ACRU’s Complaint against Noxubee County, Mississippi
ALEXANDRIA, VA (Nov. 16, 2015) — The on Thursday, Nov. [...]
Meet the Police Officer Who’s Been Charged with Voter Fraud
By Hans von Spakovsky Call the cops! It looks like someone is committing voter fraud in Indiana again! Ironically, in this case, however, the alleged fraudster who has been arrested by the Indiana State Police was a cop. Unfortunately, even officers who graduate from the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy are capable of violating the public trust by allegedly trying to steal an election. That is the case with Officer Lowell Ross Colen of the Rising Sun Police Department, a small Indiana town of around 2,300 people on the Ohio River across from Kentucky. Colen was apparently an average guy at the police department. According to his chief, Dave Hewitt, Colen was "fairly well liked and very loyal." Hewitt described Colen as the "kind of guy that would come in and put his time in." However, it seems Colen was doing more than providing for the public safety while on duty at the Rising Sun Police Department. Colen wanted individuals to vote for his father, Francis "Swede" Colen, in the 2015 May primary for city council. So, he allegedly proceeded to fill out absentee ballot applications for people who were not even eligible to vote in the election, and then voted with these ballots after he received them from election officials. According to the Indiana State Police Department, he forged the signatures of the supposed voters on some of the documents before turning them into the Ohio County, Ind. clerk's office. In some cases, Officer Colen is even believed to have been in uniform and on duty while committing the acts. In a twist of fate, the voting scofflaw was arrested in his home on charges of official misconduct, forgery, voter fraud and ghost employment. He has been charged with 13 felony counts, and is, of course, entitled to a presumption of innocence, so it remains to be seen what the final disposition will be. Nonetheless, this goes to show that, contrary to what some skeptics say, voting fraud does occur in this country. In local elections with small margins of victory, fraud is especially able to be the deciding factor.
Destroying Your Vote
By Walter Williams Voter ID laws have been challenged because liberal Democrats deem them racist. I guess that's because they see blacks as being incapable of acquiring some kind of government-issued identification. Interesting enough is the fact that I've never heard of a challenge to other ID requirements as racist, such as those: to board a plane, open a charge account, have lab work done or cash a welfare check. Since liberal Democrats only challenge legal procedures to promote ballot-box integrity, the conclusion one reaches is that they are for vote fraud prevalent in many Democrat-controlled cities. There is another area where the attack on ballot-box integrity goes completely unappreciated. We can examine this attack by looking at the laws governing census taking. As required by law, the U.S. Census Bureau is supposed to count all persons in the U.S. Those to be counted include citizens, legal immigrants and non-citizen long-term visitors. The law also requires that illegal immigrants be a part of the decennial census. The estimated number of illegal immigrants ranges widely from 12 million to 30 million. Official estimates put the actual number closer to 12 million. Both citizens and non-citizens are included in the census and thus affect apportionment counts. Counting illegals in the census undermines one of the fundamental principles of representative democracy --- namely, that every citizen-voter has an equal voice. Through the decennial census-based process of apportionment, states with large numbers of illegal immigrants, such as California and Texas, unconstitutionally gain additional members in the U.S. House of Representatives thereby robbing the citizen-voters in other states of their rightful representation.
Carson: Voter ID Laws Not Racist
Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson dismissed the idea that restrictive anti-voter fraud requirements could be racist, echoing the position of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach -- a champion of such measures who has called accusations of racism a personal insult. "I've made it my personal project, every time I visit a country outside the U.S., to ask what do they do to ensure the integrity of voting? There's not one single country anywhere -- first world, second world, it doesn't matter -- that doesn't have official requirements for voting," Carson said on Oct. 16. "My question to those people who say we're racist because we apply those standards: Are all the other countries of the world racist? I don't think so. Voting is an important thing. Obviously, you want to make sure that it's done by the appropriate people." Carson made the comments in an interview with The Topeka Capital-Journal ahead of a planned appearance in Topeka. Kobach, who is also a Republican, drew fire from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who posted a tweet linking to a New York Times story on Kansas' plan to purge incomplete voter registrations older than 90 days. She commented: "We should be doing everything we can to get young people more engaged in our democracy, not putting up obstacles." The tweet was the second time Clinton has criticized Kobach in recent months. In August, Clinton called the purge of the incomplete registrations a "targeted attack on voting rights." In both cases, Kobach hit back. Last week, he said every noncitizen vote cancels out a citizen's vote. "The Hillary Clinton campaign is unhappy with the fact that Kansas has the most secure election system in the country," Kobach said.
Federal Lawsuits Stay Alive over North Carolina Voter ID Law
WINSTON-SALEM, N.C. -- A federal judge has refused to dismiss portions of federal lawsuits challenging North Carolina's upcoming voter identification requirement, setting up a likely trial early next year. U.S. District Court Judge Thomas Schroeder denied the motion from attorneys for the state during a court hearing Oct. 18 in Winston-Salem. The state wrote that the voter ID claims filed in 2013 by civil rights groups, voters and the federal government are moot because the legislature eased the photo identification requirement that begins in 2016. The plaintiffs argued the modified voter ID mandate still threatens to burden black and Hispanic voters, who are less likely to have qualifying IDs. Photo ID is supposed to begin with the March 15 primary.
Tough Kansas Voter ID Laws Trigger Lawsuits
TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) - Secretary of State Kris Kobach's successful push to require new Kansas voters to document their U.S. citizenship has spawned three lawsuits, including one he pursued against a federal agency in trying to enforce the policy. Kansas is one of only four states that make new voters show a birth certificate, passport or other citizenship papers. The Kansas requirement took effect in 2013, and Kobach has directed county election officials to cancel more than 31,000 incomplete registrations, most from people who've failed to comply with the requirement.
ACLU Loses Bid to Expand Wisconsin Voter IDs
A federal district court on Tuesday refused to expand the kinds of identification voters can use, rejecting the arguments made by a special interest group that aimed to make voting easier for students, veterans and people with out-of-state driver's licenses. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a lawsuit against Wisconsin's voter ID law earlier this year, claiming the law was unconstitutional due to its limitations. The ACLU asked the court Oct. 5 to expand the law to include IDs for veterans, IDs for technical college students and out-of-state driver's licenses. They argued the law arbitrarily excluded those classes of people. District Judge Lynn Adelman rejected the ACLU's arguments in his decision. Adelman explained that a line must be drawn between acceptable and unacceptable forms of ID, otherwise the state would have to create and maintain an infinite list. Adelman believed the logistics of expanding the list of acceptable forms of ID could hinder the state's capability of administering the law, but also conceded the state could have added veteran's IDs to the list. "To be sure, Wisconsin probably could have included veteran's ID on the list ... without significantly increasing its administrative burden," Adelman said in his opinion. "However ... the state had to draw the line between acceptable and unacceptable forms of ID somewhere."
About That Voter-ID Fracas in Alabama: Much Ado About Nothing
By Hans A. von Spakovsky Many on the left are in a ferment over Alabama's closure of some part-time Department of Motor Vehicles offices. It's being done for budgetary reasons, but liberals are claiming it's being done to raise a "barrier for poor and minority voters" in getting an ID to vote, according to the Washington Post. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton said that "it's a blast from the Jim Crow past" and Jesse Jackson claimed that "this new Jim Crow isn't subtle." It's really a sign of how desperate critics of voter-ID laws are that they would raise such inflammatory, ridiculous claims over a budget issue that has nothing to do with race, Jim Crow, or discrimination. After all, they've been steadily losing their fight against voter ID in the courts, with only a few exceptions, and in the realm of public opinion. Alabama's new voter-ID law for both in-person and absentee voting went into effect last year. Despite the outcries that it would "suppress" votes, there have been no problems or complaints that anyone has been unable to vote because of the new requirement. It's been the same in all of the other states, such as Georgia and Indiana, that have implemented such ID laws. I've written numerous papers looking at turnout data in states after ID laws became effective -- ID laws have no discernible effect on decreasing or preventing turnout. Alabama has 44 driver's-license offices throughout the state. It apparently also had 31 satellite offices that were open only part-time and that accounted for less than 5 percent of the driver's licenses issued each year. Because of the budget passed by the state legislature, Alabama's state government had to "allocate scarce limited resources in Fiscal Year 2016," according to a letter sent by Governor Robert Bentley to Representative Terri Sewell (D., Ala). So the state government decided to close these satellite offices. Sewell is one of the critics whose "impulsive, ill-informed" comments about that decision were, Governor Bentley says, "based on irresponsible media reports." What all of the media and critics missed or deliberately ignored is that, in addition to being able to use a driver's license to meet the voter-ID requirement, you can get a free voter ID in every single county in the state. In addition to DMV offices, the secretary of state offers free voter IDs in all 67 counties through the local election registrar.
How Non-Citizens Can Swing Elections
By Hans von Spakovsky In an article in Politico, Mark Rozell, acting dean of the School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs at George Mason University, and Paul Goldman, a weekly columnist for the Washington Post, point out a fact that should greatly concern all Americans: that the presence of millions of noncitizens, both legal and illegal, could tilt the presidential election toward the Democrat Party and decide the election in favor of the eventual Democratic nominee. Voter Fraud Happens As I have outlined in many different articles and a recent book on voter fraud, illegal voting by noncitizens is a growing problem. Most election officials are not taking the steps necessary to detect or stop it, and many prosecutors including the current Justice Department seem reluctant to prosecute it. A study released in 2014 by three professors at Old Dominion and George Mason Universities in Virginia concluded that 6.4 percent of the noncitizen population voted illegally in the 2008 election, enough to have changed the outcome of various contests in a number of states. That includes the winner of North Carolina's electoral votes, which went to Barack Obama by a relatively small margin, since a majority of foreign-born residents favor the Democratic Party. That may also be why Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the governor of a battleground state, vetoed a bill that would have required jury commissioners to provide local election officials with the names of individuals called for jury duty from the state's voter registration list who were excused for not being U.S. citizens. Some States Have Congressional Districts They Shouldn't Have But as Rozel and Goldman accurately point out, noncitizens may be changing the outcome of presidential elections even without voting illegally. This is related to the problem of some states having more representatives in Congress than they should, and others being shortchanged unfairly due to the huge--and growing--population of illegal aliens whom the Obama administration and its political allies want to provide permanent amnesty. All of this stems from the way apportionment is conducted. There are 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Under Sec. 2 of Article I of the Constitution and Sec. 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, every ten years, after the "Enumeration" (the Census), we redistribute those 435 seats based on the "whole number of persons in each State." In other words, the number of members of the House that each state gets is based on the total population of each state relative to the total population of the U.S., which includes noncitizens. Thus, the upwards of 12 million illegal aliens present in the U.S., combined with other aliens who are here legally but are not citizens and have no right to vote, distort representation in the House.
Former AG Mukasey Hits Obama Justice Department Voting Section
Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey delivered a sharp criticism of the Obama Justice Department, particularly the DOJ Voting Section in a speech republished in Hillsdale College's Imprimis. In a broadside aimed at the Obama-era DOJ, Mukasey hits the Department's biased and partisan law enforcement policies. Mukasey's speech should be required reading for every Presidential campaign. Mukasey revisits the dismissal of the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party by Eric Holder and other political appointees shortly after the 2009 inauguration: During the 2008 election, two members of the New Black Panther Party showed up at a polling place in Philadelphia dressed in black battle fatigues . . . In the waning days of the Bush administration, the DOJ's Voting Section filed a lawsuit and won a default judgment. But in the spring of 2009, after the Obama administration took over, those handling the case were directed to drop it. The only penalty left in place was a limited injunction that barred the person with the nightstick from repeating that conduct for a period of time in Philadelphia. And when the Office of Professional Responsibility looked into the matter, their finding criticized the bringing of the case more than the dropping of it. As one "handling the case," the benefit of hindsight has revealed the New Black Panther dismissal as a sign of things to come. By 2015, we've grown used to outcome-driven law enforcement from the Justice Department. Laws are mere suggestions, not commands to this administration. If the Obama administration disagrees with a law, they simply refuse to enforce it. In the New Black Panther case, the incoming Obama administration found it reprehensible that the civil rights laws would be used to protect anyone other than Democrat party constituencies. While the Office of Professional Responsibility behaved as General Mukasey described, the Justice Department Inspector General issued a report that documented the pervasive hostility inside the Voting Section to equal enforcement of the law to protect all Americans. Simply, if the victims of civil rights violations are white, they don't receive protection. This outcome is no accident. It is a result of beliefs held by civil servants working inside the Justice Department. If a Republican wins the Presidency, he or she would be well advised to listen to General Mukasey and implement fundamental changes to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, particularly the Voting Section. Step One may well be remedial training on what the Rule of Law means. (PJ Media coverage of the New Black Panther dismissal can be found here, here and here.)