If you’ve wondered why left-of-center activists get so agitated about ballot-security measures such as voter identification, John Fund offers some answers in his latest column for National Review Online.
The election-integrity measures being pushed in many states — such as showing photo ID at the polls — are enormously popular. A recent Rasmussen poll showed that 76 percent of likely voters support photo ID, including 58 percent of Democrats. Such measures guard against the disfranchisement of voters that occurs when someone cancels out their vote through fraud, but Clinton dismisses the very notion of voter fraud, despite numerous recent examples and the virtual impossibility of detecting fraud once it has been committed using a secret ballot. “I went to the polls to vote last year, and was told someone had already voted in my name,” Dennis Miller, an economist from Akron, Ohio, told me this week. “The officials said there was no way to detect who had done it.”
It’s not surprising that Mrs. Clinton denies the existence of fraud — she has a long history of encouraging measures that undermine election integrity. In 1993, President Bill Clinton made the passage of the Motor Voter Law his first legislative priority. Even though he had just been elected in a race that saw the largest increase in turnout in a generation, Clinton declared there was a “crisis” in voting and rammed the bill through Congress. It severely limited states from pruning “dead wood” (people who had died, moved, or been convicted of crimes) from their rolls. States had to permit mail-in voter registration, which made phantom voter registrations much easier. States could no longer ask anyone for identification or proof of citizenship when registering. Welfare, DMV, and other government offices were ordered to promote voter registration. Joe Madison, the former head of voter registration for the NAACP and now a radio talk-show host, said such measures would have a clear political effect. “When people are standing in line to get cheese and butter or unemployment compensation, you don’t have to tell them how to vote. They know how to vote.”
The Motor Voter Law was the brainchild of two radical academic allies of Saul Alinsky, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who believed that poor people had every moral right to game the electoral and political system to deliver radical change. Bill Clinton, with Hillary at his side, acknowledged the role Cloward and Piven had played in passing the legislation when he signed it into law in their presence in 1993. In 1996, Cloward defended Motor Voter, telling CBS News, “It’s better to have a little bit of fraud than to leave people off the rolls who belong there.”
Since then, the Alinsky Left has actively promoted measures to expand the voting rolls by any means possible while they’ve opposed any and all ballot-security measures. “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 election laws and procedures,” Christian Adams told Breitbart News. A former Justice Department attorney, Adams is now in the private sector and has brought lawsuits to force several counties to clean up their rolls — including counties with more registered voters than they have adults. “Cloaking their actions in the rhetoric of civil rights and the right to vote, they seek to affect the outcome of the election.”
