The Patriot Post® · Why Require Voter ID?

With the midterms less than a month away, the idea of election integrity should be on everyone’s minds. Unfortunately, Democrats and their Leftmedia super PAC would have us believe that voter fraud is a myth concocted by the Right to keep minorities from voting. Instead, they would rather focus on the phantom Trump-Russia collusion story that has been refuted by all but the most rabid anti-Trump leftists.

For Democrats, it’s easy to believe that Russian ads on Facebook can swing an election away from Hillary Clinton. The idea that the millions of duplicate and dead voters on the nation’s electoral rolls could be unduly swinging elections, however, is a bridge too far.

Judicial Watch’s Election Integrity Project released a report last year that found that America’s voter rolls were in chaos. By crunching numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the federal Election Assistance Commission, Judicial Watch discovered that there were 3.5 million more registered voters than actual eligible adult voters in the United States.

Think that might be relevant again with the November midterms around the corner?

National Review’s Deroy Murdock took a deep dive into the numbers. He found that 462 counties nationwide in which the voter registration rate exceeded the eligible adult voter population. In most cases, there were a handful of over-registrations. These were most likely due to dead voters who hadn’t been removed from the rolls or people who had moved but were still listed at their old address.

Yes, mistakes can be made, but 3.5 million of them?

Some counties in Washington, Delaware, and New Mexico had voter registration rates upwards of 150% of the resident population. In areas with large populations, this can amount to many thousands of people. In Los Angeles County, Judicial Watch tallied over 700,000 over-registrations. San Diego Country had 810,000 more voters than people. In fact, California alone accounts for almost half of all the nation’s over-registrations.

But by all means, let’s ditch the Electoral College and let California decide national elections, leftists tell us.

States that figured prominently in the 2016 election had significant over-registration numbers. Hillary Clinton’s margin of victory in Colorado and New Hampshire was lower than the number of over-registrations in either state. Her national popular vote margin was less than three million, compared to the 3.5 million extraneous voters in the Judicial Watch report.

President Donald Trump proposed a federal examination of state voter rolls to purge bad names and investigate fraud shortly after he took office. Several Democrat states refused to cooperate and threatened to file suit, effectively shutting down the investigation before it even started. They claimed states’ rights (like that’s ever mattered to Dems before) and fell back on their age-old rebuttal that voter fraud doesn’t exist.

As if on cue, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School concocted a report claiming voter fraud was a myth. The reasoning behind this finding was that the paltry number of prosecutions of voter fraud across the country indicated that it was a statistically insignificant issue. In other words, there haven’t been a lot of prosecutions, so it’s not a big deal.

The voter-fraud-as-myth crowd wants the public to believe the only instances of fraud that exist were the ones that were prosecuted, or more appropriately the ones that were so glaringly obvious that they could not be ignored. If this was the theory behind all criminal behavior, then we should believe that the only crime that takes place is crime perpetrated by the criminals who get caught.

Any prosecutor who would subscribe to such nonsense has no business in the legal profession.

The low instances of reported voter fraud are a result of an epic lack of enforcement of voter laws, not extremely lucky prosecutors who found the dozen or so instances of voter fraud that took place in the whole country.

Voter ID is a simple way to verify that voters are who they say they are and secure the integrity of our election process. Democrats have repeatedly blocked attempts to establish this procedure. Why? Is it because such laws infringe on the voting rights of minorities?

Hardly. Requiring people to present ID for voting is not a draconian measure. People are required to present identification in any number of public interactions on a daily basis, including obtaining Medicaid benefits, cashing Social Security checks, and using food stamps. If voter ID is so difficult for poor people or minorities to obtain, then how did they get ID to take advantage of these federal or state benefits?

The cynical view about the source of the pushback against voter ID, which unfortunately is closer to the truth, is that tighter voter registration laws mean it will be harder to commit voter fraud. Once you remove the burdens that would supposedly hinder minority voting, what other answer is there?