On Sun, 23 Oct 2016 00:47:33 -0700 (PDT), whit3rd <
whi...@gmail.com>
wrote:
Undercover agents were able to vote as dead people, but election
officials are attacking the agents. Liberals who oppose efforts to
prevent voter fraud claim that there is no fraud — or at least not any
that involves voting in person at the polls. But New York City’s
watchdog Department of Investigations has just provided the latest
evidence of how easy it is to commit voter fraud that is almost
undetectable. DOI undercover agents showed up at 63 polling places
last fall and pretended to be voters who should have been turned away
by election officials; the agents assumed the names of individuals who
had died or moved out of town, or who were sitting in jail. In 61
instances, or 97 percent of the time, the testers were allowed to
vote. Those who did vote cast only a write-in vote for a “John Test”
so as to not affect the outcome of any contest. DOI published its
findings two weeks ago in a searing 70-page report accusing the city’s
Board of Elections of incompetence, waste, nepotism, and lax
procedures. The Board of Elections, which has a $750 million annual
budget and a work force of 350 people, reacted in classic bureaucratic
fashion, which prompted one city paper to deride it as “a 21st-century
survivor of Boss Tweed–style politics.” The Board approved a
resolution referring the DOI’s investigators for prosecution. It also
asked the state’s attorney general to determine whether DOI had
violated the civil rights of voters who had moved or are felons, and
it sent a letter of complaint to Mayor Bill de Blasio. Normally, I
wouldn’t think de Blasio would give the BOE the time of day, but New
York’s new mayor has long been a close ally of former leaders of
ACORN, the now-disgraced “community organizing” group that saw its
employees convicted of voter-registration fraud all over the country
during and after the 2008 election. Greg Soumas, president of New
York’s BOE, offered a justification for calling in the prosecutors:
“If something was done in an untoward fashion, it was only done by
DOI. We [are] unaware of any color of authority on the part of [DOI]
to vote in the identity of any person other than themselves — and our
reading of the election law is that such an act constitutes a felony.”
The Board is bipartisan, and all but two of its members voted with
Soumas. The sole exceptions were Democrat Jose Araujo, who abstained
because the DOI report implicated him in hiring his wife and
sister-and-law for Board jobs, and Republican Simon Shamoun.
Good-government groups are gobsmacked at Soumas’s refusal to smell the
stench of corruption in his patronage-riddled empire. “They should
focus not on assigning blame to others, but on taking responsibility
for solving the problems themselves,” Dick Dadey of the watchdog group
Citizens Union told the Daily News. “It’s a case of the Board of
Elections passing the buck.” DOI officials respond that the use of
undercover agents is routine in anti-corruption probes and that people
should carefully read the 70-page report they’ve filed before
criticizing it. They are surprised how little media attention their
report has received. You’d think more media outlets would have been
interested, because the sloppiness revealed in the DOI report is
mind-boggling. Young undercover agents were able to vote using the
names of people three times their age, people who in fact were dead.
In one example, a 24-year female agent gave the name of someone who
had died in 2012 at age 87; the workers at the Manhattan polling site
gave her a ballot, no questions asked. Even the two cases where poll
workers turned away an investigator raise eyebrows. In the first case,
a poll worker on Staten Island walked outside with the undercover
investigator who had just been refused a ballot; the “voter” was
advised to go to the polling place near where he used to live and
“play dumb” in order to vote. In the second case, the investigator was
stopped from voting only because the felon whose name he was using was
the son of the election official at the polling place. Shooting the
messenger has been a typical reaction in other states when people have
demonstrated just how easy it is to commit voter fraud. Guerrilla
videographer James O’Keefe had three of his assistants visit precincts
during New Hampshire’s January 2012 presidential primary. They asked
poll workers whether their books listed the names of several voters,
all deceased individuals still listed on voter-registration rolls.
Poll workers handed out ten ballots, never once asking for a photo ID.
O’Keefe’s team immediately gave back the ballots, unmarked, to
precinct workers. Debbie Lane, a ballot inspector at one of the
Manchester polling sites, later said: “I wasn’t sure what I was
allowed to do. . . . I can’t tell someone not to vote, I suppose.” The
only precinct in which O’Keefe or his crew did not obtain a ballot was
one in which the local precinct officer had personally known the dead
“voter.” New Hampshire’s Democratic governor, John Lynch, sputtered
when asked about O’Keefe’s video, and he condemned the effort to test
the election system even though no actual votes were cast. “They
should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, if in fact
they’re found guilty of some criminal act,” he roared. But cooler
heads eventually prevailed, and the GOP state legislature later
approved a voter-ID bill, with enough votes to override the governor’s
veto. Despite an exhaustive and intrusive investigation, no charges
were ever filed against any of O’Keefe’s associates. Later in 2012, in
Washington, D.C., one of O’Keefe’s assistants was able to obtain
Attorney General Eric Holder’s ballot even though Holder is 62 years
old and bears no resemblance to the 22-year-old white man who obtained
it merely by asking if Eric Holder was on the rolls. But the
Department of Justice, which is currently suing Texas to block that
state’s photo-ID law, dismissed the Holder ballot incident as
“manufactured.” The irony was lost on the DOJ that Holder, a staunch
opponent of voter-ID laws, could have himself been disenfranchised by
a white man because Washington, D.C., has no voter-ID law. Polls
consistently show that more than 70 percent of Americans — including
clear majorities of African Americans and Hispanics — support such
laws. Liberals who oppose ballot-security measures claim that there
are few prosecutions for voter fraud, which they take to mean that
fraud doesn’t happen. But as the New York DOI report demonstrates, it
is comically easy, given the sloppy-voter registration records often
kept in America, to commit voter fraud in person. (A 2012 study by the
Pew Research Center found that nationwide, at least 1.8 million
deceased voters are still registered to vote.) And unless someone
confesses, in-person voter fraud is very difficult to detect — or
stop. New York’s Gothamist news service reported last September that
four poll workers in Brooklyn reported they believed people were
trying to vote in the name of other registered voters. Police officers
observed the problems but did nothing because voter fraud isn’t under
the police department’s purview. What the DOI investigators were able
to do was eerily similar to actual fraud that has occurred in New York
before. In 1984, Brooklyn’s Democratic district attorney, Elizabeth
Holtzman, released a state grand-jury report on a successful 14-year
conspiracy that cast thousands of fraudulent votes in local, state,
and congressional elections. Just like the DOI undercover operatives,
the conspirators cast votes at precincts in the names of dead, moved,
and bogus voters. The grand jury recommended voter ID, a basic
election-integrity measure that New York has steadfastly refused to
implement. In states where non-photo ID is required, it’s also all too
easy to manufacture records that allow people to vote. In 2012, the
son of Congressman Jim Moran, the Democrat who represents Virginia’s
Washington suburbs, had to resign as field director for his father’s
campaign after it became clear that he had encouraged voter fraud.
Patrick Moran was caught advising an O’Keefe videographer on how to
commit in-person voter fraud. The scheme involved using a personal
computer to forge utility bills that would satisfy Virginia’s voter-ID
law and then relying on the assistance of Democratic lawyers stationed
at the polls to make sure the fraudulent votes were counted. Last
year, Virginia tightened its voter-ID law and ruled that showing a
utility bill was no longer sufficient to obtain a ballot. Given that
someone who is dead, is in jail, or has moved isn’t likely to complain
if someone votes in his name, how do we know that voter fraud at the
polls isn’t a problem? An ounce of prevention — in the form of voter
ID and better training of poll workers — should be among the minimum
precautions taken to prevent an electoral miscarriage or meltdown in a
close race. After all, even a small number of votes can have sweeping
consequences. Al Franken’s 312-vote victory in 2008 over Minnesota
senator Norm Coleman gave Democrats a filibuster-proof Senate majority
of 60 votes, which allowed them to pass Obamacare. Months after the
Obamacare vote, a conservative group called Minnesota Majority
finished comparing criminal records with voting rolls and identified
1,099 felons — all ineligible to vote — who had voted in the
Franken–Coleman race. Fox News random interviews with ten of those
felons found that nine had voted for Franken, backing up national
academic studies that show felons tend to vote strongly for Democrats.
Minnesota Majority took its findings to prosecutors across the state,
but very few showed any interest in pursuing the issue. Some did,
though, and 177 people have been convicted as of mid 2012 — not just
“accused” but actually convicted — of voting fraudulently in the
Senate race. Probably the only reason the number of convictions isn’t
higher is that the standard for convicting someone of voter fraud in
Minnesota is that the person must have been both ineligible and must
have “knowingly” voted unlawfully. Anyone accused of fraud is apt to
get off by claiming he didn’t know he’d done anything wrong. Given
that we now know for certain how easy it is to commit undetectable
voter fraud and how serious the consequences can be, it’s truly
bizarre to have officials at the New York City Board of Elections and
elsewhere savage those who shine a light on the fact that their modus
operandi invites fraud. One might even think that they’re covering up
their incompetence or that they don’t want to pay attention to what
crimes could be occurring behind the curtains at their polling places.
Or both.
Read more at:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/368234/voter-fraud-weve-got-proof-its-easy-john-fund
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