ACRU Commentary Archives - Page 27 of 39 - Voting Integrity Institute

Wisconsin Is Ground Zero in Voter ID Fight

Wisconsin is not only an electoral battleground state, it is ground zero in the fight to ensure honest elections. Failing to recall Republican Gov. Scott Walker in 2012 or to defeat him in the 2014 election, union-backed legal groups are continuing their efforts to try to make voter fraud easier to commit. Rebuffed by the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has filed a petition at the U.S. Supreme Court asking the court to overturn Wisconsin's Voter ID law. On Thursday, Attorney General Brad Schimel's communications director Anne E. Schwartz responded to an email, saying only that, "We will continue to defend the Wisconsin Voter ID Law." Enacted in 2011, Act 23 requires voters to show one of several forms of photo identification before voting. Wisconsin is one of 17 states that have added a voter ID law following the Supreme Court's upholding of Indiana's photo ID law in 2008. A total of 34 states now require some form of ID to vote, according to the ACLU's petition.

ACRU Staff2020-05-03T23:34:44+00:00January 19th, 2015|ACRU Commentary, Vote Fraud, Voter ID|

Grand Jury Recommends Charges Against Pa. Attorney General

A grand jury has recommended criminal charges against Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane. The grand jury found that she leaked secret grand jury information to a newspaper in an effort to smear political enemies. PJ Media has been covering Kane's refusal to prosecute Pennsylvania Democrats who took bribes in order to oppose photo voter identification legislation in Pennsylvania.

ACRU Staff2020-05-03T23:37:08+00:00January 9th, 2015|ACRU Commentary, Voter ID|

One in Eight Voter Registrations Is Flawed, O’Keefe Video Demonstrates

By John Fund Filmmaker James O'Keefe has yet again demonstrated just how vulnerable our election system is to fraud. A Pew Center on the States study in 2012 found that one out of eight voter registrations is inaccurate, out-of-date, or a duplicate. Some 2.8 million people are registered in two or more states, and 1.8 million registered voters are dead. So O'Keefe decided to take some of the 700,000 "inactive" voters the Voting Integrity Project says are on the rolls in North Carolina, the site of one of the nation's most hotly contested Senate races, and see just how easy it would be to obtain a ballot in their name. Sadly, it was child's play as his video demonstrates.

ACRU Staff2020-05-03T23:35:35+00:00November 3rd, 2014|ACRU Commentary, Vote Fraud, Voter ID|

How to Fraud-Proof Elections

By Edwin Meese III and Ken Blackwell Once upon a time, Americans got together on Election Day, went to the polls, and chose our leaders. Voting on the same day helped bind us together as self-governing citizens in a free republic. It even felt like a national holiday -- Independence Day without the fireworks. Except for those traveling or who are infirm and who can use absentee ballots, Election Day puts everyone in the same boat. As a civic exercise in equality, it is unparalleled. It has the added advantage of making vote fraud more difficult, since there is a very short window in which to commit it. But over the past few decades, election laws have been relaxed in the name of convenience, with "reforms" such as early voting, same-day registration, Sunday and evening voting hours, no-excuse absentee voting and allowing out-of-precinct ballots. All of these increase the possibility of vote fraud. At the same time, despite a clear mandate in the National Voter Registration Act (also known as the Motor Voter Law) to keep accurate registrations, the system has grown lax; election authorities have left millions on the voter rolls who should not be there.

ACRU Staff2020-05-03T23:38:05+00:00November 3rd, 2014|Absentee / Mail-in Voting, ACRU Commentary, Early Voting, Same-Day Registration, Vote Fraud, Voter ID|

The Truth about Voter ID: An ACRU Special Report

By Don Feder No reform is more necessary for the integrity of the electoral process - and none has been subjected to more savage and disingenuous attacks -- than voter ID laws. Of all these, the most outrageous is the charge that voter ID is the same as Jim Crow -- the racist system that was used to disenfranchise Southern blacks for generations after Reconstruction. Voter ID laws currently in place in 20 states - though some have been delayed by activist courts or are being challenged by Eric Holder's Justice Department - require voters to present a valid photo ID, like a driver's license, before voting. J. Christian Adams, formerly with the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, warns: Liberal foundations, public interest law firms and advocacy groups have created a permanent network of experts and organizations devoted to an arcane but critical task: monopolizing the narrative on elections laws and procedures, Cloaking their actions in the rhetoric of civil rights and the right to vote, they seek to affect the outcome of elections. They challenge any efforts to protect the integrity of the ballot box by denying the possibility of vote fraud and crying "Jim Crow." Opponents of voter ID take a three-prong approach to defeating the reform. First, they argue that it's unnecessary -- that voter fraud is so rare as to be virtually non-existent. This constitutes a denial of both history and reality. Election fraud has always been with us, from ballot-box stuffing and the graveyard vote to voting by illegal immigrants. By requiring voters to prove their identity, ID laws help to ensure honest elections.

ACRU Staff2020-05-03T23:34:45+00:00October 28th, 2014|ACRU Commentary, ACRU Report, Vote Fraud, Voter ID|

Here Comes the 2014 Voter Fraud

In the past few months, a former police chief in Pennsylvania pleaded guilty to voter fraud in a town-council election. That fraud had flipped the outcome of a primary election. Former Connecticut legislator Christina Ayala has been indicted on 19 charges of voter fraud, including voting in districts where she didn't reside. (She hasn't entered a plea.) A Mississippi grand jury indicted seven individuals for voter fraud in the 2013 Hattiesburg mayoral contest, which featured voting by ineligible felons and impersonation fraud. A woman in Polk County, Tenn., was indicted on a charge of vote-buying--a practice that the local district attorney said had too long "been accepted as part of life" there. Now come the midterm elections on Nov. 4. What is the likelihood that your vote won't count? That your vote will, in effect, be canceled or stolen as a consequence of mistakes by election officials or fraudulent votes cast by campaign workers or ineligible voters like felons and noncitizens?

ACRU Staff2020-05-03T23:36:58+00:00October 28th, 2014|Absentee / Mail-in Voting, ACRU Commentary, Early Voting, Proof of Citizenship, Same-Day Registration, Vote Fraud, Voter ID|

Could Non-Citizens Decide the November Election?

Could control of the Senate in 2014 be decided by illegal votes cast by non-citizens? Some argue that incidents of voting by non-citizens are so rare as to be inconsequential, with efforts to block fraud a screen for an agenda to prevent poor and minority voters from exercising the franchise, while others define such incidents as a threat to democracy itself. Both sides depend more heavily on anecdotes than data. In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races. Our data comes from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). Its large number of observations (32,800 in 2008 and 55,400 in 2010) provide sufficient samples of the non-immigrant sub-population, with 339 non-citizen respondents in 2008 and 489 in 2010. For the 2008 CCES, we also attempted to match respondents to voter files so that we could verify whether they actually voted. How many non-citizens participate in U.S. elections? More than 14 percent of non-citizens in both the 2008 and 2010 samples indicated that they were registered to vote. Furthermore, some of these non-citizens voted. Our best guess, based upon extrapolations from the portion of the sample with a verified vote, is that 6.4 percent of non-citizens voted in 2008 and 2.2 percent of non-citizens voted in 2010.

ACRU Staff2020-05-03T23:36:58+00:00October 27th, 2014|ACRU Commentary, Vote Fraud, Voter ID|

‘Ghetto Aurora’ Is Ground Zero for Colorado Vote Fraud

A Greenpeace activist supporting Senator Mark Udall has been caught on undercover video by James O'Keefe saying a great town to commit voter fraud is Ghetto Aurora. I couldn't find Ghetto Aurora on a map, but the activist says it is in Colorado. It's no surprise that the best place to commit voter fraud is Colorado. If you deliberately tried to design an election system to aid fraud, here's how you'd do it. You'd put ballots in the hand of folks that you have some indication no longer live where they did long ago. You'd make sure folks got ballots even if many of the counties had more people on the voter rolls than people alive. Then, you'd make sure that voting is decentralized, out of sight of election officials so that there is no way to know who is really voting the ballots. Check, check and check. Welcome to Colorado's new vote by mail system.

ACRU Staff2020-05-03T23:38:06+00:00October 22nd, 2014|ACRU Commentary, Vote Fraud, Voter ID|

Video Sting Shows How Easy Voter Fraud Is in Colorado

Many liberals are adamant there is no threat of voter fraud that justifies efforts to improve the integrity of elections. "There is no real concrete evidence of voter fraud," tweeted Donna Brazile, former acting chair of the Democratic National Committee, this week. "It's a big a-- lie." James O'Keefe, the guerilla filmmaker who brought down the ACORN voter-registration fraudsters in 2010 and forced the resignation of NPR executives, politely disagrees. Today, he is releasing some new undercover footage that raises disturbing questions about ballot integrity in Colorado, the site of fiercely contested races for the U.S. Senate, the U.S. House, and the governorship. When he raised the issue of filling out some of the unused ballots that are mailed to every household in the state this month, he was told by Meredith Hicks, the director of Work for Progress, a liberal group funded by Democratic Super PACS.: "That is not even like lying or something, if someone throws out a ballot, like if you want to fill it out you should do it."

ACRU Staff2020-05-03T23:35:35+00:00October 22nd, 2014|ACRU Commentary, Vote Fraud, Voter ID|

ACLU ‘Thrilled’ to Kill Voter ID in Arkansas

Reacting to the Arkansas Supreme Court's ruling declaring the state's voter-identification law unconstitutional, ACLU of Arkansas Legal Director Holly Dickson said her group is "thrilled." Well, why not. They've been at it all over the country, trying to take down voter ID laws and enrich the ground that can yield a bumper crop of vote fraud. The unanimous decision on Oct. 15 upheld a lower court ruling and will affect early balloting, which began Monday, Oct. 20. Election Day is Tuesday, Nov 4. The Republican-controlled state legislature enacted the fraud-prevention law in 2013 over a veto by Democratic Gov. Mike Beebe. The justices ruled that the law requiring all voters to present government-issued photo identification, "imposes a requirement that falls outside" four qualifications outlined in the state constitution: A voter must be a U.S. citizen, an Arkansas resident, 18 years old and registered to vote. Providing proof that voters are, indeed, who they say they are, a requirement that the and more than 70 percent of the public strongly supports, is too high a hurdle, according to the ACLU. Ms. Dickson called the law "an unconstitutional barrier that has already stolen legitimate voting rights." When clerks ask to see an ID before selling beer, are they "stealing legitimate drinking rights?"

ACRU Staff2020-05-03T23:34:45+00:00October 21st, 2014|ACRU Commentary, Early Voting, Vote Fraud, Voter ID|

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