John Fund on voter fraud

Posted on July 30, 2007

John Fund at the WSJ chimes in on the new reports of voter fraud. He includes the ACORN fraud in Washington state I blogged about last week and adds some extra:

But last week also brought fresh evidence that voter fraud is a real problem and could even branch out into cyberspace:

• California’s Secretary of State Debra Bowen, a Democrat, reported that state-approved hackers had been “able to bypass physical and software security in every [voting] machine they tested,” although she admitted that the hackers had access to internal security information and source codes that vote thieves wouldn’t normally have.

• The Florida secretary of state’s office reported it had found “legally sufficient” evidence that some 60 people in Palm Beach County had committed voter fraud by voting both there and in New York state. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement has launched a formal probe. In 2004, New York’s Daily News found that 46,000 people were illegally registered to vote in both New York and Florida.

• Prosecutors in Hoboken, N.J., last week announced they are investigating a vagrant who was part of a group of voters observed to be acting suspiciously outside a polling place in an election last month. After he signed a voting register in the name of another man, he was confronted by a campaign worker and fled the scene. He later admitted to cops that he had been paid $10 to vote.

• Last week the U.S. Department of Justice recommended that an outside party be appointed to oversee Democratic primary elections in Noxubee County, Miss. In June, federal district judge Tom Lee found that Ike Brown, the Democratic political boss of Noxubee, had paid notaries public to visit voters and illegally mark their absentee ballots, imported illegal candidates to run for county office and manipulated the registration rolls.

But the most interesting news came out of Seattle, where on Thursday local prosecutors indicted seven workers for Acorn, a union-backed activist group that last year registered more than 540,000 low-income and minority voters nationwide and deployed more than 4,000 get-out-the-vote workers. The Acorn defendants stand accused of submitting phony forms in what Secretary of State Sam Reed says is the “worst case of voter-registration fraud in the history” of the state.

The list of “voters” registered in Washington state included former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, New York Times columnists Frank Rich and Tom Friedman, actress Katie Holmes and nonexistent people with nonsensical names such as Stormi Bays and Fruto Boy. The addresses used for the fake names were local homeless shelters. Given that the state doesn’t require the showing of any identification before voting, it is entirely possible people could have illegally voted using those names.

As chair of the NH Senate Internal Affairs committee for 6 years I held hearings on all sorts of election law bills seeking to avoid exactly these types of fraud. We heard over and over from the Dems “There have been no prosecutions - therefore there is no fraud”.

Now NH is uniquely protected from some of these abuses of the system because we are not covered by Clinton’s Motor Voter Law. We do not have to allow anyone but duly authorized public officials (town clerks, supervisors of the checklists, city clerks) to register anyone to vote. This avoids most of the fraud perpetrated by ACORN and Democrat employees like has happened in Washington, Missouri and South Dakota.

We also determined early on that a paper ballot, readable by humans, using optical readers but with a hand re-count as a final resolution to any disputes was the only proper way to handle election responsibly. The punch card butterfly ballots disappeared from here decades ago - not a hanging Chad to be found.

However, the Dems continually resisted any requirement that would make prosecutions possible for illegal registration or voting, going so far as Gov. Lynch vetoing a bill last year that would have simply required the same security for voting that is used to board a bus, train, or plane or to cash a check - presenting a photo ID to obtain a ballot.

They also fought all attempts to restrict non residents, like transients and out of state college students from registering and voting.

We have a problem with same day registration, but thankfully we do not have the Motor Voter Law for ACORN and others to abuse.

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