registered automatically when they got [a] license and don’t ever want to vote.”

It’s important to note, as well, that despite what you’ve heard, and what Democrats are constantly intimating, an analysis by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution uncovered no racial disparities in the voter roll purge in Georgia, finding that blacks and whites were purged in proportion to their shares of the state’s registered voters:

The article concludes:

However you look at these situations, though, “hundreds of thousands of voters” are not losing their right to cast ballots. Even if judges began forcing Wisconsin and Georgia—and the seven other states with “use it or lose it laws”—to ignore the law, there’s no evidence that it would have any bearing on the election.

Because even if we conceded that a tenth of these purges were inappropriate (and there’s zero evidence that suggests that even 1% of them are wrong), and even if we conceded that every single one of those voters would then cast their ballots for Democrats (which is implausible), it still wouldn’t change the outcome.

Not in Georgia. Not in Wisconsin. Not anywhere.

None of this is to contend that there isn’t a single person in the country who is being unfairly denied the right to vote. But the notion that “hundreds of thousands of voters” will be stopped from participating in the 2020 election through voter purges is nothing but destructive scaremongering meant to undermine American belief in the veracity of our elections.

Purging the voter rolls cuts down on voter fraud. It eliminates the possibility of someone claiming to be someone who has either moved or died. It prevents the vote of an American citizen from being cancelled out by fraud. It helps keep our elections honest.

Preparing To Steal An Election

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There have been a number of people convicted of voter fraud since the 2016 election. Efforts to remove dead people and non-citizens from voting rolls have been consistently opposed by Democrats, claiming racism. Frankly, I don’t think dead people should vote–regardless of their race. On Friday, the Democrats in the House of Representatives passed an updated version of  H.R. 4, which will make it very difficult for states to require identification to vote or to purge their voter rolls of dead people or non-citizens.

PJ Media posted an article yesterday explaining the bill and its consequences.

The article reports:

While the country is being distracted by the Democrats’ bogus impeachment, House Democrats passed H.R. 4, the so-called Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2019, on a mostly party-line vote. Democrats claim the legislation is about fighting voter suppression—because when Democrats lose elections it can only be because of voter suppression, obviously. “Action is urgently needed to combat the brazen voter suppression campaign that is spreading across America,” Nancy Pelosi claimed at a press event Friday before the bill’s passage.

The bill, if signed into law, would require states to obtain “preclearance” from the Justice Department in order to make changes to voter laws—a blatant infringement of states’ rights. Why would Democrats want such a law in place? According to House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.), the Voting Rights Advancement Act of 2019, “is a good step to right the wrongs that’ve dismantled the fundamental right to vote through Voter ID laws, purging voter rolls & closing majority-minority polling places.”

The article concludes:

It’s obvious what this legislation is really about. Democrats are fighting efforts to ensure the integrity of our elections. “This bill would essentially federalize state and local election laws when there is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that those states or localities engaged in any discriminatory behavior when it comes to voting,” said Rep. Doug Collins (R-Ga.). “The Supreme Court has made clear that this type of federal control over state and local elections is unconstitutional, because Congress can only do that when there’s proof of actual discrimination, which is what this bill is supposed to be about,” he added. Collins also believes the problem Democrats claim to want to fix isn’t actually a problem. “Voting rights are protected in this country, including in my own state of Georgia, where Latino and African American voter turnout has soared. Between 2014 and 2018, voter turnout increased by double digits for both men and women in both of these communities.”

As scary as this legislation is, it won’t go anywhere in the U.S. Senate. But, make no mistake about it, Democrats oppose every attempt to ensure the integrity of our elections, and they won’t stop.

Any fraudulent vote cancels the legitimate vote of an American citizen. All of us need to protect voter integrity in our elections. H.R. 4 does not do that.

Who Is Voting In Our Elections?

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PJ Media posted an article yesterday about voter fraud in Ohio.

The article reports:

Ohio Secretary of State Frank LaRose announced on Wednesday that an investigation by his office has uncovered hundreds of illegally registered non-citizen voters, 77 of whom cast ballots in the November 2018 election.

In a letter to Attorney Dave Yost on December 4, LaRose, a Republican, explained, “As a result of our review, my office has identified 277 individuals who registered to vote in Ohio and 77 individuals who cast a ballot in an Ohio election and who appear to be legally present, noncitizens.”

The Secretary of State said the review “utilized a cross-matching of the voter rolls in the Statewide Voter Registration Database with the list of individuals who have Ohio driver licenses or state identification cards.” He noted that while the state does not maintain a “comprehensive database” of non-citizens in Ohio, Bureau of Motor Vehicles records do indicate the citizenship status of individuals who apply for driver’s licenses or state identification cards.

The article includes a list of voter fraud convictions across the nation. Please follow the link to the article to read the list. Voter fraud is real.

The article concludes:

Requiring a photo ID in order to vote and limiting absentee voting to those who truly need it would go along way toward ensuring election integrity and easing the public’s mind about what goes on in precincts large and small across the U.S., but those commonsense measures are considered racist by those on the left who believe people of color aren’t smart enough to vote without their assistance. Those of us who believe minority voters are every bit as intelligent and resourceful as their Caucasian counterparts are the real racists, and don’t you forget it.

Honest elections are an important part of a representative republic. We need to protect the integrity of our elections.

So Remind Me Why I Voted

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We live in a representative republic. We elect people to represent us. Occasionally we actually vote on issues via referendums, ballot initiatives, etc. Those votes directly reflect the will of the voters.

In 2018, the General Assembly passed a law putting an item on the ballot that required voters to show identification in order to vote. Governor Cooper vetoed the legislation; the Senate overrode the veto. The measure was also challenged in court, but that challenge seems to have gone nowhere.

The voters of North Carolina approved voter id by more than 50 percent. The Governor has called the law racist and unnecessary. If everyone is required to show identification, how is that racist? The law is necessary because we have a number of voters on our voter rolls that are over 110 years of age. I doubt that all of those people are still alive. There are also situations where fifty or more people are listed as having the same address–an address that does not have an inhabitable building. There have also been situations where people who voted were asked to serve on a jury and told the court they couldn’t because they were not American citizens. Wow.

Yes, voter id is necessary. Yes, the voters of North Carolina voted for it. Yes, Governor Cooper, you should be representing the will of the voters.

The Democrats’ First Proposal Upon Taking Control Of The House Of Representatives

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The first bill introduced in the House of Representatives when the Democrats took over was H.R. 1. The bill was sponsored by Representative John P. Sarbanes of Maryland and is called the “For the People Act of 2019.” Great, only it’s really not for the people–it’s for bigger federal government and smaller state governments.

Politifact posted an article on February 8th about the bill.

The article mentions some of the demands the bill would make on states:

• Offer online voter registration;

• Establish automatic voter registration;

• Allow voter registration on the day of a federal election;

• Allow voters to correct their registration information at the polls;

• Restore voting rights to felons after they leave prison;

• Offer at least 15 days of early voting; and,

• Follow new rules before purging voters from registration lists.

The bill also has several measures related to campaign finance or ethics:

• Require super PACs to disclose donors who give more than $10,000;

• Require major online platforms to maintain an online public record of people who buy at least $500 worth of political ads; and

• Use public financing to match small dollar donations to House and presidential candidates.

There are also some other interesting items in the bill listed in a pjmedia article of January 10th:

It forces states to implement mandatory voter registration. If someone is on a government list — such as receiving welfare benefits or rental subsidies — then they would be automatically registered to vote. Few states have enacted these systems because Americans still view civic participation as a voluntary choice.

…H.R. 1 would also force states to have extended periods of early voting, and mandates that early voting sites be near bus or subway routes.

…H.R. 1 also undermines the First Amendment by exerting government control over political speech and undoing the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision.

The proposal also undoes another Supreme Court decision. In Husted, a case arising out of Ohio, the Court ruled that federal laws — known as “Motor Voter” — do not prohibit states from using a voter’s inactivity from triggering a mailing to that voter to see if they still are living at that location. H.R. 1 would undo that ruling and prohibit states from effectively cleaning voter rolls.

For further information follow the link to the pjmedia article.

Article 1 Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution states:

The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

The Congress shall assemble at least once in every Year, and such Meeting shall be on the first Monday in December, unless they shall by Law appoint a different Day.

States are given the authority to hold elections. To put the federal government in charge of elections is to open the door for fraud on a large scale. That is exactly what H.R. 1 does.

Undermining Elections One State At A Time

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I think most people understand that the Democrats look at people entering America illegally as future Democrat voters. However, it seems as if some of those expected votes are not happening in the future–they are happening now.

On Friday, Hot Air reported that the Texas Secretary of State has reported that as many as 58,000 non-citizens voted in elections in Texas between 1996 and 2018.

The Houston Chronicle reported that there has been some pushback on this statement:

“There is no credible data that indicates illegal voting is happening in any significant numbers, and the Secretary’s statement does not change that fact,” said Beth Stevens, Voting Rights Legal Director with the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Stevens said she is concerned about how the state is identifying the suspected non-citizen voters.

The Secretary of State’s office insists the data is accurate and relies on documents that the voters themselves submitted to DPS when they were trying to obtain drivers licenses. Non-citizens are eligible to get a Texas drivers license, but they are not allowed to register to vote.

“It is important to note that we are not using information self-reported by the person regarding citizenship status; rather, we are using documents provided by the person to show they are lawfully present in the United States,” the state’s director of elections, Keith Ingram, wrote in a notice to registrars in all 254 counties in Texas.

The article at Hot Air concludes:

Also, it’s not as if the Texas Secretary of State makes this announcement and suddenly the names on his list are removed. The Secretary of State in Texas doesn’t have the power to remove anyone from the voter rolls, so that will be done by county-level registrars. Those officials will check the names and give each identified person 30 days to demonstrate proof of citizenship. Only if they fail to do that or don’t respond at all will they be removed from the rolls.

It seems to me what’s really at stake here is the presumption that large-scale voter fraud doesn’t happen. If Texas can substantiate even a fraction of this list it would change the dynamic of future conversations about non-citizen voting. We’ll have to wait and see if that happens.

We need to remember that every vote by a non-citizen cancels out the legal vote of a citizen. For those claiming that cleaning up the voter rolls disenfranchises people, what about the citizens disenfranchised by non-citizen votes?

 

But It Sounds So Wonderful

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Sometimes I wonder if anyone in Congress has actually read the U.S. Constitution.

Shmoop states:

Clause 1. The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations, except as to the Places of chusing Senators.

The Constitution generally leaves it up to the states to organize congressional elections, but gives Congress the power to set new rules for federal elections as it sees fit. In 1842, Congress passed an important law requiring single-member district elections in every state, standardizing congressional election practices nationwide. The same law set one standard Election Day—the Tuesday after the first Monday in November—throughout the country. We still use the same Election Day today.

On Thursday PJ Media reported that one of the top legislative priorities of the new House of Representatives is the passage of H.R. 1.

The official name of the bill is:

H.R.1 – To expand Americans’ access to the ballot box, reduce the influence of big money in politics, and strengthen ethics rules for public servants, and for other purposes.

If only that were what the bill is actually about.

These are some of the provisions of H.R.1 listed in the article:

It forces states to implement mandatory voter registration. If someone is on a government list — such as receiving welfare benefits or rental subsidies — then they would be automatically registered to vote. Few states have enacted these systems because Americans still view civic participation as a voluntary choice. Moreover, aggregated government lists always contain duplicates and errors that states, even without mandatory voter registration, frequently fail to catch and fix.

H.R. 1 also mandates that states allow all felons to vote. Currently, states have the power under the Constitution to set the terms of eligibility in each state. Some states, like Maine, have decided that voting machines should be rolled into the prisons. Other states, like Nevada, have chosen to make a felony a disenfranchising event.

…H.R. 1 would also force states to have extended periods of early voting, and mandates that early voting sites be near bus or subway routes. While purportedly designed to increase participation, early voting has been shown to have no effect on turnout.

…H.R. 1 also undermines the First Amendment by exerting government control over political speech and undoing the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United decision.

The proposal also undoes another Supreme Court decision. In Husted, a case arising out of Ohio, the Court ruled that federal laws — known as “Motor Voter” — do not prohibit states from using a voter’s inactivity from triggering a mailing to that voter to see if they still are living at that location. H.R. 1 would undo that ruling and prohibit states from effectively cleaning voter rolls.

You get the picture. Please follow the link to read the entire article. Aside from the fact that most of H.R. 1 in unconstitutional, it is a naked power grab by the new House of Representatives. It needs to be stopped cold.

Does Voter Fraud Exist?

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The Federalist posted an article yesterday with the following headline, “Voter Fraud Is Real. Here’s The Proof.”

The article cites the following examples:

This week, liberals have been repeating their frequent claim that voter fraud doesn’t exist. A recent Salon article argues that “voter fraud just isn’t a problem in Pennsylvania,” despite evidence to the contrary. Another article argues that voter fraud is entirely in the imagination of those who use voter ID laws to deny minorities the right to vote.

Yet as the election approaches, more and more cases of voter fraud are beginning to surface. In Colorado, multiple instances were found of dead people attempting to vote. Stunningly, “a woman named Sara Sosa who died in 2009 cast ballots in 2010, 2011, 2012 and 2013.” In Virginia, it was found that nearly 20 voter applications were turned in under the names of dead people.

In Texas, authorities are investigating criminals who are using the technique of “vote harvesting” to illegally procure votes for their candidates. “Harvesting” is the practice of illegally obtaining the signatures of valid voters in order to vote in their name without their consent for the candidate(s) the criminal supports.

These are just some instances of voter fraud we know about. It would be silly to assume cases that have been discovered are the only cases of fraud. Indeed according to a Pew Charitable Trust report from February 2012, one in eight voter registrations are “significantly inaccurate or no longer valid.” Since there are 146 million Americans registered to vote, this translates to a stunning 18 million invalid voter registrations on the books. Further, “More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters, and approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state.” Numbers of this scale obviously provide ripe opportunity for fraud.

Our elections need to be above board and trusted by the voters. Voter fraud has always been part of the game, but in some ways electronic voting machines have made it easier. Voter identification will solve some of the problems, but the ultimate answer may be paper ballots.

The article included some suggestions on how the limit voter fraud:

So now that we know voter fraud is a serious issue, what are some solutions to this problem? States like Michigan have Poll Challenger programs, where observers from both parties may be present at voter check-in tables at precincts. They check each voter’s ID against a database of registered voters for that precinct to ensure the person attempting to vote is actually legally qualified to vote in that precinct. If there’s a discrepancy, the poll challenger may officially challenge the ballot. Other states should implement similar programs.

States should sponsor initiatives to remove dead voters and correct the registrations of people registered in multiple states (make them choose just one state). Since many local jurisdictions are reluctant to clean their voter rolls, federal or state oversight with teeth may be necessary.

Further, voter ID laws, such as the one implemented by North Carolina, but (wrongly) struck down by three liberal judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit— one appointed by Bill Clinton and the other two appointed by President Obama—are needed to ensure there’s no cheating with votes. States should continue to press the issue regardless of recent setbacks by liberal activist judges.

Finally, some have claimed that strong voter ID laws are racist, because they disproportionately impact minorities and would prevent minorities from voting. As a black person, I’m naturally interested in this claim. Thankfully, it turns out to be false. The Heritage Foundation has shown that black voter turnout actually increased after North Carolina passed its voter ID law.

An illegal vote cancels the vote of a legal voter. Let’s work together to make all legal votes count.

Is Voter Fraud Real?

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In August of 2017, Investor’s Business Daily posted an editorial that is still significant today. The editorial dealt with voter fraud.

The editorial stated:

Elections: American democracy has a problem — a voting problem. According to a new study of U.S. Census data, America has more registered voters than actual live voters. It’s a troubling fact that puts our nation’s future in peril.

The data come from Judicial Watch’s Election Integrity Project. The group looked at data from 2011 to 2015 produced by the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, along with data from the federal Election Assistance Commission.

As reported by the National Review’s Deroy Murdock, who did some numbers-crunching of his own, “some 3.5 million more people are registered to vote in the U.S. than are alive among America’s adult citizens. Such staggering inaccuracy is an engraved invitation to voter fraud.”

Murdock counted Judicial Watch’s state-by-state tally and found that 462 U.S. counties had a registration rate exceeding 100% of all eligible voters. That’s 3.552 million people, who Murdock calls “ghost voters.” And how many people is that? There are 21 states that don’t have that many people.

The article concluded:

And, in at least two nationally important elections in recent memory, the outcome was decided by a paper-thin margin: In 2000, President Bush beat environmental activist and former Vice President Al Gore by just 538 votes.

Sen. Al Franken, the Minnesota Democrat, won his seat by beating incumbent Sen. Norm Coleman in 2008. Coleman was initially declared the winner the day after the election, with a 726-vote lead over Franken. But after a controversial series of recounts and ballot disqualifications, Franken emerged weeks later with a 225-seat victory.

Franken’s win was enormous, since it gave Democrats filibuster-proof control of the Senate. So, yes, small vote totals matter.

We’re not saying here that Franken cheated, nor, for that matter, that Bush did. But small numbers can have an enormous impact on our nation’s governance. The 3.5 million possible fraudulent ballots that exist are a problem that deserves serious immediate attention. Nothing really hinges on it, of course, except the integrity and honesty of our democratic elections.

I don’t claim to be a mathematical genius, but logically it doesn’t seem as if you should have more registered voters than live people. I understand that there can be a delay if a person dies, but hopefully that person can be taken off of the voter rolls quickly. There are also cases of intentional fraud. A friend of mine checked the voter rolls for the names of anyone registered to vote at her address. She found three names that she did not even recognize.

Recently there has been a move in some areas to compare voting rolls with the names of those refusing jury duty by stating that they are not American citizens. A number of people have been charged with crimes for voting when they were not eligible to vote.

We need honest elections. That is one reason that voter identity is a good idea. We also need checks and balances on our data–reporting and storing data. Recently a friend checked election data and found that it has been altered after certification. That should not happen.

North Carolina has a voter id measure on the ballot in November. The voters had already passed a voter id measure, but the courts struck it down. Let’s hope the will of the people will prevail this time.

Why We Need Voter Identification At The Polls

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Yesterday Breitbart posted an article about the voting rolls in the 12th District of Ohio. It seems that in that district there are 170 registered voters over the age of 116. It is quite possible that some of those registered have the wrong birth year listed as a result of clerical errors or computer errors, but for the sake of argument, let’s just say half of those voters have the right birth year. That is 85 voters that are not likely currently living. Troy Balderson’s current lead in that election is 1700 votes.

The article reports:

Soros pledged $5 million to fund Clinton campaign attorney Marc Elias’s efforts to fight voter ID laws in Ohio and two other states ahead of the 2016 election. Elias would file that suit in Ohio on behalf of several groups, including the Ohio Organizing Collaborative, that would have an employee sentenced to prison for voter fraud.

In 2016, liberal activist groups Demos and the ACLU filed suit against the state of Ohio in an attempt to stop its efforts to remove inaccurate voter registrations from its rolls. Soros gave 1.25 million to Demos in 2016, on top of the more than $3 million he had given in previous years. And Soros has been even more generous with the ACLU, giving over $35 million for Trump related lawsuits.

Ultimately, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Ohio’s efforts in a 5-4 decision earlier this year.

The article concludes:

Consider that 170 registered voters listed as being over 116 years old still existed on the rolls of Ohio’s 12th Congressional when GAI accessed the data last August. That’s 10 percent of Balderson’s current margin of victory, pending provisional ballots. And 72 voters over the age of 116 who “live” in Balderson’s district cast ballots in the 2016 election.

But the Left hasn’t given up trying to create conditions favorable for voter fraud in Ohio. As former Ohio Secretary of State Ken Blackwell has pointed out, “hyper-partisan liberals…have their eyes on Ohio.” Electing a Democrat as the state’s top elections official would undoubtedly roll back the hard-won safeguards Ohio has implemented. And as Blackwell points out, as goes Ohio, so goes the Presidency.

An illegal vote cancels the vote of a legal voter. We need to clean up the voter rolls in all states. I seriously doubt that 72 voters over the age of 116 voted. If they did, I want to know what their lifestyle is because evidently they are on to something!

A Small Step To Insure The Integrity Of The Vote

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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.

 

 

We Might Want To Deal With This Before November

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The Washington Times posted an article today stating that The Public Interest Legal Foundation has identified more than 100,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in Pennsylvania.

The article reports:

More than 100,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in Pennsylvania alone, according to testimony submitted Monday in a lawsuit demanding the state come clean about the extent of its problems.

The Public Interest Legal Foundation, which has identified similar noncitizen voting problems in studies of Virginia and New Jersey, said Pennsylvania officials have admitted noncitizens have been registering and voting in the state “for decades.”

But state officials have stonewalled PILF requests for access to the data that could expose the problem, the group says in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Harrisburg.

“For months, Pennsylvania bureaucrats have concealed facts about noncitizens registering and voting — that ends today,” PILF President and General Counsel J. Christian Adams said.

He said Pennsylvania had already admitted to a “glitch” dating back to the 1990s that had allowed noncitizens applying to renew driver’s licenses to be offered the chance to register to vote. Mr. Adams said he now wants to find out how bad the problem is overall.

Pennsylvania officials wouldn’t respond to the lawsuit, nor to the 100,000 noncitizen number.

The article further reports:

The PILF did manage to obtain some records from county officials and filed some of their findings in the new court case.

One man, Felipe Rojas-Orta, canceled his registration last year, filing a handwritten note saying he was not a citizen. He had, however, registered as a Democrat and voted in three separate elections, including most recently 2016, the year of the presidential race.

Another woman had her registration canceled in 2006 as a noncitizen, yet re-registered to vote twice — and cast ballots in some elections. That woman is still active in the system, the lawsuit says.

The federal “motor-voter” law requires states to make voter registration available at motor vehicle bureaus, but also pushes states to try to keep their voter roles clean. Under the law, private parties can sue to press states to perform the cleansing.

It is time to end “motor-voter.” States need to confirm the citizenship of people who are registering to vote. Noncitizens voting in our elections is a much more serious problem than any interference by foreign governments. It is also time for states to purge their voting records of dead people. There was a situation locally where a person checked the voter rolls and found out that there were three people claiming her home as residence in order to vote that did not live there. It was very difficult to get those people removed from the voting rolls. If we want honest elections, one place to start would be to clean up the voter rolls.

When The Numbers Don’t Add Up

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Yesterday The Daily Caller posted an article about the voter rolls in Rhode Island.

The article reports:

The Providence Journal reports that Rhode Island Secretary of State Nellie Gorbea conducted an audit of the state’s voter registry and identified some 150,000 non-Rhode Islanders registered to vote in the state. Gorbea says this group of non-state residents is primarily composed of citizens who have since moved to other jurisdictions or died and does not suggest widespread fraud.

It’s not fraud if none of them voted, but how do we know how many of them voted?

The article continues:

The Journal previously reported that there were 781,770 registered voters in the state in 2016. As such, the group of non-state residents Gorbea’s audit identified account for 19 percent of all registered voters in Rhode Island.

…Still, Gorbea concedes an inaccurate voter registry jeopardizes the state’s elections.

“[H]aving clean voter lists [is] critical to preserving the integrity of our elections and ensure that elections are fair, fast and accurate,” she said.

One has to wonder why states are not more anxious to clean up their voter rolls.

This is another example of why the Commission on Election Integrity is needed.

When The Numbers Don’t Add Up And The Politicians Don’t Care

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Today’s Washington Free Beacon posted an article about the Governor of Virginia, Terry McAuliffe, vetoing a bill that would require investigations of jurisdictions in the state whose voter rolls contain more registered voters than citizens who are eligible to vote. Now I don’t claim to be a genius at math, but it seems to me that a jurisdiction that has more registered voters than citizens who are eligible to vote might have a problem with its voter rolls.

The article reports:

The bill, first introduced by Republican state Sen. Mark D. Obenshain, was prompted by a report that shed light on eight Virginia counties that had more registered voters on their voter rolls than eligible voters.

Obenshain’s bill would require “the local electoral boards to direct the general registrars to investigate the list of persons voting at an election whenever the number of persons voting at any election in a county or city exceeds the number of persons registered to vote in that county or city,” according to its summary. “The Department of Elections is required to provide certain data to any general registrar conducting such an investigation for the registrar’s use during the investigation. The local electoral boards are required to make reports of the findings to the State Board. These reports are public documents.”

Why would any elected official of either party be okay with more registered voters in a jurisdiction than there are citizens eligible to vote? I would hope that all elected officials would support the idea of honest elections.

Governor McAuliffe made the following statement when he vetoed the bill:

“By requiring 133 individual general registrars to conduct an investigation of voters under undefined standards, this bill raises serious constitutional questions,” McAuliffe said in a statement. “It could expose eligible and properly registered Virginians to the risk of improper disenfranchisement.”

“Further, Senate Bill 1105 would increase the administrative burden on local election officials. Rather than imposing unnecessary investigative requirements on those officials, we should focus attention and resources on the Commonwealth’s proven and efficient methods of list maintenance, which serve as a national model.”

At some point we need to remind people that any illegal vote disenfranchises the vote of a legal voter. Keeping honest voting rolls is not an unnecessary investigative requirement–it is the job of the election officials.

The article reminds us of some discoveries during the last election:

The Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), an Indiana-based group that litigates to protect election integrity, released the report last year that sparked Obenshain’s bill.

PILF’s report found 1,046 aliens who were illegally registered to vote in a small sample of eight Virginia counties that responded to its public records requests.

Logan Churchwell, spokesman for the group, said it is reasonable to ask questions about voter rolls with more voters than citizens.

“It is entirely reasonable to ask questions when a voting jurisdiction has more registered voters than citizens,” Churchwell told the Washington Free Beacon. “The Justice Department for the past eight years refused to perform similar studies using powers it was already vested with. Virginia lawmakers and private parties like PILF were forced to pick up the slack. It’s astonishing to see a sitting governor calculate political blowback when voter roll integrity is at stake.”

“As PILF previously reported, these eight problematic jurisdictions had more than 1,000 alien voters removed from the rolls in years past with roughly 20 percent casting ballots before being caught.”

“There’s smoke, fire, and damage right in front of Governor McAullife’s eyes. When will he stop playing politics with Virginians’ voting rights?”

Honest elections are the backbone of our representative republic. We need to make sure our elections follow the basic rules of common sense. The number of registered voters in an area should not exceed the number of eligible voters. If it does, something is wrong.