The Times Supports Vote Fraud

Conservatives approach the sanctity of the ballot differently than do liberals. Conservatives see fraud as significantly more threatening than disenfranchisement; liberals the reciprocal. Conservatives willingly subject those purporting to be lawful voters to the inconvenience of actually having to minimally establish that fact rather than tolerate any fraud; liberals happily tolerate considerable fraud rather than risk discouraging a single lawful vote too lazy to prove his identity.

From a crassly partisan perspective, this results, presumably, from the opinion of both sides that those committing fraud are more likely to vote for liberals than for conservatives.

Consider the editorial in today’s Times praising the Obama Justice Department for its invalidation, under the Voting Rights Act, of a two innocuous voter ID schemes in Georgia. As the Gray Lady describes these horrific proposals:

"One, known as "no match, no vote," flagged new registrants whose basic information — name, date of birth, driver’s license number and last four digits of the Social Security number — did not match government databases. The other checked citizenship status through a similar matching process."

The difficulty, as The Times presents it, is human error:

"When the Justice Department investigated the "no match, no vote" results, it found that thousands of eligible Georgia voters were wrongly flagged, often because of small glitches, like transposed digits in a driver’s license number. In the case of the citizenship check, over half of the roughly 7,000 people flagged as potential noncitizens actually were citizens."

So, Smith shows up at the polls, but is on "the list" because someone at DMV transposed a driver’s license number. Process: said voter casts a provisional ballot and can then provide the necessary proof. No big deal, right?

But consider the last sentence of that paragraph. Approximately half of the people flagged as non citizens WERE NOT CITIZENS AND WERE ON THE ROLLS!! This, apparently, concerns The Times not in the least.

Al Franken – God help us all – will likely soon take a seat in the United States Senate. He "won" that seat by a margin of a few hundred votes. If even 2,500 non-citizens voted (again, presumably the Left believes that those folks support Democrats or they would not be trying so hard to keep them on the voting rolls) such has a huge national impact.

Apparently, most of the folks flagged as potentially non-citizens were minorities. Imagine that. When looking for non-citizens, a disproportionate number of Hispanics and Asians get flagged. That, The Times suggests, is "discriminatory". Presumably, no such process will be tolerable until it flags an equal number of European immigrants fraudulently registered to vote.

The minor inconvenience attendant to dealing with governmental bureaucracy does not constitute a huge violation of civil rights, let alone represent a nefarious effort to repress minority voters. It represents the inescapable consequences of the salutary attempt to ensure that many thousands of ineligible registrants do not vote. By The Times' own backhanded admission, thousands of ineligible voters were caught by the Georgia program.

But what’s a little vote fraud among friends?