Voter Fraud: An Existential Threat to America
By James Simpson — Accuracy In Media
It is difficult to describe the enormity of the crime being committed by the Obama administration and their Democratic allies. They flagrantly flout the law, while simultaneously turning it into a weapon against political opponents, use government agencies to target innocent Americans, attempt to create legal voters through amnesty, and undermine voter integrity measures to facilitate vote fraud, while denying it even exists. In short, they are corrupting the entire process.
Thus, it is fitting to begin this report by recounting a story of deliberate, blatant official voter fraud. This April 17, the Illinois House Executive Committee voted to authorize $100 million to construct President Obama’s future presidential library and museum in Chicago. AP reported that the Committee voted “unanimously,” 9-0 to support the plan. The report was false. Only four of the 11 Committee members were in attendance—all Democrats. They did not even have a quorum. Furthermore, this was supposed to be a “subject matter only” hearing, i.e., entailing no votes. No matter; the legislators simply made up the results—even counting absent Republicans as “yes” votes. Republican State Representative Ed Sullivan observed, “In this case they didn’t even care to change the rules; they just flat out broke them.”
Motor Voter
The National Voter Registration Act (NVRA), also known as “motor voter,” promotes easy voter registration at motor vehicle, welfare and other state and local government offices. Voters can apply in person or by mail, and, until a recent court ruling, the federal application required no proof of citizenship. NVRA also dictates voter roll maintenance, but it is a confusing procedure that can take over two election cycles. States have also frequently been lackadaisical about taking advantages of the methods afforded by the law. Some election boards actually have to be sued to clean up their voter rolls.*
As a result, nationwide, voter rolls are a shambles. According to a Pew report, approximately 24 million voter registrations nationally are either invalid or inaccurate, including about 1.8 million deceased individuals and 2.75 million multi-state duplicates.
The NVRA was authored by socialists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, and many believe it was deliberately constructed to pave the way for ACORN-style massive registration fraud. The pair is notorious for the Cloward/Piven Crisis Strategy—a plan to overwhelm government with demands for welfare spending, thereby leading to systemic crisis. Cloward and Piven helped launch ACORN to advance their strategy.
They also had other intentions for those burgeoning welfare rolls. “If organizers can deliver millions of dollars in cash benefits to the ghetto masses,” they wrote, “it seems reasonable to expect that the masses will deliver their loyalties to their benefactors.” Cloward and Piven developed the Motor Voter idea to simplify voter registration for this demographic. In 1993, it became law. Successive NRVA lawsuits have forced state agencies to become de facto taxpayer-funded voter registration drives.
Through its criminal activities, massive voter registration fraud and numerous convictions, ACORN made voter fraud national news. Prodded, and in some cases sued by activists, state legislatures began cleaning voter rolls and enacting ballot integrity measures like photo voter ID.
Voter Suppression
Democrats responded by executing a nationwide propaganda campaign of contrived outrage to deliver one relentless message: widespread voter fraud is a myth created by racist Republicans to justify voter ID and other laws that suppress the minority vote. MSNBC even called it a war on voting.
This President has proven over and over, however, that Democrats lie, and the Obama administration has institutionalized the practice. As Robert Popper writes in The Wall Street Journal:
In an April 11 speech to Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, President Obama recited statistics purporting to show that voter fraud was extremely rare. The “real voter fraud,” he said, “is people who try to deny our rights by making bogus arguments about voter fraud.”
Popper responds, “These arguments themselves are bogus.”
And of course he’s right. While they deny, obfuscate and attack, Democrats don’t even bother to hide their true intentions. In an event that can only be described as bad optics for the President, Sharpton’s NAN had just hosted a “Welcome Home Party” for serial convicted vote fraudster Melowese Richardson. After serving only eight months of a five year sentence for her crimes, Richardson was celebrated by Sharpton as a conquering hero.
Voter Fraud as Reparations
Democrats’ attitude toward voter fraud is the voting version of reparations for slavery. Some Democrats have even said that because minorities and the poor have little influence, “extraordinary measures (for example, stretching the absentee ballot or registration rules) are required to compensate.” Democrat election officials do this all the time, and a form of it has actually become official Justice Department policy in its effort to boost Hispanic representation.
Hispanic voters in Port Chester, New York were allowed to use something called “cumulative voting” in an election for village trustees. There were six trustee seats and Hispanics were allowed to cast six votes in any way they chose, for example, casting one vote for each of six candidates or all six for one candidate. Cumulative voting has also been used to elect a school board in Amarillo, Texas, the county commission in Chilton County, Alabama, and the city council in Peoria, Illinois.
Having rationalized the moral high ground with their “voter suppression” charge—Democrats go on the warpath. In recent years this has involved lawsuits, organized slander and a nationwide campaign to resist election reform. Under the Obama presidency, it has also included using federal agencies to attack private citizens and organizations.
IRS Targeting of Conservatives
In 2010, homemaker and small business owner, Catherine Engelbrecht, founded True the Vote (TTV), an organization dedicated to combating vote fraud. The group’s experience at the hand of government has become emblematic of the Obama administration’s despotic nature.
Catherine Engelbrecht’s gripping congressional testimony:
AIM interviewed Mrs. Engelbrecht for this article. Read the rest of her story here (PDF).
The travails of TTV are but one example of hundreds of conservative and tea party non-profits the IRS deliberately targeted in the run-up to the 2012 election. For example, the Ohio Liberty Council submitted their application on June 30, 2010. They received the first IRS answer in January 2012. It asked extensive questions about every single event they held and planned to hold, the people in their groups, their qualifications, speakers, publications, websites, Facebook pages and more. The IRS demanded they respond in two weeks.
In 2013, a Treasury Inspector General report stated that as of December 2012, 160 organizations had been waiting between 206 and 1,138 days. The IRS also secretly drafted new regulations to restrict conservative organizations. And while Obama and congressional Democrats feigned outrage, it was their idea to target conservatives. Many conservatives are still awaiting answers. Most recently, it has been revealed that a high level DOJ official asked the IRS to consider criminal investigations of conservative groups. No liberal group has been subject to such abuse.
[Correction * The italicized sentence is a correction/replacement for this sentence that was previously there: NVRA also dictates voter roll maintenance, but actually makes it more difficult by requiring an exhaustive procedure that takes a minimum of four, and sometimes more than eight years, before a deceased or otherwise ineligible voter can be removed.]
Read the full report at Accuracy In Media