Organization Trends
Voter Fraud is Real
Voter fraud is real and voter ID laws are needed to protect the integrity of the ballot box, writes Jack Kelly of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Kelly’s column begins:
The state chairman of Indiana’s Democratic Party resigned Monday as a probe of election fraud in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary widened.
State law requires a presidential candidate to gather 500 valid signatures in each county to qualify for the ballot. Barack Obama may not have met it. Investigators think 150 of the 534 signatures the Obama campaign turned in for St. Joseph County may have been forged.
Yet Democrats say that measures to guard against vote fraud are racist Republican plots to disenfranchise minority voters.
Republicans “want to literally drag us back to Jim Crow laws,” said Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Fla, chair of the Democratic National Committee.
The NAACP has asked the United Nations to intervene to block state voter ID laws. It may have an ulterior motive for opposing ballot security measures. An NAACP official was convicted on 10 counts of absentee voter fraud in Tunica County, Miss., in July.
Former Democratic Rep. Artur Davis, who is black, said vote fraud is rampant in African-American districts like his in Alabama.
“The most aggressive contemporary voter suppression in the African-American community is the wholesale manufacture of ballots at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt,” Mr. Davis said. “Voting the names of the dead, and the nonexistent, and the too mentally impaired to function cancels out the votes of citizens who are exercising their rights.” […]