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clipped from "How to Steal an Election"
John Fund

Wholesale vote fraud is on the rise again, almost all of it trying to elect Democratic candidates. The reason that the cheating is happening overwhelmingly among the Dems these days may have something to do with who supports the respective parties, say Larry Sabato and Glenn Simpson in their book Dirty Little Secrets. Republican voters tend to be middle class and not easily tempted to commit fraud, while "the pool of people who appear to be available and more vulnerable to an invitation to participate in vote fraud tend to lean Democratic." Most incidents of wide-scale fraud, agrees Paul Harrison, director of the Center for American Politics at the University of Maryland, "reportedly occur in inner cities."

Barely a day has gone by in the run-up to the 2004 election without another outrageous story hitting the headlines. In Lansing, Michigan, the city clerk's office complained in late September about 5,000 to 8,000 fraudulent voter-registration forms that had recently come in—courtesy, election officials believed, of the Public Interest Research Group, a liberal advocacy outfit. In Racine, Wisconsin, around the same time, election officials discovered that Project Vote, another left-wing advocacy group, had filed scores of applications with phony addresses and other questionable items. The acting city clerk asked the district attorney's office to pursue possible criminal charges. Ohio, Nevada, Iowa—similar stories abounded in states across the country.

Why is such activity proliferating? It flows from the success of Democratic lawmakers in pushing aside clear, orderly, and rigorous voting procedures in favor of elastic and "inclusive" election rules that invite manipulation. A machine for corruption is the 1993 "Motor Voter Act," the first bill that President Clinton signed. The law requires government officials to allow anyone who renews a driver's license or applies for welfare or unemployment to register to vote on the spot, without showing ID or proof of citizenship. It also allows ID-free registration by mail. The law also makes it hard to purge voting lists of those who've died or moved. All this makes vote fraud a cinch, almost as easy as when Tammany Hall handed out pre-marked ballots.

Among the many abuses it has spawned, the Motor Voter law seems to have enabled illegal aliens to vote—for Democrats, evidence suggests. A 1996 INS investigation into alleged Motor Voter fraud in California's 46th congressional district discovered that "4,023 illegal voters possibly cast ballots in the disputed election between Republican Robert Dornan and Democrat Loretta Sanchez." Dornan lost by fewer than 1,000 votes. In 2002, Dean Gardner, a losing GOP candidate for California's state legislature, sent out a survey to 14,000 first-time voters. A total of 1,691 surveys came back. The results were startling: 76 people admitted that they weren't citizens but had voted, while 49 claimed not to have registered at their correct residence, as the law requires. Gardner lost by only 266 votes.

In the 2000 election, as the Missouri secretary of state later discovered, 56,000 St. Louis-area voters held multiple voter registrations. No one knows how much actual fraud took place, but it may have played a role in the Democratic defeats of incumbent Republican senator John Ashcroft, who lost his seat by 49,000 votes, and gubernatorial candidate Jim Talent, who lost by 21,000 votes.

All these stories of potential electoral abuses, Democrats retort, pale beside the Republican shenanigans that helped deliver Florida to George W. Bush in 2000. Media recounts that showed that Bush would have won Florida under any reasonable recount standard are beside the point, they say. Election officials wrongly identified thousands of people as felons, most of them minorities, thus preventing them from voting under the state's election laws. If those votes had counted, Democrats charge, Al Gore would be president today.

But both the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post found that, if anything, election officials were too permissive in whom they allowed to cast ballots. A Post analysis discovered that 5,600 people voted whose names matched those of convicted felons. "These illegal voters almost certainly influenced the down-to-the-wire presidential election," the Post reported. "Of the likely felons identified by the Post, 68 percent were registered Democrats."

Democrats think that the ambiguity in election laws will work to their benefit this fall, allowing them to litigate every single close race. Unfortunately, if "anything goes" continue to be the ballot bywords, the nation may soon wake up to a crisis even bigger than the 2000 Florida nightmare. Perhaps then the public will demand to know who subverted the election laws. But wouldn't it be better if we did something about the problem now—even if it's as simple as requiring everyone who votes to show an ID? In 2004, we should be well past the days of Boss Tweed.