By Ken Blackwell
For years, Republicans have pushed to improve election integrity. Democrats, aided by the courts, have fiercely resisted efforts to ensure honest elections. But there’s no good argument against making sure that everyone who casts a ballot is eligible to do so, and that they cast only one per election.
After all, illegal voting is not a victimless crime. Every invalid ballot dilutes the votes of the rest of us. A democracy that does not secure the polls represents rule by the crooked rather than by the people.
Nevertheless, Democratic politicians have fought to make fraud simple. They don’t put it that way, waxing eloquent about battling against voter “suppression” and the like. But the only person who suffers when an ID is required is someone seeking to cast a ballot in another person’s name.
President Donald Trump caused a liberal brouhaha when he asserted that he would have won the popular vote if illegal votes had not been cast. There’s no way to prove his claim, but it doesn’t really matter. Old Dominion University’s Jesse Richman figures that Hillary Clinton gained about 834,000 votes from noncitizens alone who cast ballots.
By his estimate, 6.4 percent of the 20 million adult foreigners living in America voted, most of them for the Democratic nominee. This certainly inflated her popular vote total and might have added electoral votes. Had Trump done slightly worse in the battleground states, the illegal votes could have given her victory in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and thus the presidency.
Apart from noncitizens voting illegally, there’s plenty of fraud committed by people voting for the dead or in multiple jurisdictions. Back in 2012, the Pew Center on the States found nearly 24 million inaccurate or invalid registrations — one of every eight. There were almost two million dead people on the rolls and three million registered in multiple states. About 70,000 people were registered in at least three states!
That’s a lot of potential erroneous or fraudulent votes. Some problems are impossible to miss: an investigation by the (ACRU) found numerous registrants on the Pennsylvania rolls who were apparently hale, hearty, and civically active at age 100 or even 200 years. In 2013, the New York City Department of Investigation sent out staffers to cast evidently fraudulent ballots. In an incredible 97 percent of the cases the investigators were allowed to vote. When confronted with the results, the Board of Elections suggested charging the inspectors with election fraud!
Orchestrating vote fraud takes effort. But voting by noncitizens is easy if they’re not required to prove citizenship when registering or a photo ID when voting. And most of them lean Democratic. Acting individually, one by one, without any organized conspiracy, they can change election results for the presidency and other offices across America.
Read more of ACRU Policy Board member Ken Blackwell’s American Thinker article.
