Democrats don't support voter fraud; they just worry about disenfranchising the deceased

Democrats don't support voter fraud

notes Benny Huang wryly;

they just worry about disenfranchising the deceased.

Who says there’s no such thing as life after death? If voting rolls are any indicator, dead people these days are living very active lifestyles. According to an investigative report by CBS2, Los Angeles’s CBS affiliate, some dead people continue to vote years after meeting their maker.

The investigation revealed that 265 dead voters across five counties in southern California voted in recent elections, 215 of them in Los Angeles County. Some of the deceased cast ballots in multiple elections. Thirty-two of those deceased voters were found to have voted eight times since kicking the bucket. One woman who died in 1988 managed to vote in 2014.

I can think of only two explanations—either the Zombie Apocalypse is upon us or someone’s been cheatin’. I lean toward the latter.

Don’t let anyone tell you that voter fraud is a victimless crime. Every ballot illegitimately cast cancels out someone else’s vote. It’s no different than reaching into the ballot box and removing a ballot. It’s a suckerpunch to the democratic process and should be punished severely.

Oddly enough, some people seem to react to voter fraud and voter suppression very differently, as if they’re different phenomena meriting different responses. Voter suppression is considered such a heinous crime that no incident of it will be tolerated—unless perpetrated by billy-club wielding black racists, of course—while voter fraud is considered regrettable but ultimately immaterial. After all, what’s a few votes here and there? Is it really going to tip an election one way or the other? The answer, in some instances, is yes; though that’s not really the point. There’s a principle at stake here and the principle applies whether the margin of victory is a handful of votes or a million.

Any attempt to root out corruption in the electoral process is bound to meet stiff resistance from so-called “civil rights” groups that will invariably stir up racial fears. Voter ID laws, the reformers’ tool of choice for combatting voter fraud, have been painted as an attempt to resurrect Jim Crow. Minority voters lack suitable forms of identification, they say, and making them obtain an ID amounts to an unconstitutional poll tax. It’s a weak argument made even weaker by the fact that some states provide IDs for free.

Some notable “civil rights” organizations continue to oppose voter ID, grasping at increasingly ephemeral straws to justify their position. Nothing will satisfy them except anarchy at the polling stations—no controls, no verification, and no integrity in the final tally. That’s the way they like it.

Cleaning up voter rolls, however, is not the same as voter ID. What objection could there possibly be? You guess it—cleaning up voter rolls is raaaaacist! Or at least that’s the contention of the corrupt, disreputable NAACP. A recent attempt by Florida Governor Rick Scott, a Republican, to weed out noncitizens and other people who have no legal right to vote has been challenged by the NAACP and members of the opposition party. Florida House Minority Leader Mark Pattford weighed in: “[Governor Scott] can probably find more reports of UFOs and space aliens in Florida than there are reports of fraudulent voting in the state.”
 
Pattford surely knows that Miami, which is about an hour south of his district in West Palm Beach, was rocked with one of the biggest voter fraud cases in American history less than twenty years ago. The city’s Democratic mayor, Xavier Suarez, was removed from office in 1998 when it was discovered that his campaign had won the previous year’s primary by tampering with absentee ballots. Among the 895 ballots examined, 197 were found to be suspicious. Some were cast by, you guessed it, dead people.

 … The argument against cleaning up voter rolls seems to be that any attempt to purge ineligible voters will, either by happenstance or design, purge eligible voters too—and minorities disproportionately. So just to be on the safe side, let’s not purge any.

Here we are back at the flawed premise that no one is harmed when voter fraud is tolerated. Let’s examine for a moment the dead voters discovered in the CBS2 investigation to see just how wrongheaded that notion is. According to their investigation, 32 dead voters voted in at least eight elections; that’s 256 illegally cast ballots. We also know that the other 233 dead voters voted at least once. By combining the two we know that 489 ballots were illegally cast and the same number of voters were disenfranchised. Again, that’s a minimum. But rather than doing something about it some people prefer not to see a problem and compare the whole affair to UFO sightings.

The states’ voting rolls are saturated with names that don’t belong there—noncitizens, the deceased, people who have moved away, and in some cases, fictitious people.

 … This is the stuff of banana republics.

Related: Voting rights, voting wrongs:

To take another (far worse) crime, how prevalent is murder? Not very, if you take the statistics in percentage (something like 0.0048 %). Well, no matter how rare murder is, you still need to criminalize it as much for justice — to bring perpetrators (however rare they may be) to justice — as for prevention — to prevent people from being tempted to use it.

The last I heard, one needs some sort of poll card to cast a ballot in Britain, as indeed one does in every other democracy on this planet. Due to the Democrats' hysterical race-baiting, we have been subjected to the (absurd) spectacle of being the only country where having this (common-sense) requirement can only be viewed as vile, outrageous prejudice. Well, if it is racist to require voter ID in America, then Britain and every other democracy on the planet (including, of course, in Africa) can only qualify as racist as well.