Voter fraud and why we need a federal voter ID law

Yesterday in Nevada, state authorities raided the offices of an organization called ACORN and seized evidence relating to voter fraud. ACORN had submitted new voter registrations it had obtained, an unusually high number of which turned out to be fraudulent.

I’ll refrain from going into depth about ACORN and its shady activities (The group is under investigation or indictment in multiple states for fraud and violation of election laws) – a quick web search will turn up more information than you could possibly want. For the purposes of this post, it is enough to state that ACORN hires workers at an hourly rate to register new voters from among the poor and disenfranchised. This is called “community organizing”. Sound familiar? It should – Senator Barack Obama has had numerous ties to ACORN going back to his days as a Chicago organizer for an affiliated group. (In fairness, no one has made any credible claims that Senator Obama has ever engaged in the criminal activities I discuss below, and I think it extremely unlikely, although it’s possible he knew about it and chose to turn a blind eye.)

Anyway, by law ACORN cannot pay the workers incrementally for each new voter they sign up – after all, that could lead to fraud! But they do require their workers to meet a certain quota of new voters per day in order to get paid – otherwise the worker could just sleep all day and still collect a paycheck. Of course, this means that workers are often under pressure to meet their quota, and the temptation to submit fake names is obvious – especially after smoking a joint or three, as many of these “workers” have been known to do. ACORN claims that it checks the registrations before sending them in to the state and fires workers who are caught falsifying them, but the evidence suggests that they don’t try very hard.

In this case, the Nevada Secretary of State’s office has been vigilant in trying to weed out fake voters. But not every state is as disciplined, and not all fake registrations are easily debunked. The suspicion is that organizations like ACORN deliberately send in the fakes hoping they will not get spotted, allowing an ACORN operative to later vote illegally under the fake name once it is on the voter rolls.

There is an easy way to prevent that from happening – states can simply require that voters present proper photo identification, such as a driver’s license, when they show up to vote. Some states already do this, while others simply ask for name and address and have no way to prove the voter is who they say they are. There have been attempts to make this a federal requirement, but those attempts have been defeated. Why? Opponents consistently paint voter ID requirements as a conspiracy to keep poor people and minorities from voting. Thus, supporters of the requirements are called bigots and anti-democratic. This is nonsense. Poor people and minorities do not have any particular difficulty obtaining driver’s licenses or similar ID. Voter ID requirements ensure that voters of all ethnicities and socioeconomic levels are protected from someone illegally trying to cast their votes for them. This is a common-sense step toward a protection of the most fundamental right of every American citizen.

Keep all this in mind after the big election on November 4. Anywhere where Republicans win anything, you will hear screaming about alleged voter fraud and voter suppression. Anywhere that Democrats win, you will not hear those complaints, because the media doesn’t believe that voter fraud is possible if, as with the activities of ACORN and its ilk, it helps the Left.

It’s Camille Paglia time again.

Camille Paglia’s monthly column over at Salon.com is something I genuinely look forward to. This month is largely devoted to answering readers’ e-mails. Paglia discusses the Sarah Palin phenomenon at length; she finds much to admire about Governor Palin and her husband while noting that she does not share their political views. The quality of some of the letters Paglia quotes tells you something about the column itself.

As I’ve said before, in addition to being brilliant, Paglia is the most intellectually honest political writer in America today. If you skip her column, you are missing out on the best of what the genre has to offer.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/10/08/palin/print.html

All in the family: Barack Obama and Dick Cheney are cousins!?!

It’s true. According to genealogical research done by Vice President Cheney’s wife Lynne, Dick Cheney and Barack Obama are very distant cousins. Meanwhile, Governor Sarah Palin is distantly related to Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the late Princess Diana:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14384.html

2nd Presidential Debate: Analysis

I thought both candidates performed well last night. The “town hall” format was clearly much better for McCain than the format of the first debate. He held his own and scored some points against Obama, but Obama did not get rattled and had some good moments of his own, deftly working in prepared remarks without seeming obvious about it.  Overall, I would call it a tie.

Unfortunately for McCain, that’s not good enough. He needed a game-changing moment to try to reverse Obama’s rise in the polls, and he didn’t get it. It’s hard to imagine anyone having been swayed to switch their vote one way or another by last night’s debate.

The only new thing that came out of the debate was at the very beginning, when McCain came out in favor of a proposal to have Treasury buy out bad mortgages directly. I blogged about this recently, but as far as I know McCain is the first major politician to endorse the idea. Afterward, his campaign clarified that the $300 billion cost of this move should be paid for out of the $700 billion already authorized for the financial bailout. If that can actually be done, I’d support it. It would be the most significant step to date in actually helping ordinary Americans weather this crisis.

The problem for McCain is not that voters have singled out Republicans or the Bush Administration to blame for the economic crisis. On the contrary, most voters figure both parties are to blame. The problem is that the economic crisis plays perfectly into the theme of the Obama campaign – “Change”. Ordinarily, voters tend to be a bit cautious about change. I don’t think there’s any doubt that most voters believe that Obama does indeed represent change, in his very person if not in his plans for governance. In fact, the struggle for Obama has actually been to convince voters that he doesn’t represent a level of change that is more than they are comfortable with.

But when the economy is going south, and even the do-nothing Congress passes emergency legislation, implicitly acknowledging that “change” is indeed needed, I think a significant number of voters are taking the attitude that things can’t get much worse, so why not roll the dice on an unknown quantity like Obama, who has so far managed to avoid saying or doing anything too terrifying, or appearing to justify the criticism that he is not up to the task of being President.

With less than 30 days until the election, time is running out for McCain. A major event such as an economic turnaround or a foreign policy crisis could still rescue his candidacy, but if present trends continue, Barack Obama has a better than even chance of being the next President, mostly thanks to the folks at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

Here’s one of the better detailed analyses of the debate: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14381.html