pudge's Journal: Voter Fraud

It is not a well-kept secret that there's quite a bit of voter fraud going on in WA, in large part because no proof of citizenship is required to vote. You can just walk in, get a driver's license, and register to vote. They ask you if you are a citizen, but you can lie and say yes, and there's no verification. There's other problems too, and this is where it gets good.

A group called ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, which claims to represent poor people, including the homeless) has been uncovered by King County to have been fraudulently submitting voter registrations, by signing the registration cards themselves, instead of having the voter do it. ACORN staff has recently been indicted in Ohio for similar "irregularities," as well as being implicated in several other states.

Back in 2004, WA passed a law requiring election officials to match new voter registrations against a driver's license/state ID or social security file, to verify identity. There were exceptions: if you had no DL#/state ID or SSN you could attest that you have no such ID, and the election officials would determine whether you'd supplied sufficient information to determin eligibility, and if the officials find against the applicant, they must attempt to contact the applicant to give them further opportunity to respond.

ACORN sued, and we know why: they have been attempting to, in the thousands, register people who cannot or will not verify their identity and eligibility (if the people in question exist at all), and this new law would have made that illegal. That they were busy driving a freight train through the hole in the law, and suing to prevent the law from closing, didn't stop them from forging signatures and doing other things which already were illegal.

So now there's been a settlement. The state has to accept the registrations, but the voters have to provide ID at some later point in order to vote. This will create more work for the state, but ideally will still provide sufficient security. In practice, however, I'd be willing to bet (if I bet) that either ACORN is hoping that the ID will not be checked, or is planning on suing later if votes are rejected due to lack of ID.

Read more about it from the EFF (not that EFF: this one is the Evergreen Freedom Foundation, an excellent thinktank/watchdog group here in WA).

Now Playing: Keith Green - Jesus Commands Us To Go!

a modest proposal

[Bill Dog]

Maybe we need to heap on to voting requirements all the stuff that's been heaped on to firearm purchases. I mean, the integrity of our democracy is at least as important, right? So we should require not only to show ID, but there should be a background check (ID's can be forged), and a waiting period to perform the background check. Which may take some time.

We shouldn't be letting just anyone buy a gun, unless we know they're eligible, and same for voting.

Re:

[pudge]

Very nice. :-)

Re:

[Zeriel]

That's the first thing you've ever said that I can get behind totally.

Re:

[eglamkowski]

The integrity of the voting system is NOT important to the politicians, unless they are from a district that is totally safe anyways, and maybe not always for those guys either. And the politicians are the ones who would have to implement the rules to do it. Foxes guarding the hen house, I tell you.