Democrats Terrified!

[bigsixfive 341]

Fraudulent voter registration in Ohio has reached epidemic proportions over the last several election cycles, with submission of fake names, forged signatutes, etc.

According to Congressional testimony, ACORN stands out for its pattern of voter registration fraud stretching back a decade. Rather than showing any signs of improvement, all signs point to increased lawbreaking.

[T]wo Ohio voters, including Christopher Barkley , [sic] claimed that they were hounded by the community-activist group ACORN to register to vote several times, even though they made it clear they’d already signed up. Barkley estimated he’d registered to vote ‘10 to 15’ times after canvassers for ACORN relentlessly pursued him and others. ‘I kept getting approached by folks who asked me to register,’ Barkley said….

ACORN admitted to the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections that the group engages in fraudulent voter registration activity.

ACORN bribed and/or pressured Freddie Johnson of Cleveland to register to vote 72 times. Johnson filled out 72 separate voter-registration cards over an 18-month period at the behest of ACORN. Johnson stated "ometimes, they come up and bribe me with a cigarette, or they'll give me a dollar to sign up, …The ACORN people are everywhere, looking to sign people up. I tell them I am already registered. The girl said, 'You are?' I say, 'Yup,' and then they say, 'Can you just sign up again?'” He'd collected 10 to 20 cigarettes and anywhere from $10 to $15, he said.

On May 8, 2007, a Reynoldsburg, Ohio (Franklin County) man was indicted for voting twice in the November election. … [An attorney] said the man, a Mr Gilbert was registered in both counties by ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for

Reform Now, a nonprofit agency that has come under fire in 12 states for voter fraud.

On or about September 19, 2006, the mother of a 16-year-old has told the Summit County elections board that her daughter was registered to vote, just two months after a 10-year-old boy was summoned for jury duty because he was on the county’s voter rolls.

The person who filed the voter registration application was Prentice McNary of Akron, a circulator paid by Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, or ACORN, according to Board of Elections Director Bryan Williams.

Between Fall 2003 and June 2004, ACORN submitted approximately 23,000 voter registration cards in Franklin County, Ohio. The Franklin County Board of Elections discovered that voter registration cards submitted by ACORN included cards for people

who did not exist. Franklin County Board of Elections Director Matthew Damschroeder characterized many of the registrations as “blatantly false,” while the manager of Franklin County Voter Services confirmed that the submission of false voter registration

forms has resulted in the issuance of voter identification cards that could have been used, and can be used in the future, to cast fraudulent votes in the November 2004, November 2006, and November 2008 elections.

On or near June 3, 2004, two ACORN agents submitted fraudulent voter registration cards forms to the Franklin County Board of Elections

On or about October 8, 2004 ACORN submitted 19 false voter registration cards to the Franklin County Board of Elections, including cards identifying people who did not exist.

On or about October 8, 2004 ACORN submitted 19 voter registrations to the Hamilton County Board of Elections for people who could not be located by the sheriff’s department after similar handwriting and false addresses raised the suspicions of

elections workers. These registration cards were fraudulent and contained forged signatures.

On or about September 7, 2004, ACORN employee and/or agent Kevin Eugene Dooley submitted a fraudulent voter registration card to the Franklin County Board of Elections that resulted in Mr. Dooley being charged with a felony offense for forging the voter registration card in question.

In September 22, 2004, the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation confirmed that it was investigating over 800 fraudulent voter registration cards submitted in Summit County.

The group was submitting the information through a voter sign-up drive known as Project Vote. "Some of them used nonexistent names, some of them used false addresses and some of them were duplicates of previously filed applications," Walsh said, describing the complaints, which largely came from the registrar in Clark County, Nevada. Secretary of State Ross Miller said the fraudulent registrations included forms for the starting lineup of the Dallas Cowboys football team. Mr. Miller likened ACORN to a “bank robber,” while another Nevada official indicated that ACORN made a “pathetic attempt at quality control.”

On or about October 3, 2008, in Crown Point Indiana, ACORN submitted a pile of suspected fraudulent voter registration applications to Lake County election officials, said. Lake County election workers discovered dozens of ACORN-delivered registration forms they believe contain inaccurate voter information, including one in which a dead man from Gary was listed as the applicant. None of those applications was processed. Of the 5,000 voter registrations, at least half have been found to be fraudulent, registered to dead people, or feature signatures that all look exactly the same.

In 2003, ACORN employees in Missouri turned in more than a thousand suspicious voter registration cards, with one witness indicating that a card was turned in under the name of her infant

Following Colorado's 2004 election, two ex-ACORN employees were convicted of perjury for submitting false voter registration forms; one ex-ACORN employee admitted to registering her friends 40 times.

In 2004, police arrested a former ACORN employee who had more than 300 completed voter registration cards in the trunk of his car, many of which had not been turned in within the legal time limit.

In 2005, Virginia authorities found that, of a sample of Project Vote-gathered registrations, 83% were rejected for using false or questionable information.

In 2007, King County, Washington officials announced the indictment of seven workers ACORN had hired to register voters, calling the episode the "worst case of voter registration fraud in the history of the state."

In 2006, ACORN also committed what Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed called the "worse case of election fraud" in the state's history. In the case, ACORN submitted just over 1,800 new voter registration forms, and all but six of the 1,800 names were fake.

In April 2008, federal prosecutors announced guilty pleas for federal election fraud by eight former ACORN employees in Missouri, based on their activities in the 2006 election. They submitted false addresses and names, as well as forged signatures. At least one former ACORN employee was sentenced to 15 months in prison.

An ACORN spokesman said that it's typical for 30 percent of their cards to be duplicates or incomplete. That is a troublingly high rate of error

In July, 2008, Pennsylvania officials charged a former ACORN employee with 19 counts of perjury, making false statements, forgery and identity theft in connection with the voter registration forms in connection with more than 100 suspect cards.

In August, 2008, the Connecticut Post reported that state officials began asking for an investigation into ACORN's registration activities, in which there were errors in 20 percent of the thousands of registration forms the group turned in. Referencing the large amount of incomplete, incorrect, or improperly filed forms, one registrar said, "Some of 9

my staff has been here for 15 years and when they see ACORN come in, they start crying."

Bernalillo County officials are investigating 1,100 possibly fraudulent cards. In one case, a series of nine cards appear to have been filled out using the phone book. ACORN's voter registration fraud in New Mexico has been a recurring theme since 2003, including its 2004 attempt to register a 13-year-old boy

In Texas, where ACORN's affiliate, Citizens Services Inc., has provided contract work on behalf of Senator Barack Obama's presidential campaign, the Houston Chronicle reported on August 17, 2008 that "About 40 percent of the 27,000 registration cards gathered by ACORN from January through July have been rejected or placed in limbo pending the gathering of more information, according to the county" while "about 6,600 were filled out by people already registered, and many others contained insufficient information.

By the end of August, 2008, Milwaukee's Election Commission Executive Director had referred over 49 individuals to prosecutors for suspected voter registration fraud - of them, 37 were ACORN employees. An August 20 report from the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel noted that of the 35 ACORN employees referred for investigation, seventeen apparently filled out voter applications and then signed the cards themselves. That involved two to four cards in each case; twelve submitted cards for individuals who later told ACORN they never filled out an application (that involved one card in each case); one submitted a card for a dead voter, which was the second such case; a Voters Project worker previously submitted a card for a deceased voter; one was apparently making up driver's license numbers for an unknown number of voters; one submitted about a half-dozen applications for already-registered voters; and one woman reportedly complained that a voter registration card was

submitted for her husband, who had been dead for 10 years

In Michigan, A Secretary of State spokesperson recently (Summer-Fall, 2008) said "There appears to be a sizeable number of duplicate and fraudulent applications ... and it appears to be widespread." In Pontiac, Michigan, the clerk's office has found numerous applications filed for a given name. In Oak Park, Michigan, the clerk has been seeing "lots of duplication" from ACORN in recent months. Another official from the Michigan Secretary of State’s office has acknowledged that because ACORN pays their workers per voter application collected, there is an incentive for fraud, and that ACORN tends to hold applications, many of which are false and duplicate, for months and dump them on our election officials at the registration deadline.

And that's just one case.

http://www.campaignlegalcenter.org/attachments/Court_Cases_Of_Interest/1935.pdf

[bigsixfive 341]

http://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-roff/2011/07/29/despite-what-democrats-claim-voter-fraud-is-real

Back in April, in a story that did not receive the attention it deserved, a Tunica County, Miss., jury found Lessadolla Sowers, who have [sic] been identified as a member of the executive committee of the county’s NAACP chapter, guilty of 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots in the name of others.

...

A comprehensive study by the Milwaukee Police Department found a strong possibility existed that there was "an illegal organized attempt to influence the outcome" through voter fraud of the 2004 elections in Wisconsin.

The Colorado Secretary of State’s office determined that nearly 5,000 people who were not United States citizens—and therefore according to the law, ineligible to vote—voted in the 2010 U.S. Senate race.

[RunInRed 18,280]

Does the constitution require you to have a drivers license or photo ID to vote?

I don't think it even requires ID at all, of any sort. So unless you're proposing that we just drop the requirement to show any ID whatsoever, we're just arguing over what should constitute a proper and valid ID at the polling places. I hardly think a standard photo ID such as a driver's license or equivalent is asking too much.

The devil is in the details. But you're proving my point which is, there is a hidden agenda behind these laws. Bottom line: we can address this 'problem' in better ways. Do to so, we must not let political hyperbole cloud the brain.

[Tigermike 3,692]

So let us ask ourselves, who is really being the 'racist' ($1 to TigerMike) beating this drum?

The only racist $hit going on is the race baiting the demoncrats do on a regular basis.

[jj3jordan 2,169]

A phantom problem, indeed...

Oddly enough, requiring a photo ID to cast a vote would only be effective in preventing individuals from impersonating other voters at the polls -- an occurrence that is, according to a study released by the Brennan Center, more rare than getting struck by lightning. In fact, voter fraud (when individuals cast ballots despite knowing that they are ineligible to vote, in an attempt to defraud the election system) is hardly a realistic political concern. From the Bush administration's five-year national "war on voter fraud," there were only 86 convictions of illegal voting out of more than 196 million votes cast. Of those 86 convictions, only 26 were attributable to individual voters, and most of those were misunderstandings about eligibility. What is more, connection to voter fraud in a federal election carries grave punishments, including a $10,000 fine and five years in prison, in addition to any state penalties. This is a risk that very few people are willing to take, particularly for the result of one incremental vote.

Whether by intention or not, politicians and media have managed to conflate a host of election administration problems under the umbrella of "voter fraud" -- a move which has fueled a Republican-backed campaign across multiple states to pass voter ID laws. Things like clerical or typographical errors in the poll books, registration records, and underlying data are examples of occurrences that may get mistaken for voter fraud. Justin Levitt, author of The Truth About Voter Fraud, cites matching voter rolls against each other or against some other source to find alleged double voters, dead voters, or otherwise ineligible voters as the most common source of superficial claims of voter fraud, as well as the most common source of error. Thus, it is largely human error in the voting process that results in inaccurate accusations of voter fraud and feeds exaggerated concern over this "phantom problem."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victoria-coats/voter-id-laws_b_950291.html

Facts and stuff. They'll get your argument every time.

It may be rarer than a lightning strike, but it would have only taken 528 fraudulent votes to elect Al Gore. Also, RIR, my guess is that you go inside when lightning is around, even though a strike would be rare.

Saying that votes that could have been challenged are minimal may be true. But when someone casts an illegal vote because they don't have to show an ID, most of the time there is no way to challenge it. Those are the ones I worry about, and there are thousands of them, the vast majority being democrat.

[Tigermike 3,692]

What happens to those w/o a photo ID and it is cost prohibitive for them to get one? Some states have 'workarounds' but many don't. (ID's can be provided at no charge to any who actually can't afford the $10.00 to get one. Or they could pass on buying 2 packs of cigarettes.)

There's also the intimidation factor for those who have made mistakes in their past. (You mean those convicted fealons who voted and were not supposed to vote?) Spin it anyway you want, but there are political reasons why most push for this law and you know it. (Spin it any way you want, the only reason the dems are against a voter ID is political.)

Why are dems so frightened of legal voters? Why are they so afraid of eliminating any and all voter fraud?

[Tigermike 3,692]

So the Black Panthers and ACORN did nothing wrong the last election? You know as well as everyone else for all the fraud or intimidation cases there are many, many more than didn't get caught.

Again, I'm going off the facts. If you have some in support of your position, let's see them.

Yeah there is and has been some voter intimidation going on.

[TitanTiger 21,219]

Does the constitution require you to have a drivers license or photo ID to vote?

I don't think it even requires ID at all, of any sort. So unless you're proposing that we just drop the requirement to show any ID whatsoever, we're just arguing over what should constitute a proper and valid ID at the polling places. I hardly think a standard photo ID such as a driver's license or equivalent is asking too much.

The devil is in the details. But you're proving my point which is, there is a hidden agenda behind these laws. Bottom line: we can address this 'problem' in better ways. Do to so, we must not let political hyperbole cloud the brain.

I'm not proving your point. You said the Constitution doesn't require a photo ID. I pointed out it doesn't require anything. I gather you're not proposing we scrap showing ID at all, so now we're just down to deciding what should be a required form of ID. I think it's perfectly reasonable to require a valid photo ID such as a driver's license. You've yet to explain to me why this is such a horrible idea. And for the record, there could and should be provisions for those who can't afford it to get one for free, though you'll have a hard time explaining to me how $25 every four to five years is an impossible obstacle for anyone.

[RunInRed 18,280]

Well, then why don't we just write into the constitution that there is a $25 fee to vote? Extreme? Maybe. But in some circumstances, that's exactly what your advocating for and that sounds pretty horrible to me.

But I'm more concerned about a political strategy - achieved through unnecessary and overly restrictive laws - to influence the outcome of elections by discouraging or preventing people from exercising their right to vote. My concern with the methods being employed to address this phantom problem is that simple to understand: Photo ID requirements disproportionately affect minority and elderly voters who don't normally maintain driver's licenses, and therefore, requiring such groups to obtain and keep track of photo IDs that are otherwise unneeded is a suppression tactic aimed at those groups. These laws have the ability to suppress millions of voters ... all in effort to prevent a handful of fraudulent voters. I'm a rational guy ... this isn't rational.

[Tigermike 3,692]

Well, then why don't we just write into the constitution that there is a $25 fee to vote? Extreme? Maybe. But in some circumstances, that's exactly what your advocating for and that sounds pretty horrible to me.

But I'm more concerned about a political strategy - achieved through unnecessary and overly restrictive laws - to influence the outcome of elections by discouraging or preventing people from exercising their right to vote. My concern with the methods being employed to address this phantom problem is that simple to understand: Photo ID requirements disproportionately affect minority and elderly voters who don't normally maintain driver's licenses, and therefore, requiring such groups to obtain and keep track of photo IDs that are otherwise unneeded is a suppression tactic aimed at those groups. These laws have the ability to suppress millions of voters ... all in effort to prevent a handful of fraudulent voters. I'm a rational guy ... this isn't rational.

Build a better strawman that one can't stand on his own.

It's plain to see you got the memo from the Obama campaign.

[TitanTiger 21,219]

Well, then why don't we just write into the constitution that there is a $25 fee to vote? Extreme? Maybe. But in some circumstances, that's exactly what your advocating for and that sounds pretty horrible to me.

But I'm more concerned about a political strategy - achieved through unnecessary and overly restrictive laws - to influence the outcome of elections by discouraging or preventing people from exercising their right to vote. My concern with the methods being employed to address this phantom problem is that simple to understand: Photo ID requirements disproportionately affect minority and elderly voters who don't normally maintain driver's licenses, and therefore, requiring such groups to obtain and keep track of photo IDs that are otherwise unneeded is a suppression tactic aimed at those groups. These laws have the ability to suppress millions of voters ... all in effort to prevent a handful of fraudulent voters. I'm a rational guy ... this isn't rational.

You need valid photo ID for all sorts of normal things besides voting. Writing a check for instance. It's not like anyone is being asked to get a magic talisman made of rare Indian elephant ivory, washed in unicorn tears. And I've already mentioned that provision can be made for those who do not have nor need a driver's license and can't afford $25 every 4 or 5 years for a non-driver's ID card.

It's not suppression, it's common sense. Hell, I'd hand the things out for free if need be. You're buying into a bunch of liberal gobbledegook on this one. You simply cannot tell me that given plenty of warning to get one and helping with the cost for those who somehow can't afford it that this is seriously going to suppress anything other than people who take advantage of other, easier to falsify forms of ID to fraudulently vote.

[RunInRed 18,280]

We just have a difference of opinion on this issue. I think you are aligning yourself with a philosophy that makes it unnecessarily difficult for some to vote. That's not the America I believe in.

[TitanTiger 21,219]

Unnecessarily difficult? They have to show ID with a photo on it. That's just not a hardship. And I'd be fully in favor of provisions to help with the money aspects of it if $25 every 4 years or so is that financially crippling.

[RunInRed 18,280]

So just to make sure I understand your solution to this 'problem', you are advocating the creation of a government program that subsidizes/doles out photo IDs prior to every election cycle?

[Tigermike 3,692]

So just to make sure I understand your solution to this 'problem', you are advocating the creation of a government program that subsidizes/doles out photo IDs prior to every election cycle?

Only a dem would think a new government program or department would need to be created. There are already government departments/divisions that produce picture ID's. The DMV could get grants from the feds to provide free picture ID's for any poor people who applied. Or they could be provided at the Food Stamp office. Ooooops never mind they have to provide picture ID in order to apply for food stamps.

That should make the dems happy. Giving away things for free.

[tiger88 934]

We just have a difference of opinion on this issue. I think you are aligning yourself with a philosophy that makes it unnecessarily difficult for some to vote. That's not the America I believe in.

Unnecessarily difficult? Priceless. What's the matter RIR? Are you afraid you and your fellow democrats won't be able to load up all the crackheads and winos in the next election to secure the America you believe in? Most of those folks probably don't want anything to do with registering for a picture ID, do they? Yeah, that's what's wrong with America, not enough crackheads and winos deciding our future, lol.

[Tigermike 3,692]

In 2005, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 individuals called for jury duty from voter registration rolls over a two-year period in just one U.S. district court were not U.S. citizens. While that may not seem like many, just 3 percent of registered voters would have been more than enough to provide the winning presiden­tial vote margin in Florida in 2000. Indeed, the Cen­sus Bureau estimates that there are over a million illegal aliens in Florida, and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) has prosecuted more non-citizen voting cases in Florida than in any other state.

Florida is not unique. Thousands of non-citizens are registered to vote in some states, and tens if not hundreds of thousands in total may be present on the voter rolls nationwide. These numbers are significant: Local elections are often decided by only a handful of votes, and even national elections have likely been within the margin of the number of non-citizens ille­gally registered to vote.

Yet there is no reliable method to determine the number of non-citizens registered or actually voting because most laws to ensure that only citizens vote are ignored, are inadequate, or are systematically undermined by government officials. Those who ignore the implications of non-citizen registration and voting either are willfully blind to the problem or may actually favor this form of illegal voting.

Americans may disagree on many areas of immi­gration policy, but not on the basic principle that only citizens—and not non-citizens, whether legally present or not—should be able to vote in elections. Unless and until immigrants become citizens, they must respect the laws that bar non-citizen voting. To keep non-citizens from diluting citizens' votes, immigration and election officials must cooperate far more effectively than they have to date, and state and federal officials must increase their efforts to enforce the laws against non-citizen voting that are already on the books.

An Enduring Problem

Costas Bakouris, head of the Greek chapter of Transparency International, says in an interview that ending corruption is easy: enforce the law. Illegal voting by immigrants in America is noth­ing new. Almost as long as there have been elec­tions, there have been Tammany Halls trying to game the ballot box. Well into the 20th century, the political machines asserted their ascendancy on Election Day, stealing elections in the boroughs of New York and the wards of Chicago. Quite regu­larly, Irish immigrants were lined up and counted in canvasses long before the term "citizen" ever applied to them—and today it is little different.

Yet in the debates over what to do about the 8 million to 12 million illegal aliens estimated to be in the United States, there has been virtually no discus­sion of how to ensure that they (and millions of legal aliens) do not register and vote in elections.

Citizenship is and should be a basic requirement for voting. Citizenship is a legal requirement to vote in federal and state elections, except for a small number of local elections in a few jurisdictions.

Some Americans argue that alien voting is a non­existent problem or dismiss reported cases of non-citizen voting as unimportant because, they claim, there are no cases in which non-citizens "intention­ally" registered to vote or voted "while knowing that they were ineligible." Even if this latter claim were true—which it is not—every vote cast by a non-citizen, whether an illegal alien or a resident alien legally in the country, dilutes or cancels the vote of a citizen and thus disenfranchises him or her. To dismiss such stolen votes because the non-citizens supposedly did not know they were acting illegally when they cast a vote debases one of the most important rights of citizens.

The evidence is indisputable that aliens, both legal and illegal, are registering and voting in federal, state, and local elections. Following a mayor's race in Compton, California, for example, aliens testi­fied under oath in court that they voted in the elec­tion. In that case, a candidate who was elected to the city council was permanently disqualified from holding public office in California for soliciting non-citizens to register and vote. The fact that non-citizens registered and voted in the election would never have been discovered except for the fact that it was a very close election and the in­cumbent mayor, who lost by less than 300 votes, contested it.

Similarly, a 1996 congressional race in California may have been stolen by non-citizen voting. Republican incumbent Bob Dornan was defending himself against a spirited challenger, Democrat Lor­etta Sanchez. Sanchez won the election by just 979 votes, and Dornan contested the election in the U.S. House of Representatives. His challenge was dismissed after an investigation by the House Com­mittee on Oversight and Government Reform turned up only 624 invalid votes by non-citizens who were present in the U.S. Immigration and Nat­uralization Service (INS) database because they had applied for citizenship, as well as another 124 improper absentee ballots. The investigation, however, could not detect illegal aliens, who were not in the INS records.

The Oversight Committee pointed out the ele­phant in the room: "If there is a significant num­ber of ‘documented aliens,' aliens in INS records, on the Orange County voter registration rolls, how many illegal or undocumented aliens may be regis­tered to vote in Orange County?" There is a strong possibility that, with only about 200 votes determining the winner, enough undetected aliens registered and voted to change the outcome of the election. This is particularly true since the California Secretary of State complained that the INS refused his request to check the entire Orange County voter registration file, and no complete check of all of the individuals who voted in the congressional race was ever made.

The "Quick Ticket"

Non-citizen voting is likely growing at the same rate as the alien population in the United States; but because of deficiencies in state law and the failure of federal agencies to comply with federal law, there are almost no procedures in place that allow election officials to detect, deter, and prevent non-citizens from registering and voting. Instead, officials are largely dependent on an "honor sys­tem" that expects aliens to follow the law. There are numerous cases showing the failure of this honor system.

The frequent claim that illegal aliens do not reg­ister in order "to stay below the radar" misses the fact that many aliens apparently believe that the potential benefit of registering far outweighs the chances of being caught and prosecuted. Many district attorneys will not prosecute what they see as a "victimless and non-violent" crime that is not a priority.

On the benefit side of the equation, a voter regis­tration card is an easily obtainable document—they are routinely issued without any checking of identi­fication—that an illegal alien can use for many dif­ferent purposes, including obtaining a driver's license, qualifying for a job, and even voting. The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, for example, requires employers to verify that all newly hired employees present documentation verifying their identity and legal authorization to work in the United States. In essence, this means that new employees have to present evidence that they are either U.S. citizens or legal aliens with a work per­mit. The federal I-9 form that employers must com­plete for all new employees provides a list of documentation that can be used to establish iden­tity—including a voter registration card.

How aliens view the importance of this benefit was illustrated by the work of a federal grand jury in 1984 that found large numbers of aliens regis­tered to vote in Chicago. As the grand jury reported, many aliens "register to vote so that they can obtain documents identifying them as U.S. citizens" and have "used their voters' cards to obtain a myriad of benefits, from social security to jobs with the De­fense Department." The U.S. Attorney at the time estimated that there were at least 80,000 illegal aliens registered to vote in Chicago, and dozens were indicted and convicted for registering and voting.

The grand jury's report resulted in a limited cleanup of the voter registration rolls in Chicago, but just one year later, INS District Director A. D. Moyer testified before a state legislative task force that 25,000 illegal and 40,000 legal aliens remained on the rolls in Chicago. Moyer told the Illinois Senate that non-citizens registered so they could get a voter registration card for identification, adding that the card was "a quick ticket into the unemployment compensation system." An alien from Belize, for example, testified that he and his two sisters were able to register easily because they were not asked for any identification or proof of citizenship and lied about where they were born. After securing registration, he voted in Chicago.

Once such aliens are registered, of course, they receive the same encouragement to vote from campaigns' and parties' get-out-the-vote programs and advertisements that all other registered voters receive. Political actors have no way to distinguish between individuals who are properly registered and non-citizens who are illegally registered.

A Failure to Cooperate

Obtaining an accurate assessment of the size of this problem is difficult. There is no systematic review of voter registration rolls by states to find non-citizens, and the relevant federal agencies—in direct violation of federal law—refuse to cooperate with state election officials seeking to verify the citi­zenship status of registered voters. Federal immigra­tion law requires these agencies to "respond to an inquiry by a Federal, State, or local government agency, seeking to verify or ascertain the citizenship or immigration status of any individual within the jurisdiction of the agency for any purpose autho­rized by law, by providing the requested verification or status information," regardless of any other pro­vision of federal law, such as the Privacy Act. However, examples of refusal to cooperate are legion:

* In declining to cooperate with a request by Maryland to check the citizenship status of individuals registered to vote there, a spokes­man for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (CIS) mistakenly declared that the agency could not release that information because "it is important to safeguard the confidentiality of each legal immigrant, especially in light of the federal Privacy Act and the Immigration and Nationality Act."

One surprising result of this policy: In 2004, a guilty verdict in a murder trial in Maryland was jeopardized because a non-citizen was discov­ered on the jury—which had been chosen from the voter rolls.

* In 2005, Sam Reed, the Secretary of State of Washington, asked the CIS to check the immi­gration status of registered voters in Washing­ton; the agency refused to cooperate.

* A request from the Fulton County, Georgia, Board of Registration and Elections in 1998 to the old Immigration and Naturalization Service to check the immigration status of 775 regis­tered voters was likewise refused for want of a notarized consent from each voter because of "federal privacy act" concerns.

* In 1997, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's office in Dallas were investigating voting by non-citi­zens. They sent a computerized tape of the names of individuals who had voted to the INS requesting a check against INS records, but the INS refused to cooperate with the criminal investigation. An INS official was quoted as saying that the INS bureaucracy did not "want to open a Pandora's Box…. If word got out that this is a substantial problem, it could tie up all sorts of manpower. There might be a few thou­sand [illegal voters] in Dallas, for example, but there could be tens of thousands in places like New York, Chicago or Miami."

These incidents show that the CIS and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the successor agencies to the INS, are either igno­rant of federal legal requirements or deliberately ignoring them. An inquiry by a state or local election official regarding voter eligibility based on citizenship falls squarely within their statu­tory authority.

To be sure, CIS and ICE databases are not comprehensive; they contain information only about legal immigrants who have applied for the documentation necessary to be in the United States and illegal immigrants who have been detained. But even access to that information would be a big step forward for election officials in their attempts to try to clean up registration lists and find those aliens who are illegally registered and voting in elections.

The Honor System

The refusal of federal agencies to obey the law compels local election officials to rely almost en­tirely on the "honor system" to keep non-citizens from the polls. As Maryland's state election adminis­trator has complained, "There is no way of check­ing…. We have no access to any information about who is in the United States legally or otherwise."

Most discoveries of non-citizens on the registra­tion rolls are therefore accidental. Though the Department of Justice has no procedures in place for a systematic investigation of these types of crim­inal violations, in just a three year period, it prose­cuted and convicted more than a dozen non-citizens who registered and voted in federal elec­tions in Alaska, Florida, the District of Columbia, and Colorado. Among them was an alien in southern Florida, Rafael Velasquez, who not only voted, but even ran for the state legislature. Eight of the 19 September 11 hijackers were registered to vote in either Virginia or Florida—registrations that were probably obtained when they applied for driver's licenses.

In 1994, Mario Aburto Martinez, a Mexican national and the assassin of Mexican presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio, was found to have registered twice to vote in California. A random sample of just 10 percent of the 3,000 Hispanics registered to vote in California's 39th Assembly District by an independent group "revealed phony addresses and large numbers of registrants who admitted they were not U.S. citi­zens." This problem may be partially explained by the testimony of a Hispanic member of the Los Angeles Police Department who had been a volun­teer for the California-based Southwest Voter Reg­istration Education Project. When she reported to her supervisor that her fellow volunteers were not asking potential voters whether they were citizens, she was reprimanded "and told that she was not to ask that question…only whether the person wished to register to vote." Similarly, the Dor­nan–Sanchez investigation produced an affidavit from a non-citizen stating that the Sanchez cam­paign's field director, an elected member of the Anaheim Board of Education, told him that it "didn't matter" that he was not a U.S. citizen—he should register and vote anyway.

In 2006, Paul Bettencourt, Voter Registrar for Harris County, Texas, testified before the U.S. Com­mittee on House Administration that the extent of illegal voting by foreign citizens in Harris County was impossible to determine but "that it has and will continue to occur." Twenty-two percent of county residents, he explained, were born outside of the United States, and more than 500,000 were non-citizens. Bettencourt noted that he cancelled the registration of a Brazilian citizen in 1996 after she acknowledged on a jury summons that she was not a U.S. citizen. Despite that cancellation, how­ever, "She then reapplied in 1997, again claiming to be a U.S. citizen, and was again given a voter card, which was again cancelled. Records show she was able to vote at least four times in general and primary elections."

In 2005, Bettencourt's office turned up at least 35 cases in which foreign nationals applied for or received voter cards, and he pointed out that Harris County regularly had "elections decided by one, two, or just a handful of votes." In fact, a Norwe­gian citizen was discovered to have voted in a state legislative race in Harris County that was decided by only 33 votes. Nor is this problem unique to Harris County. Recent reports indicate that hun­dreds of illegal aliens registered to vote in Bexar County, Texas, and that at least 41 of them have voted, some several times, in a dozen local, state, and federal elections.

In 2005, Arizona passed Proposition 200, which requires anyone registering to vote to provide "sat­isfactory evidence of United States citizenship," such as a driver's license, a birth certificate, a pass­port, naturalization documents, or any other docu­ments accepted by the federal government to prove citizenship for employment purposes. The state issues a "Type F" driver's license to individuals who are legally present in the United States but are not citizens. Since Proposition 200 took effect, 2,177 non-citizens applying for such licenses have attempted to register to vote. Another 30,000 have been denied registration because they could not produce evidence of citizenship.

The constitutionality of Arizona's requirement is currently being litigated in federal court. The dis­trict court hearing the case refused to issue a pre­liminary injunction against enforcement of the law, and the Supreme Court vacated a preliminary injunction issued by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. Trial is scheduled for July 2008. The plaintiffs will have to convince the presiding judge that the very same proof of citizenship required by the federal government before an individual can work is somehow unlawful when imposed by a state before a person can vote.

Some non-citizen registrations can be detected through the jury process. The vast majority of state and federal courts draw their jury pools from voter registration lists, and the jury questionnaires used by court clerks ask potential jurors whether they are U.S. citizens. In most states, however, and throughout the federal court system, court clerks rarely notify local election officials that potential jurors have sworn under oath that they are not U.S. citizens. In jurisdictions that share that informa­tion, election officials routinely discover non-citi­zens on the voter rolls. For example, the district attorney in Maricopa County, Arizona, testified that after receiving a list of potential jurors who admit­ted they were not citizens, he indicted 10 who had registered to vote. (All had sworn on their registra­tion forms that they were U.S. citizens.) Four had actually voted in elections. The district attorney was investigating 149 other cases.

The county recorder in Maricopa County had also received inquiries from aliens seeking verifica­tion, for their citizenship applications, that they had not registered or voted. Thirty-seven of those aliens had registered to vote, and 15 of them had actually voted. As the county's district attorney explained, these numbers come "from a relatively small universe of individuals—legal immigrants who seek to become citizens…. These numbers do not tell us how many illegal immigrants have regis­tered and voted." Even these small numbers, though, could have been enough to sway an elec­tion. A 2004 Arizona primary election, explained the district attorney, was determined by just 13 votes. Clearly, non-citizens who illegally registered and voted in Maricopa County could have deter­mined the outcome of the election.

These numbers become more alarming when one considers that only a very small percentage of regis­tered voters are called for jury duty in most jurisdic­tions. The California Secretary of State reported in 1998 that 2,000 to 3,000 of the individuals sum­moned for jury duty in Orange County each month claimed an exemption from jury service because they were not U.S. citizens, and 85 percent to 90 percent of those individuals were summoned from the voter registration list, rather than Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) records. While some of those individuals may have simply committed per­jury to avoid jury service, this represents a signifi­cant number of potentially illegal voters: 20,400 to 30,600 non-citizens summoned from the voter reg­istration list over a one-year period.

Helping Aliens Vote

Under the Constitution, an individual's eligibility to vote is left mostly to the states. Article I and the 17th Amendment provide that the electors for Members of Congress shall have the qualifications for electors of the most numerous branch of the state legislatures. Article II provides that presi­dential electors shall be chosen in the manner directed by state legislatures. All of the states require voters to be U.S. citizens to vote in state elections, and 18 U.S.C. § 611 makes it a crime for "any alien to vote in any election held solely or in part for the purpose of electing a candidate for the office of President, Vice President, Presidential elector," or Congress.

Other federal laws authorize the Justice Department to prosecute non-citizens for registering and voting in elections. The National Voter Regis­tration Act of 1993 (NVRA) requires individuals registering to vote to affirm eligibility require­ments, including citizenship. The Help America Vote Act of 2002 (HAVA) added a specific citizen­ship question to the federal voter registration form. Since citizenship is clearly material to a voter's eligibility, aliens can be prosecuted for pro­viding false registration information and voting under the NVRA. They can also be prosecuted under 18 U.S.C. § 1015(f), which criminalizes mak­ing a false statement or claim about citizenship "in order to register to vote or to vote in any Federal, State, or local election (including an initiative, recall, or referendum)," and under 18 U.S.C. § 911, which prohibits making a false claim of citizenship.

The NVRA has contributed to the problem of aliens registering to vote. The largest source of voter registrations are state programs created under Section 5 of the NVRA, known as "Motor Voter," which requires all states to allow individuals who apply for a driver's license to register to vote at the same time. States such as Maryland, Hawaii, Maine, Michigan, New Mexico, Oregon, Utah, and Washington allow illegal aliens to obtain driver's licenses, and other states, such as Tennessee, pro­vide licenses to resident aliens.

To comply with Motor Voter, states automatically offer voter registration to all applicants for a driver's license. Most government employees do so even when they know the applicants are not citizens because these employees do not want to face claims that they discriminated based on ethnicity, and they believe it is the responsibility of election offi­cials, not state DMVs, to determine the eligibility of voter registration applicants. Yet when license bureaus submit completed registration forms to state election officials, they often omit the citizen­ship status of the applicants.

Savvy politicians may already have taken advan­tage of this state of affairs. During the Clinton Administration, for example, the Justice Depart­ment allegedly forced states to offer voter regis­tration to non-citizens. In response, the Texas Secretary of State reportedly asked his attorney general to sue the department.

Confusion still reigns in the states. In 2004, a Maryland state legislator contacted the DOJ to express his concern that the Maryland Department of Motor Vehicles was allowing non-citizens apply­ing for driver's licenses to register to vote. When he asked the DMV to stop, he was told that it was required by the NVRA to offer all driver's license applicants the opportunity to register to vote. The Justice Department quickly sent the Maryland dele­gate a letter pointing out that the NVRA had no such requirement and that federal law makes it a crime for a non-citizen to register. The letter went on to say that a state that issues licenses to non-cit­izens should not offer such an individual the right to register to vote. Nonetheless, there is no evi­dence that the Maryland DMV has changed its pro­cedures to deter non-citizens from registering, and Maryland officials recently testified that they were issuing 2,000 driver's licenses per week to undocu­mented aliens.

Utah, which issues licenses to illegal aliens, switched to a two-tiered system that issues a visibly different "driving privilege" card to illegal aliens after a limited 2005 audit by the state's Legislative Auditor General. The audit found that hundreds of illegal aliens had registered to vote when they obtained their Utah driver's licenses—and at least 14 of them had voted. The audit used a small sample; Utah State Senator Mark Madsen said that an extrapolation of the audit numbers suggested that 5,000 to 7,000 aliens were registered to vote.

This problem has been exacerbated by many states' interpretation of a HAVA provision that requires a citizenship question on the federal mail-in voter registration form. The provision, in 42 U.S.C. § 15483, requires the following question: "Are you a citizen of the United States of America?" If an applicant fails to answer this question, HAVA provides that the local election official must notify the applicant of the failure and "provide the appli­cant with an opportunity to complete the form in a timely manner to allow for the completion of the registration form" prior to the election. Under the threat of lawsuits by organizations like the Ameri­can Civil Liberties Union, states such as Ohio, Iowa, and South Dakota will register an individual even if he fails to answer the citizenship question. The Justice Department so far has failed to sue these states to force compliance with HAVA.

HAVA also imposes an identification require­ment for first-time voters who register by mail. Many states, including California, have interpreted this provision to apply only to registration forms received through the U.S. mail, so the requirement is easily avoided by turning in the registration form directly to election officials. Additionally, docu­ments named in the law as acceptable forms of identification for voter registration, such as utility bills and bank statements, are easily obtained by non-citizens. HAVA also requires applicants to pro­vide a driver's license number or the last four digits of their Social Security number but allows an indi­vidual to register even if he has neither number.

Practical Solutions

There are several changes that states and the fed­eral government can and should make to prevent non-citizens from registering and voting illegally in state and federal elections:

* Congress and state legislatures should require all federal and state courts to notify local elec­tion officials when individuals summoned for jury duty from voter registration rolls are excused because they are not United States citi­zens. United States Attorneys are already under a similar obligation: Under the NVRA, they must send information on felony convictions to local election officials so that the felons can be removed from voter registration rolls.

* All states should require anyone who registers to vote to provide proof of U.S. citizenship. This requirement should be identical to the fed­eral requirement of proof for employment.

* ICE and CIS should comply with federal law and confirm the citizenship status of registered voters when they receive requests for such information from state and local election officials. If the agen­cies decline to do so, they should be investigated by Congress and the Inspector General of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for their failure to follow the law.

* The database, known as E-Verify, that is being used by U.S. employers to check the citizenship status of prospective employees should be made available to election officials and administrators of the statewide registration databases required by HAVA so that election officials can run data­base comparisons to identify registered voters who are not citizens.

* The DOJ should file enforcement actions against all states that allow an individual to register to vote when he or she has not answered the citi­zenship question on the voter registration form required by HAVA.

* Local district attorneys must be made to realize that registration and voting by non-citizens are offenses against the basic principles of our dem­ocratic system and that such cases must be prosecuted. CIS and ICE should also realize that all information they have on non-citizen voting—such as when immigrants applying for citizenship admit they have registered and voted or when illegal aliens who are detained are found to possess voter registration cards or other documents indicating they are registered to vote—must be referred to the DHS for insti­tution of removal proceedings, to the DOJ for prosecution, and to the relevant election offi­cials so that the individual can be struck from the registration rolls.

* The DOJ should conduct a survey of all state DMVs to determine which ones have rules and procedures in place that prevent non-citizens who apply for driver's licenses from register­ing to vote and then file enforcement actions against any state that refuses to comply with this requirement.

* A voter registration card should not be a valid identifying document to obtain a driver's license or employment.

America has always been a nation of immi­grants, and we remain today the most welcoming nation in the world. Newly minted citizens assimi­late and become part of the American culture very quickly. Requiring that our laws—all of our laws— be complied with requires no more of an alien than it does of a citizen. It is a violation of both state and federal law for immigrants who are not citizens to vote in state and federal elections. These violations effectively disenfranchise legiti­mate voters whose votes are diluted, and they must be curtailed.

Election officials have an obligation not only to enforce those laws, but also to implement registra­tion and election procedures that do not allow those laws to be bypassed or ignored. Anything less encourages contempt for the law and our election process. Lax enforcement of election laws permits individuals who have not entered the American social compact or made a commitment to the U.S. Constitution, U.S. laws, and the U.S. cultural and political heritage to participate in elections and potentially change the outcome of closely contested races that affect how all Americans are governed.

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[RunInRed 18,280]

:playingalong: And how do propose we fund this new program at the DMV?

[Tigermike 3,692]

:playingalong: And how do propose we fund this new program at the DMV?

And how much could a few free ID's cost? Never mind if the dems and federal government are involved it would be a billion $$$$$$ program.

The right to vote in free and fair elections is one of the fundamental rights underlying the democratic principles of the American republic. Everyone who is eligible to vote should be able to do so, but at the same time, such votes should not be diminished or stolen by fraudulently cast ballots or votes by ineligible individuals such as convicted felons who have not gone through the process of having their voting rights restored, illegal aliens or people who have been dead for years.

The better question would be how many illegal votes are you willing to accept in order to not inconvenience a few homeless guys?

[jj3jordan 2,169]

Does the constitution require you to have a drivers license or photo ID to vote?

Does the Constitution require you to fund some one else's health care insurance?

[Tigermike 3,692]

A phantom problem, indeed...

Oddly enough, requiring a photo ID to cast a vote would only be effective in preventing individuals from impersonating other voters at the polls -- an occurrence that is, according to a study released by the Brennan Center, more rare than getting struck by lightning. In fact, voter fraud (when individuals cast ballots despite knowing that they are ineligible to vote, in an attempt to defraud the election system) is hardly a realistic political concern. From the Bush administration's five-year national "war on voter fraud," there were only 86 convictions of illegal voting out of more than 196 million votes cast. Of those 86 convictions, only 26 were attributable to individual voters, and most of those were misunderstandings about eligibility. What is more, connection to voter fraud in a federal election carries grave punishments, including a $10,000 fine and five years in prison, in addition to any state penalties. This is a risk that very few people are willing to take, particularly for the result of one incremental vote.

Whether by intention or not, politicians and media have managed to conflate a host of election administration problems under the umbrella of "voter fraud" -- a move which has fueled a Republican-backed campaign across multiple states to pass voter ID laws. Things like clerical or typographical errors in the poll books, registration records, and underlying data are examples of occurrences that may get mistaken for voter fraud. Justin Levitt, author of The Truth About Voter Fraud, cites matching voter rolls against each other or against some other source to find alleged double voters, dead voters, or otherwise ineligible voters as the most common source of superficial claims of voter fraud, as well as the most common source of error. Thus, it is largely human error in the voting process that results in inaccurate accusations of voter fraud and feeds exaggerated concern over this "phantom problem."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/victoria-coats/voter-id-laws_b_950291.html

Facts and stuff. They'll get your argument every time.

Just to shed a little light on your sources:

the Brennan Center,

* Leftist think tank and legal activist group, whose heaviest financial contributor is George Soros’ Open Society Institute

* Supports campaign -finance reform, judicial activism, voting rights for felons, and living-wage laws

Founded in 1995, the Brennan Center for Justice is a think tank and legal activist group affiliated with New York University Law School and pursues a wide range of goals drawn from the radical agenda of Sixties activism as well as from the program of Goerge Soros' Open Society Institute. The Center generates scholarly studies, mounts media campaigns, files amicus briefs, gives pro bono support to activists, and litigates test cases in pursuit of radical "change." It employs 35 full-time staff, including attorneys, social scientists, researchers, and publicists.

Former Amherst College president Tom Gerety became Executive Director of the Brennan Center in May 2003, succeeding Founding Director E. Joshua Rosenkranz. The Center's stated mission is to carry on the work of its namesake, former Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Jr. (1906 - 1997), who pioneered the modern practice of "legislating from the bench" and gave birth to the doctrine of the "living" Constitution whose relationship to the Founders’ document is “evolving.” The Brennan Center runs the following programs and projects:

(d) Voting and Representation Project: Works to grant voting rights to felons and other "disenfranchised" groups; seeks redistricting and other systemic changes that would primarily benefit Democrats and other leftist parties; promotes electoral reforms whose practical effect would be to make voter fraud easier.

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There is an agenda at play here and it isn't the right trying to suppress votes.

[RunInRed 18,280]

Does the constitution require you to have a drivers license or photo ID to vote?

Does the Constitution require you to fund some one else's health care insurance?

Who's healthcare are you funding? Better yet, who has funded yours?

[RunInRed 18,280]

When you can't attack the facts, you attack the source. It's an old trick, who are you trying to fool?

[tiger88 934]

When you can't attack the facts, you attack the source. It's an old trick, who are you trying to fool?

Says the guy who has presented a small amount of quotes from ultra liberal sources, only to be countered by a mountain of facts from opposing sources, and ignored almost all of these posts while throwing in a few cute little Arnaldo/liberal style quips and a song and dance or two and now is doing his best to claim a inexplicably smug victory that exists only in his guilty brain washed liberal mind. "wink".

[Tigermike 3,692]

When you can't attack the facts, you attack the source. It's an old trick, who are you trying to fool?

When your "source" is an agenda driven paid puppet of George Soros it's worth pointing out.

When the "facts" your "source" uses are inaccurate and incompletely presented in order to bolster your agenda it needs to be pointed out.

New Myths on Voter ID

By Hans A. von Spakovsky

October 13, 2011 8:00 A.M.

Last weekend, both the New York Times and the Washington Post ran commentaries claiming that voter fraud is a myth. “There is almost no voting fraud in America,” pronounced the Post’s October 9 editorial. Apparently the liberal commentariat spurns reading readily available case studies on election fraud, and well-researched books detailing fraud, including John Fund’s Stealing Elections and Larry Sabato’s Dirty Little Secrets.

The fraud denialists also must have missed the recent news coverage of the double voters in North Carolina and the fraudster in Tunica County, Miss. — a member of the NAACP’s local executive committee — who was sentenced in April to five years in prison for voting in the names of ten voters, including four who were deceased. And the story of the former deputy chief of staff for Washington mayor Vincent Gray, who was forced to resign after news broke that she had voted illegally in the District of Columbia even though she was a Maryland resident. Perhaps they would like a copy of an order from a federal immigration court in Florida on a Cuban immigrant who came to the U.S. in April 2004 and promptly registered and voted in the November election.

But the papers go beyond denying even the existence of fraud. They also erroneously claim that new voter-ID laws and other reforms designed to protect the integrity of the democratic process are actually intended to suppress the votes of Democrats and minorities.

None of this is true, of course, and the “evidence” presented to support those allegations is nothing but smoke and mirrors. All claims about vote suppression and supposedly huge numbers of voters who don’t have ID are based on a dubious study released a week ago by the Brennan Center, a partisan and unobjective advocacy organization.

The “report” by the Brennan Center, “Voting Law Changes in 2012,” claims that 5 million voters will be disenfranchised due to the recent “wave” of election laws that have been implemented. That total is supposedly made up of:

1. 3.2 million voters who will be unable to vote because of voter-ID laws.

2. 240,000 voters who will be unable to vote because of laws requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote.

3. 202,000 voters registered in 2008 through voter-registration drives that have now been made extremely difficult or impossible under new laws.

4. 630,000 voters registered in 2008 through Election Day voter registration where it has now been repealed.

5. One to two million voters who voted in 2008 on days eliminated under new laws rolling back the time allowed for early voting prior to election day.

6. At least 100,000 disenfranchised felons who might have regained voting rights by 2012.

When deconstructing the total number, almost all of the supposed millions of voters affected are based on the 1st and 5th bullet points (3.2 million and 1 to 2 million), which are fallacious; and the merits of the rest of the “key” points don’t hold up under close examination.

An analytic reader of the Brennan Center report can’t help but wonder “Where’s the beef?” Most of the 2011 report is based on an extrapolation of an earlier, even more questionable report released in 2006. I pointed out the numerous problems with that 2006 study in a recent National Review article:

About the only thing the Left has had to rely on for its hollow claims about photo ID is a flawed 2006 study — titled “Citizens without Proof” — by the Brennan Center at NYU’s law school supposedly showing that millions of Americans who are eligible to vote lack photo ID. The Brennan Center has been vigorous in opposing almost every sensible voter reform, from voter ID to requiring proof of citizenship when registering to vote. This 2006 study is dubious in its methodology and especially suspect in its sweeping conclusions. It is based on a survey of only 987 “voting-age American citizens,” although it contains no infor­mation on how it was determined whether a respondent was actually an American citizen entitled to vote, and might easily have included illegal and legal aliens, felons, and others who are ineligible. The survey then uses the responses of these 987 individuals to estimate, based on the 2000 Census, the number of Americans without valid documentation. Although the report says it was weighted to account for underrepresentation of race, it does not provide the methodology used.

By neglecting to ask whether respondents were actual or likely voters, registered voters, or even eligible voters, the study ignored the most relevant data: the number of eligible citizens who would have actually voted but could not because of voter-ID laws. All pollsters know that the only really accurate polls are of likely voters, not of the voting-age population. Surveys of registered voters have shown the exact opposite of the Brennan Center study: American University found that less than one-half of 1 percent of registered voters in Maryland, Indiana, and Mississippi lacked a government-issued ID. A 2006 survey of more than 36,000 voters found that only 23 people in the entire sample would be unable to vote because of an ID requirement.

Also, the Brennan Center survey didn’t ask whether people had IDs; it asked whether IDs were “readily available.” And the question about citizenship documentation asked whether respondents had access “in a place where you can quickly find it if you had to show it tomorrow,” even though elections are not scheduled on such a short-term basis. This was obviously intended to skew the results. The survey also failed to ask whether respondents had student IDs, which are acceptable under many state laws, or tribal IDs, which are acceptable in some states, including Georgia and Arizona. On one question, 14 percent of respondents were so confused that they said they had both a U.S. birth certificate and naturalization papers.

So there really is nothing behind the claim that 3.2 million voters will supposedly be unable to vote because of new voter-ID laws. This is especially true because these same types of claims were made in the federal lawsuits filed against voter-ID laws in Indiana and Georgia. Those lawsuits were dismissed because the plaintiffs were unable to produce a single individual, much less “millions” of voters, who would be unable to vote because of the requirement to show a photo ID. (Note: All of the states provide a free photo ID to anyone who can’t afford one). As a Heritage study found, sharply higher turnout in the 2008 and 2010 elections in Georgia and Indiana proved that voter ID does not prevent Democrats or minorities from voting. Five years later, the disastrous results that the Brennan Center has been predicting since 2006 have never materialized.

Next, the Brennan Center claims that 240,000 voters will be unable to vote because of new laws in Georgia, Kansas, and Arizona that require proof of citizenship to register to vote. Again, there is no evidence to support their numbers, which are based on their flawed 2006 study. In upholding Arizona’s proof of citizenship requirement in 2008, federal district court judge Roslyn Silver (a Clinton appointee) noted that the plaintiffs had “only produced one person . . . who is unable to register to vote due to” the new requirement and had produced no evidence that “the persons rejected are in fact eligible to register to vote.”

Georgia recently sued the Holder Justice Department because of its delay and dilatory tactics in reviewing Georgia’s proof-of-citizenship law under Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act. After the state filed suit, the Department immediately capitulated and precleared the law without objection because it was unable to produce a single scintilla of evidence that requiring proof of citizenship to vote was discriminatory or that any eligible U.S. citizens would be unable to vote.

The Brennan Center claims that 202,000 potential voters will be affected by new rules on voter-registration drives conducted by third-party organizations like ACORN. They base this number on voters who registered in 2008 through such drives. But again, there is no proof that voters will not simply register via one of the many other ways provided under the National Voter Registration Act or Motor Voter — such as registering at state DMVs, which is the way the vast majority of Americans register.

More important, the new rules imposed by states like Florida are, contrary to the Brennan Center’s claims, intended to guarantee the enfranchisement of voters. For example, Florida will now require organizations to turn in voter-registration forms within 48 hours of their completion by voters. This is intended to stop the disenfranchisement that has occurred in past elections due to organizations like ACORN holding on to these forms past the registration deadlines. Election officials will tell you that they have received thousands of forms, some of them months old, either on the eve of the registration deadline (making it very difficult to process them before the election) or past the deadline, which disenfranchises voters who thought they had gotten registered for an upcoming election.

Florida also now requires organizations to put an identification code for their organization on each registration form so election officials will know which organization screwed up a registration when it comes in incomplete. That was also caused in large part by the thousands of incomplete and fraudulent registration forms submitted by ACORN. I fail to understand how that requirement will keep people from registering to vote.

Next, the Brennan Center claims that 630,000 potential voters will be affected by the elimination of Election Day voter registration in states like Maine because that is how some voters registered in 2008. Again, there is no evidence that such individuals will not register prior to Election Day like all other voters. The Maine Heritage Policy Center just released a study concluding that Election Day registration “had no recognizable impact on voter turnout in Maine since its implementation in 1973. In fact, the three lowest turnout years since 1960 occurred after EDR was implemented.” California voters defeated a 2002 referendum to implement Election Day registration 59 percent to 41 percent, and even such liberal newspapers as the Los Angeles Times and the San Francisco Chronicle warned against its implementation because of the potential for voter fraud.

The Brennan Center’s figure of 1 to 2 million voters who will be affected because of new laws rolling back the time allowed for early voting also has no data to back it up. In fact, turnout data from prior elections show quite the opposite. Curtis Gans of American University has done a number of studies comparing turnout in early-voting states with turnout in other states. He found that turnout in national elections increases at a slower rate (or decreases at a steeper rate) in states with early voting, compared with states without early voting.

Gans speculates that early voting just provides greater convenience to individuals who would vote anyway on Election Day. Since campaigns spend the bulk of their money on get-out-the-vote efforts just before Election Day, that concentrated effort may not be as effective when it is spread out over a long period of time in states with early voting. So the claim that Florida’s changing its early-voting period from 13 days to seven days, or Georgia from 45 days to 21 days, will decrease turnout is pure speculation by the Brennan Center. The evidence points to the contrary. Brennan assumes that a person who previously voted ten days before early voting ended will decline to vote between one and seven days before it ends. Transforming that faulty assumption into “disenfranchisement” is absurd. Even if the assumption were correct, the voter would have disenfranchised himself by choosing not to vote any time during a week-long period.

Finally, the Brennan Center claims that 100,000 felons will be unable to vote because of changes in state laws making it more difficult for felons to regain voting rights. States have a constitutional right under the Fourteenth Amendment to take away the right to vote from individuals for “participation in rebellion, or other crime.” There is no constitutional barrier to Florida’s requiring a five-year waiting period for felons before they can apply for restoration to prove they have learned their lesson, paid their debt to society, and successfully reintegrated themselves into civil society. The Brennan Center views this — and the fact that the five-year period resets if a felon is rearrested — as a vicious violation of a felon’s rights. The Center is entitled to its opinion, but opinions are not facts.

Some of the bias in the report is very telling, such as a passage on page 18 that says that the claims of Colorado secretary of state Scott Gessler and Kansas secretary of state Kris Kobach about finding noncitizens registered to vote have been “debunked.” What do they cite for this debunking? Another questionable Brennan Center study that simply said that “without the underlying reports and methodologies . . . any conclusions cannot be fully supported or dismissed.” It also relies on a statement from Rep. Charles Gonzalez (D., Texas), who attacked Gessler at a House Administration Committee hearing for being honest enough to state the limitations on his data, but didn’t offer any evidence to refute Gessler’s report. So a Democratic congressman’s unsupported attacks are taken as both true and sufficient to counter the carefully described research of a Republican secretary of state. By the way, a credited contributor to the 2011 report is none other than Myrna Perez, President Obama’s nominee to fill a Democratic seat as a commissioner on the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

To judge from the number of reports citing its conclusions, the Brennan Center report is certainly a successful propaganda effort. However, neither the editorials of the Washington Post and the New York Times nor the Brennan Center report are empirically driven. Rather, they are myth-driven diatribes against common-sense election reform that the vast majority of the American people agree with, no matter what their race or political background. They are certainly not the devastating constraints on voters that the Brennan Center’s report puffs them up to be.

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