Vote Fraud Blindness

During the last two year term, the Legislature tackled many new initiatives, ostensibly designed to improve New Jersey’s electoral system. Some of the ideas commanded virtually unanimous support; others were more problematic.

But notable by its absence was even the slightest effort to make the ballot box more secure by insisting on proper identification.

Consider this rant from a representative of the League of Women Voters in Georgia in response to a perfectly reasonable proposal to counteract vote fraud:

Georgia has become the toughest place in America for eligible registered voters to cast their ballots. After a rancorous and racially charged debate, Georgia lawmakers passed legislation to require voters to produce government-issued photo identification at the polls.

Georgia's new voter ID law will impact voters of all parties, of every race and in all parts of our state

For the hundreds of thousands of Georgia voters who do not drive, are not in the military, do not work for the government and do not travel abroad, getting a form of ID that will be accepted at the polls will involve traveling to one of only 56 locations in the state that issue such identification, waiting in long lines and paying a fee or declaring indigence.

This change is unconstitutional, nothing short of voter disenfranchisement and a tremendous threat to our most fundamental right, the right to vote."

So, now, being compelled to prove that you are entitled to vote is "unconstitutional", a mortal threat against the right to vote.

The possibility that some potential voter might be too lazy to spend an hour or so doing that which needs to be done to secure such an ID constitutes a very minor threat to democracy. Vote fraud presents a much more immediate menace. Across the nation, those who consider winning, and the attendant power victory produces, more important than actually getting more votes, often resort to vote fraud. Typically, this involves getting people to vote more than once, registering non-existent voters, and employing absentee ballots which are far easier to manipulate and far more difficult to police.

Here in New Jersey, and across the nation, the Democrats raised a massive stink about the wholly hypothetical possibility that some computer hacker might breach the voting machines and steal votes; they insisted that electronic voting machines produce paper receipts. And, yet, they did precisely nothing to prevent more mundane forms of voter fraud, which is to say, fraud methods which actually exist, example of which abound, and which could be substantially curtailed were some form of ID required to register and vote.

At minimum, some form of photo ID should be required for all voters. Ideally, we’d even go beyond that, and insist upon an electronic ID system with unique PIN numbers, similar to ATMs.

The political left – including, obviously, the LOWV – apparently believes that fair elections, in which only qualified voters cast ballots, represent a mortal threat to their electoral chances. That it’s better to tolerate fraud than to run the risk that some small group of otherwise qualified voters simply can’t find the time in their busy schedules – for years – to secure a voter ID card.

The Democrats enacted legislation which spends tens of millions of dollars to upgrade electronic voting machines against purely speculative threats, but refuses to take even the most modest action against abuses of which examples abound.

At what conclusion would a reasonable observer arrive?