At The Polls: Who Is Stealing Your Vote?

Publius @ International Business Times:

Theft is usually a personal tragedy, but when an election is stolen, it’s a national one.

Voter fraud numbers are staggering. Forty-six states have prosecuted vote fraud cases in the past decade, which collectively number in the thousands. Thousands more likely have gone unprosecuted.

We should all be asking why.

Pollsters tell us the election will be determined by turnout, or by unemployment numbers, or by Gov. Mitt Romney’s “binders of women,” or whether we force the Catholic Church to pay for Sandra Fluke’s birth control. But the glaring omission from the strategists’ calculus is the real “dark horse” of the 2012 election, and that’s voter fraud.

Both the Left and Right are concerned about it. The election integrity crisis has been highlighted by journalists on both sides of the political spectrum — from the right, the American Spectator’s Quin Hillyer, and the National Review’s John Fund; on the left, Mother Jones’ Jaeah Lee.

Most Americans share their concern. More than 70 percent of Americans in a number of public opinion surveys favor anti-fraud measures, like voter ID requirements. That’s because there is both motive and opportunity for stealing elections.

If a group believes that billions in foreign aid, amnesty, or industry-saving stimulus funds hang in the balance, this is more than sufficient incentive to steal an election.

The stakes could not be higher. An American need not be old enough to remember the Kennedy-Nixon election, where just one more vote in each precinct would have changed the outcome — and history. But one doesn’t have to look any further back than the 2000 election. A few hundred fraudulent votes, and the leader of the free world might have been implementing climate change regulations rather than invading Iraq. People around the world live and die based on the outcome of U.S. elections.

One U.S. Senate race in Colorado shows us the vastness of the problem. During an audit, authorities took a closer look at who voted and were surprised to find that nearly 5,000 people voted illegally. Colorado’s lax election controls allowed thousands of honest citizens to be disenfranchised by having their votes canceled out with illegal votes. It was as if their votes were erased. For every illegal vote that authorities detect, how many more did they miss?

Colorado is not alone. Vote fraud likely changed the 2008 Minnesota U.S. Senate race when Al Franken won by just a 312-vote margin. After the fact, investigators discovered the election was rife with fraud. No one knows the full extent, but investigators were able to find more than 1,000 of the illegal votes cast. At least 170 of those illegal voters have been convicted — so far.

But by the time these investigations and prosecutions come to light, it is too late. Consequences? Franken was the deciding vote in favor of Obamacare. Yes, elections have consequences.

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