Voter ID Archives - Page 121 of 147 - Voting Integrity Institute

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|

849 Registered New York Voters Are 164 Years Old

A single Bronx voter listed in official records as being 164 years old led Board of Elections officials to review their files -- where they turned up another 849 New Yorkers who were supposedly alive when Abe Lincoln was president. The stunning discovery came after The Post reported last week that the birth date of Luz Pabellon, a spry 73-year-old who has been living and voting in The Bronx since the 1970s, was recorded as Jan. 1, 1850. This week, a search of the records in all five boroughs found 849 more voters with the same wacky birth date. Board officials chalked up the implausible age snafu to previous practices that allowed residents not to provide their exact birthdays when registering to vote.

ACRU Staff2020-05-03T23:36:58+00:00October 23rd, 2014|News, 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|

Supreme Court Upholds Texas Voter ID Law

The Supreme Court allowed Texas to enforce its strict voter identification laws in the upcoming midterms on Oct. 18. The decision, which came at 5 a.m., was unsigned and contained no reasoning. The court rejected requests from the Obama administration and civil rights groups, refusing to re-impose an injunction against the law that was granted by a district court judge but lifted by the 5th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals on Oct. 14. The law requires voters to present a photo ID at the polls before casting their ballot. Acceptable forms of ID include a Texas drivers license, a military ID, passport, or Texas gun license. All three female Justices, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, publicly dissented from the decision.

ACRU Staff2020-05-03T23:34:45+00:00October 21st, 2014|In the Courts, News, Voter ID|

Arkansas Supreme Court Strikes Down Voter ID Law

In a ruling that could affect a key U.S. Senate race, the Arkansas Supreme Court on Wednesday declared the state's voter-identification law unconstitutional. The unanimous decision, which upheld a lower court, came just days before early balloting begins Monday for the Nov. 4 election. The justices ruled that Act 595, which required voters to show government-issued photo identification, "imposes a requirement that falls outside" the 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. The constitutional qualifications "simply do not include any proof-of-identity requirement," the majority wrote in its 20-page opinion. The law, which took effect Jan. 1, was approved in April 2013 after the Republican-dominated Legislature overrode the veto of Gov. Mike Beebee, a Democrat.

ACRU Staff2020-05-03T23:34:45+00:00October 16th, 2014|In the Courts, News, Voter ID|

Appeals Court Upholds Texas Voter ID Law

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on Tuesday afternoon gave the state of Texas permission to enforce its strict voter ID law, finding that a federal judge's ruling last week barring the use of that law "substantially disrupts the election process . . . just nine days before early voting begins...next Monday." The three-judge panel commented that the Supreme Court "has repeatedly instructed courts to carefully consider the importance of preserving the status quo on the eve of an election." That was a controlling reason, it said, for permitting the law to govern voting in the remaining days before the November 4 election. Opponents on Tuesday immediately filed an application to the U.S. Supreme Court to block the law.

ACRU Staff2020-05-03T23:34:45+00:00October 15th, 2014|Early Voting, In the Courts, News, Voter ID|

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