Fired not for tolerating voter fraud for years but for admitting that there’s a problem at all

Voter fraud deniers will have to grasp those straws a little tighter 

predicts Benny Huang,

after an undercover video released last week showed Alan Schulkin, Manhattan’s Commissioner of the Board of Elections, admitting in no uncertain terms that the problem exists. Schulkin, a Democrat, was not aware that he was speaking to an operative of the public integrity outfit Project Veritas. Unfortunately, Shulkin is just another public figure who says one thing in public and something entirely different in private.

“I think there’s a lot of voter fraud, people don’t realize certain neighborhoods in particular, they bus people around to vote,” said Schulkin to a Project Veritas journalist. When he was asked what kind of neighborhoods he was talking about, he replied: “Oh, I don’t want to say.” The journalist pressed a little harder, asking: “Oh, like minority neighborhoods? Like black neighborhoods and Hispanic neighborhoods?” Schulkin replied, “Yeah. And Chinese too.” Nor did he believe that the problem was confined to in-person voting. When he was asked about absentee ballot fraud, he replied “Oh there’s thousands of absentee ballots. I don’t know where they came from.”

The problem of voter fraud is real. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either trying to perpetuate it or extremely naïve. None of this should come as a surprise to anyone who’s the least bit cognizant of the culture of corruption that pervades many American cities. All that is required for voter fraud to flourish is a corrupt political machine willing to scam the honor system that operates our vulnerable elections.

And yet vote fraudsters are protected by a code of silence nearly as sacred as the mafia’s omertà. Even Alan Schulkin won’t talk about it unless he thinks no one will hear. As an election official he’s overseen numerous elections and had the opportunity to witness the shenanigans firsthand, yet he won’t do anything about it. That tells me that he’s under extreme pressure to keep mum.

And alas, that pressure has predictably come to bear. Mayor De Blasio is now calling for Schulkin’s resignation—not for tolerating voter fraud for years (which really should cost him his job) but for admitting that there’s a problem at all. De Blasio, like most Democrat politicians, is less scandalized by the existence of voter fraud than that anyone would speak its name aloud. If you ask them, it’s not happening, and anyone who says that it is happening ought to pay an enormous social penalty up to and including his job. “Again, this is just urban legend that there is a [voter] fraud problem,” said De Blasio. “There isn’t. There’s no proof of it whatsoever.”

Is that so? The definition of “proof” can sometimes be elusive, but I would argue that when a major election official, speaking off the record and with nothing to gain, says that voters are being bused around from precinct to precinct, that’s at least a form of evidence, if not proof. At very least, it merits further investigation, which is exactly what De Blasio doesn’t want.

But in fact Mayor De Blasio is wrong; there has been a major voter fraud operation uncovered in New York City in my lifetime, which means that voter fraud is not some kind of “urban legend” similar to alligators in the sewers. In 1984, a grand jury delivered the results of its investigation, asserting that it had found evidence of systematic election fraud in large parts of Brooklyn taking place from 1968 until it was stopped in 1982. The fraudsters apparently used a smorgasbord of methods to tilt the elections their way—absentee ballot fraud, voting in the name of dead people or people who were known to have moved away, the impersonation of legitimate voters, and the wholesale invention of fictitious voters. Yes, they also bused people around. According to the book “Who’s Counting?” by Hans von Spakovsky and John Fund, “One of the witnesses before the New York grand jury described how he led a crew of eight individuals from polling place to polling place to vote. Each member of his crew voted in excess of 20 times, and there were approximately 20 other such crews operating during that election.” By doing a little back of the envelope arithmetic, I can estimate that these electoral wrecking crews probably cast about 3,600 fake ballots, give or take a few hundred.

The New York grand jury said it all when it concluded: ”The ease and boldness with which these fraudulent schemes were carried out shows the vulnerability of our entire electoral process to unscrupulous and fraudulent misrepresentation.” Yes, indeed.

I can already hear the objections: “But that was more than thirty years ago!”—the implication being that election fraud in the past doesn’t prove election fraud in the present. True, 1984 was a long time ago, though not nearly as long ago as 1964, and we still have federal election monitors in the South to ensure that racist white officials don’t disenfranchise blacks. It seems that people’s idea of what constitutes a “long time ago” varies in inverse proportion to how much they want root out the problem. The argument that the 1984 Brooklyn fraud case is old news misses the point, namely that fraudsters even then had both the capability and the intention to scam the system. All those who think voter fraud is an “urban legend” will have to explain how the problem magically solved itself while those same capabilities and intentions survived.

New York is no less corrupt today than it was in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. Here’s what really changed between then and now—in those days, there was an actual sense of outrage that elections were being stolen. Now anyone who talks about the problem runs the risk of being smeared as a racist. In 1984, public officials were able to see voter fraud because their eyes were open to it, to say nothing of their minds. Today the attitude is nothing less than willful ignorance. No prosecutor in his right mind would go to trial with that case because, as the adage goes, you can’t beat city hall. Even people who are charged with guarding the integrity of our elections, people like Alan Schulkin, have given up trying to stop it. It’s a third rail of politics—talk about voter fraud and you get zapped.

Alan Schulkin himself is now backtracking from his claims, though only because he’s tasted some of the mayor’s wrath and presumably that of the city’s “civil rights” establishment—in other words, the race hustlers. Schulkin now claims that he should have said “potential” voter fraud, but that’s clearly not what he meant when he spoke unwittingly to Project Veritas. When he said that “they bus people around to vote” in black, Hispanic, and Chinese neighborhoods, he wasn’t speaking hypothetically. If he were, that would actually be racist. If we assume that Schulkin was talking about potential voter fraud, not the real McCoy, a prudent person would be right to ask how he knows that it would happen in black, Hispanic, and Chinese neighborhoods. But the answer is moot because he’s lying when he backtracked on his comments. He got caught being honest and had to make up a lie to wiggle out from under the implications of his earlier statement. If he had known he was being recorded he would have denied the existence of the problem just like the rest of the New York City political establishment.

The former congressman Artur Davis, a black Democrat turned independent turned Republican turned Democrat, summed it up well when he said:

“Most people would not change their mind on voter ID if someone walked in front of them and admitted they committed voter-ID fraud yesterday. They have their heels dug in. A number of people opposed to voter ID are opposed for political reasons, for reasons that don’t have substance. People plead guilty to voter fraud, and that doesn’t seem to move the opinions of some of those opposed.”

Truer words have never been spoken. It’s hard to make a political establishment that has risen to power via voter fraud care about the issue because they just don’t see it as a problem.