Posts

Report: Florida Democrats Plotted Statewide Effort to Use Altered Election Forms to Fix Absentee Ballots After Deadline

/0 Comments/in , /by

The day after the 2018 midterm elections, Florida Democrats attempted to launch a statewide effort to use fraudulent election forms to fix signature problems on absentee ballots after the state’s deadline, a blockbuster report from the Naples Daily News says.

Federal prosecutors are already investigating altered election forms from Broward, Santa Rosa, Citrus, and Okaloosa Counties for possible voter fraud. Ana Ceballos, writing from Tallahassee, Fla., reports that an email obtained by the USA TODAY NETWORK-Florida shows Democratic party leaders attempted to organize an effort beyond those counties “to give voters the altered forms to fix improper absentee ballots after the Nov. 5 deadline.”

“Democratic party leaders provided staffers with copies of a form, known as a ‘cure affidavit,’ that had been modified to include an inaccurate Nov. 8 deadline,” Ceballos writes.

The election document was a state form to fix absentee ballots with signature problems. The original document provides that corrections must be submitted “no later than 5 p.m. on the day before the election.”

Three contested statewide elections, including the Senate race between Republican Rick Scott and Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., are headed for recounts in which these absentee ballots may make a difference.

The Democratic Party collected a list of Florida voters whose ballots were flagged with signature problems and their contact information. Jennifer Kim, the party’s central Florida deputy field director, sent an email to party staffers on Nov. 7 explaining how volunteers and staffers could have these voters correct their ballots after the deadline. She attached the altered form to her email with copies in both English and Spanish.

“The voters MUST print out the form and sign it by hand,” Kim wrote.

Kim’s email instructed staff and volunteers to use the list of voters to contact about their signature problems on the absentee ballots, to complete the form on the phone with the voter and to email the completed form to the voter.

The voter was instructed to print the form and to sign it. And Kim’s email instructed the party workers to tell voters to deliver the signed form to their local election office.

Kim told staffers that voters should reply back to them after they delivered the forms at the party’s email, [email protected]. That email was also included in documents Florida election officials referred to federal prosecutors in connection to the altered forms received by Broward and the other three counties.

“If needed (party) staff or volunteer should go pick up their affidavit and deliver it for them if they are not able to deliver by 5 p.m. Thursday. (Each office should identify a runner that can do this.),” her email states.

A Palm Beach Democrat who spoke to the Daily News said the plan was to have voters fix and submit as many absentee ballots as possible with the altered forms, hoping that they would be counted if a judge rules to include such absentee ballots in the vote count.

On Thursday, Chief Judge Mark Walker of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida ruled that voters should have until Saturday to fix their absentee ballot signatures, which the Daily News reports could mean the corrected ballots fixed by these altered forms will be counted. Walker was appointed to the District Court bench by President Barack Obama.

Florida Department of State officials argue that altering the forms constitutes a criminal offense.

“Making or using an altered form is a criminal offense under Florida law,” wrote State Department lawyer Bradley McVay in referring the altered forms to federal prosecutors. “More fundamentally, altering a form in a manner that provides the incorrect date for a voter to cure a defect (or an incorrect method as it related to provisional ballots) imposes a burden on the voter significant enough to frustrate the voter’s ability to vote.”

So let’s get this straight. Florida law gives voters a deadline to fix incorrect absentee ballots before Election Day. The Democratic Party schemes to have some voters who did not meet this deadline fix their ballots after Election Day. They alter election forms with an incorrect date to accomplish this and hope some Florida judge rules in their favor that the deadline established by state law disenfranchises voters. Then, an Obama-appointed federal judge rules that the deadline was wrong and gives voters till Saturday to fix their ballots, potentially letting the ballots corrected with these fraudulent forms be counted.

If that’s not election cheating, what is? (For more from the author of “Report: Florida Democrats Plotted Statewide Effort to Use Altered Election Forms to Fix Absentee Ballots After Deadline” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Let’s Cut to the Chase and Have the Judges Vote for Us

/0 Comments/in , /by

The outcome of elections, like every other national question, is now determined by an assorted sample of unelected federal judges. So why even have elections? At this rate, we should just ask the judges to vote for us.

Courts exist to adjudicate cases under the law. For example, if two companies have a dispute or if I sue my neighbor for damaging my car, we go to court, not to Congress or a state legislature. But if we have a dispute over an issue that determines the outcome of the broadest public policy, cultural, and civic questions, we go to a legislature. That is what distinguishes us as a republic from a judicial version of North Korea. But now the judges are monopolizing the ultimate political question – election law. They are vitiating state law and determining the outcome of all elections – in favor of one party, of course.

What we are seeing in Georgia and Florida is Democrats using the liberal courts to mandate that states accept ballots that are either tardy or otherwise invalid pursuant to state law. Now a judge has ordered the recount in Florida to be extended. Who needs state governments when we have federal judges unilaterally vested with more power than all of Congress and the president put together?

States, not the federal courts, were given control over qualifications and process of elections

All elections must have standards. The Constitution leaves the decisions over the methods, process, and procedures of elections with the states. The structure of the ballots, the nature of the polling stations, the process of absentee ballots, standards governing unclear and anomalous ballots, and verification against fraud are all issues left to the states. The Election Clause (Art. I, §4, cl. 1) does give Congress, not the federal courts, power to intervene when necessary. According to Hamilton in Federalist No. 59, it was only to be in extraordinary circumstances, and it was primarily for the purpose of ensuring that elections are indeed held and Congress is not abolished altogether by the states.

Congress intervened in state election law during the 1860s to ensure that freed slaves weren’t denied the right to vote, and they passed other laws a century later to ensure that the states were complying with the Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments. Aside from those narrowly designed interventions, nothing fundamentally altered the control of states over election matters. Senator Jacob Howard, one of the prime drafters of the 14th Amendment, made it clear during the floor debate in 1866: “The second section leaves the right to regulate the elective franchise still with the States, and does not meddle with that right.”

As Justice Thomas said in Evenwel v. Abbott, “None of the Reconstruction Amendments changed the original understanding of republican government.” And that original understanding as it relates to election law was that states should control the methods and procedures of elections because “it was found necessary to leave the regulation of [federal elections], in the first place, to the state governments, as being best acquainted with the situation of the people,” as Madison said at the Virginian Ratifying Convention.

Thus, we are left, more or less, with the original constitutional design from Art. I §2 and the 17th Amendment – that states control the qualifications of the electors of the electoral college and those who can vote in congressional elections. As Justice Thomas said in Arizona v. The Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, Inc., “It was well understood that congressional power to regulate the “Manner” of elections under Article I, §4, did not include the power to override state voter qualifications under Article I, §2.”

The courts crown themselves king over elections

Over time, Congress did need to ensure that the narrow Reconstruction-era amendments were enforced. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was designed to combat real discrimination against black American voters during the Jim Crow days of the South. Yet much like the 14th Amendment and other civil rights-era legislation (both in the 19th and 20th centuries), the Left and the courts are twisting the interpretation of the VRA to crush the states. Beginning with the Baker v. Carr decision and in many subsequent decisions, the federal courts have taken over election law from Congress. Even though Art. I §4 gives Congress the power to police the states and even though §5 of the 14th Amendment gives Congress the power to enforce the Reconstruction-era Amendments, the courts always read the word “judiciary” in place of “Congress.”

Many observers thought that the 2013 Shelby County case, wherein the court struck down one provision of the Voting Rights Act, would lead to an era of states having more control over election law. Quite the contrary — it has led to successful lawsuits striking down every aspect of state law. We’ve seen the courts in recent months nullify every Republican redistricting map; mandate weeks of early voting; prevent states from asking for photo ID at the polls or verifying proof of citizenship for voter registration; block states from combatting voter fraud; block states from cleaning dirty voter rolls; and generally require the implementation of any administrative method or procedure of voting that is preferred by Democrats.

The Supreme Court has failed to police these lower courts. Adding insult to injury, the other two branches of government as well as our entire body politic believe any random federal judge can control and vitiate commonsense state election law.

In short, the courts — at the behest of the ACLU — have abused the VRA to ensure that Republicans can never win a close election because they require laws that both favor Democrat GOTV over Republicans and prevent states from combatting voter fraud. Hence, a law that was designed to stop the disenfranchisement of black voters is now used to disenfranchise all citizens — black and white — by invalidating voter ID laws and other measures designed to screen out non-citizen voters and voter fraud.

The notion that the federal government could get involved in the number of days of voter registration and voter qualification issues would have been foreign to our Founders. Even if we defend the continuation of the Voting Rights Act’s interventions because they were needed decades ago to stop Jim Crow laws, it is simply against the spirit of the Constitution for the courts to apply those laws beyond their original intent.

Yet here we are, with the courts vitiating one election law after another to tip the balance of power to Democrats. What they do is create an insurance policy by deliberately getting fraudulent voters, ineligible voters, voters without the proper residency and documentation, erroneously gathered absentee ballots, and even non-citizens to cast provisional ballots up front. Federal law does require states to offer provisional ballots, but states were left to determine the regulations and specific application. That is, until the courts came in and started mandating who must be accepted and under which circumstances.

Consequently, Democrats accrue piles of thousands of ineligible voters throughout an election with absentee ballots and on Election Day with provisional ballots. As soon as they see the results within striking distance, they get a federal judge to mandate the counting of those votes. We are living through an electoral trend of increasingly close races with a polarized country, and unless this judicial supremacy is mitigated, Republicans will lose every important election because of the breakdown of the rule of law and uniform and fraud-proof standards.

Nobody put it better than Marco Rubio:

And indeed, if we are prepared to vest the power of determining the score in the unelected branch of government, we are left with nothing but a judicial North Korea. (For more from the author of “Let’s Cut to the Chase and Have the Judges Vote for Us” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

The 2018 Midterm Results Leave Democrats Without a Roadmap for 2020

/0 Comments/in , /by

By The Federalist. Trying to project lessons from a midterm election for the next general election is risky business for many reasons. Yet no one may be more interested in trying to tease lessons out of 2018 than the Democrats seeking the presidency in 2020. For them, the results must range somewhere between confounding and disappointing.

Like any party out of the White House, today’s Democrats are groping for an identity. In particular, they are searching for the type of candidate who can beat the Republican––presumably President Trump––in a national contest.

The prospective candidates appear to be trying to fit themselves into various templates to please certain factions of their base, or fit certain theories about how to win in the Electoral College. A number of Democrats running statewide campaigns in 2018 tested these various approaches, but the results are hardly encouraging.

One Democratic faction is interested in a campaign involving identity politics––or, to put it less pejoratively, representational politics. They are shopping for the next Barack Obama, a candidate who inspires minorities and younger voters to flock to the polls. . .

Presidential wannabes like senators Kamala Harris and Cory Booker (or former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick) probably watched gubernatorial candidates like Florida’s Andrew Gillum and Georgia’s Stacey Abrams with great interest. Gillum and Abrams both ran on solidly progressive platforms, and neither was afraid to make race and racism issues in their campaigns. (Read more from “The 2018 Midterm Results Leave Democrats Without a Roadmap for 2020” HERE)

___________________________________________________

What the midterm election results mean for your taxes

By Market Watch. The 2018 midterm elections are over, and we will have a divided government through at least 2020. Here are the possible federal income tax implications for individual taxpayers:

With the Democrats now in control of the House and the Republicans still in control of the Senate, we have the classic recipe for tax gridlock. That’s because any tax legislation must originate in the House and then pass both the House and the Senate before being signed by the president. The Democrats want to roll back most or all of the taxpayer-friendly changes included in the 2017 Tax Reform and Jobs Act (TCJA), but there is no way the Republicans will allow that to happen.

The main idea of so-called Tax Reform 2.0 was to make permanent the TCJA’s temporary federal income tax rate cuts for individual taxpayers, the doubled child-tax credit, and the deduction for up to 20% of qualified business income (QBI) from pass-through entities (sole proprietorships, partnerships, LLCs, and S corporations). These pro-taxpayer changes are scheduled to expire at the end of 2025. (Read more from “Triple Murder Suspect Is an Illegal Immigrant Released Despite Detainer Request” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Stunning New Poll Reveals Drastic Turn in Midterm Elections

/0 Comments/in , /by

By The Blaze. Democrats got a gut check with a new poll from Quinnipiac showing that their lead in the generic ballot had been sliced by half for the midterm elections. . .

The Quinnipiac University poll found that Democrats had a generic ballot lead of 7 points, with 49 percent of Americans saying they’d vote for a Democrat while 42 percent said they’d vote for a Republican.

This lead represents half of the advantage the Democrats had in the same poll from September, when 52 percent of Americans said they’d vote for Democrats, while only 38 percent said they supported Republicans.

(Read more from “Stunning New Poll Reveals Drastic Turn in Midterm Elections” HERE)

______________________________________________________

We’re Running Thousands of Midterm Simulations Until Election Day

By TIME. After a humbling round of misfires in 2016, political forecasters now face an even more daunting challenge: Predicting the results of 470 simultaneous Congressional elections at a time when yesterday’s rules seem to no longer apply.

Not to be discouraged, most election handicappers predict a surge in Democratic turnout that may well flip the House of Representatives to Democratic control. That said, Congressional election outlooks have a sizable margin of error given the sheer number of races, less comprehensive polling and fluctuating turnout rates.

To get a handle on how likely Republicans are to lose either the House or the Senate, TIME is using the forecasts of three major political seers to create 10,000 electoral simulations every day, which you can activate below. In the electoral maps below, you can select predictions by Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, The Cook Political Report, Inside Elections, or a combination of all three to see, based on the confidence level of each race’s outlook, how likely it is for each scenario to play out in November. (Read more from “We’re Running Thousands of Midterm Simulations Until Election Day” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

U.S. Mid-Terms: Hackers Expose ‘Staggering’ Voter Machine Flaws

/0 Comments/in , /by

By BBC. Voting machines pose “serious risks” to US security, hackers are warning.

A report outlines major flaws in voting hardware, weeks before US mid-term elections.

One ballot machine, used in 23 US states, carries a cybersecurity flaw that was reported over a decade ago, the hackers claim. . .

In August, the Def Con conference in Las Vegas ran a “Voting Village”, where participants were encouraged to uncover flaws in US election infrastructure by hacking into various computer systems.

More than 30 voting machines and other pieces of equipment were made available to attendees of the conference, including the M650 electronic ballot scanner, which is currently used by 23 US states. (Read more from “U.S. Mid-Terms: Hackers Expose ‘Staggering’ Voter Machine Flaws” HERE)

_________________________________________________

Voting Machines Are Still Absurdly Vulnerable to Attacks

By WIRED. WHILE RUSSIAN INTERFERENCE operations in the 2016 US presidential elections focused on misinformation and targeted hacking, officials have scrambled ever since to shore up the nation’s vulnerable election infrastructure. New research, though, shows they haven’t done nearly enough, particularly when it comes to voting machines.

The report details vulnerabilities in seven models of voting machines and vote counters, found during the DefCon security conference’s Voting Village event. All of the models are in active use around the US, and the vulnerabilities—from weak password protections to elaborate avenues for remote access—number in the dozens. The findings also connect to larger efforts to safeguard US elections, including initiatives to expand oversight of voting machine vendors and efforts to fund state and local election security upgrades.

“We didn’t discover a lot of new vulnerabilities,” says Matt Blaze, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the organizers of the Voting Village, who has been analyzing voting machine security for more than 10 years. “What we discovered was vulnerabilities that we know about are easy to find, easy to reengineer, and have not been fixed over the course of more than a decade of knowing about them. And to me that is both the unsurprising and terribly disturbing lesson that came out of the Voting Village.” (Read more from “Voting Machines Are Still Absurdly Vulnerable to Attacks” HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Foreign Interference: Foreigners Voting in Our Elections

/0 Comments/in , /by

If Russians were found to have voted in our elections, would that be enough to get the political class to take seriously the issue of non-citizens voting in our elections? What if Russian nationals got standing to sue against any method of protecting the integrity of our elections and Census reapportionment? Would it then be kosher to focus on the existential threat posed by voter fraud?

All conservatives should take the Russian attempts to meddle in our elections seriously. But that is a national security and counterintelligence issue; it’s not an electoral issue. Nobody can say that the Russians made a difference with the actual voters in the Midwest who elected Trump. But what does make a difference is foreign nationals actually voting in our elections as well as being counted in the Census. They do more than influence our elections; they downright shape, distort, and irretrievably alter the outcome of our elections. Why is there no concern about this issue among the political class?

A law fueling non-citizens voting

Last week, the Public Interest Legal Foundation (PILF), headed by former DOJ attorney and election law expert J. Christian Adams, published a report showing definitive proof of non-citizens voting in Alleghany County, Pennsylvania, a key battleground state. Last year, the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation admitted that through the motor voter law, thousands of non-citizens were seamlessly registered to vote through their process of obtaining driver’s licenses. Last December, Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt estimated that over 100,000 non-citizens were registered over the past two decades statewide.

And this is just one critical state admitting its error. It’s not hard to see how this is a problem affecting countless hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people. The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) — otherwise known as the motor voter law – requires states to offer those obtaining driver’s licenses the option of registering to vote. The problem is that without strong mandates to check citizenship status, this law turned into basically a government requirement to register non-citizens to vote! Non-citizens, even legal immigrants, have no standing to vote in our elections. The courts have downright prevented states from asking for proof of citizenship on voter registration forms, and in many states, we are stuck with nothing more than an honor system to ensure that only Americans are choosing American leaders. Thus, when non-citizens erroneously register to vote, it often takes years to discover because of all the lawsuits against any state that employs commonsense measures to secure the integrity of our elections.

Worse, a dozen states hand out driver’s licenses to illegal aliens – more than a million in California alone – and other states are being forced to do so by the courts.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that this system and the amalgamation of a number of immigration factors, court decisions, and legal mandates have created a ubiquitous problem of non-citizens voting. It is extremely difficult to expose the extent of the problem because states do not cooperate with those who seek to research and quantify the number of non-citizens voting in our elections. Although the organization was denied access to review state records, PILF was given access to records from Alleghany County, which includes the state’s second most populous city, Pittsburgh. PILF found that 139 individual non-citizens were illegally registered to vote since 2006 and 27 percent of them cast at least one ballot in an election. Of course, just 23 of the 139 non-citizens were registered Republican.

Here’s the kicker: These were just the people who self-reported in just one county. We have no idea how many non-citizens voted in Alleghany County, much less the entire Keystone State, but it’s safe to say the number is exponentially higher. These are individuals who self-reported because they were scared that if they are ever caught having been illegally registered to vote, they could be prosecuted for voter fraud and deported. In a similar report in 2016, PILF found 1,046 non-citizens registered to vote in eight Virginia counties and “cast a total of 186 votes between 2005 and 2015.

Record immigration, the motor voter law, and no mandated verification are a recipe for disaster for immigrants and citizens

It’s important to remember that our system is so absurd that it hurts even well-intentioned immigrants. Forget about illegal immigrants or those who desire to subvert our laws for a moment. Many unsuspecting legal immigrants are given the choice of registering to vote without even realizing it’s illegal to do so. Now a number of blue states are automatically registering people with driver’s licenses to vote as part of their obsession to juice up turnout. This will easily rope in many non-citizens. We can’t expect immigrants to be more zealous about the problem than we are. In fact, the problem is so real that the ACLU initially opposed California’s automatic registration law out of concern that it would register many non-citizens, which would render them deportable for violating election law.

This is a growing problem with the explosion of immigration over the past few decades. As the Center for Immigration Studies reports, “[I]n 1990, immigrants were at least 20 percent of the adult population (18-plus) in just 44 counties; by 2014 they were at least 20 percent of the adult population in 152 counties.” They further note that “the immigrant share of adults has more than quadrupled in 232 counties.” The total immigrant population now stands at 44 million. Putting the broader immigration debate aside for a moment, even those who favor mass immigration must admit that the unprecedented growth in immigration poses a foundational risk to the franchise unless states are able to ensure that non-citizens are not registering to vote through motor voter forms.

In one of the case studies in Allegheny County, PILF found that a woman named Karen who came here on a K-1 fiancée visa was registered to vote from 1996 until 2008. In her own words: “I asked the attendant if I should fill it out. I told her that I didn’t think I was qualified to vote as I wasn’t a citizen. She thought I should fill it out anyway, and that I would be rejected if I was not qualified.” PILF posted her letter to county officials asking that her name be removed after years of being registered as an active voter against her will.

Now imagine all of the dishonest people and illegal aliens trying to “influence our elections” who would never self-report. We need not imagine how many illegals are likely voting in California. Thanks to concerns from the ACLU, California added the following provision to Section 2269 of the automatic voter registration law:

If a person who is ineligible to vote becomes registered to vote pursuant to this chapter and votes or attempts to vote in an election held after the effective date of the person’s registration, that person shall be presumed to have acted with official authorization and shall not be guilty of fraudulently voting or attempting to vote pursuant to Section 18560, unless that person willfully votes or attempts to vote knowing that he or she is not entitled to vote.

How many think this will actually deter them from voting once they are protected from prosecution?

Subverting our sovereignty and destiny: The ultimate foreign influence

It’s worse than foreign nationals simply voting in our elections. All illegal aliens are counted in the Census and give states like California more representation in the House and in presidential elections, even when they don’t all actually cast ballots. This is the ultimate disenfranchisement of Americans. Now, the legal profession is working in the courts to prevent the Trump administration from even asking about immigration status on the Census, much less discounting illegals in the 2020 reapportionment.

The distortion of our elections is amplified by dual-nationality voting – with over 1 million Mexican-Americans voting in both American and Mexican elections, while Mexican presidential candidates campaign for votes on our shores while bashing our government. Where is the concern of foreign meddling by Mexico?

A sane Republican Party would introduce a legislative agenda to broadly address foreign meddling in our elections on all fronts while aggressively pursuing a counterintelligence effort against Russian espionage. That agenda should:

Explicitly authorize states to require proof of citizenship to vote

Require that states and localities use the federal SAVE (Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements) database or E-Verify to check for non-citizens voting

Stop counting illegal aliens in the Census for purpose of reapportionment

Treat states that offer driver’s licenses to illegal aliens as sanctuary cities and cut off special federal law enforcement grants

Disallow dual citizens to vote in foreign election while voting in American elections

Tighten up section 8 of the motor voter law, which requires states to “make a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters,” in a way that even liberal judges can’t misread it

Yesterday, Speaker Paul Ryan declared, “There is no question that Russia interfered in our election and continues attempts to undermine democracy here and around the world.” He called for a renewed focus “on holding Russia accountable and putting an end to its vile attacks on democracy.” Fabulous. Why then has he refused to allow a single piece of legislation dealing with the ultimate subversion of democracy – voter fraud and non-citizens voting – to come to the floor for a vote?

Anyone in the media and in Congress who is concerned about foreign powers influencing elections but ignores foreigners actually voting in our elections and irrevocably distorting our representation is high on Russian vodka or is intellectually bankrupt. (For more from the author of “Foreign Interference: Foreigners Voting in Our Elections” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

While the Left Ignores Voter Fraud, More Evidence Mounts to Prove Them Wrong

/0 Comments/in , /by

The 2016 elections have passed, but courts still have plenty of work to do sorting out cases of voter fraud throughout the country.

Convictions have continued to roll in this spring, and The Heritage Foundation’s voter fraud database is growing longer by the day.

This week, we are adding 19 convictions, including cases from Texas, Colorado, and Illinois. These are just the latest convictions. Yet despite the overwhelming evidence, the left prefers to bury its head in the sand and refuses to acknowledge the reality of Voter fraud.

Take one example from Kansas. When Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach claimed his first conviction in a voter fraud case against a non-U.S. citizen, opponents of the conviction had no interest in dealing with the facts.

Instead, some groups on the left—like the liberal news site Think Progress—accused Kobach of “voter suppression.” Another Salon article completely dismissed Kobach without addressing the evidence he found, saying, “Someday he’ll have evidence of a problem that doesn’t exist.”

In many states, voter registration requires proof of citizenship. The left calls such policies anti-American. But is that really such a radical idea, that voters in a U.S. election would have to be U.S. citizens?

If liberals want evidence, then Heritage has it. To date, we have documented 773 confirmed criminal convictions in 492 voter fraud cases spanning 44 states.

Here are a few of the newest entries to the database:

Toni Lee Newbill, of Colorado, pleaded guilty to voting twice for her deceased father, once in the 2013 general election and again in the Republican Primary of 2016. Newbill was sentenced to 18 months of unsupervised probation, 30 hours of community service, and was ordered to pay a $500 fine and additional court fees.

Noe Olvera, of Texas, pleaded guilty to a federal bribery charge. Olvera, a postman, admitted to taking a $1,000 bribe from a paid campaign worker in exchange for a list of the names and addresses of mail-in ballot recipients on his postal route.

After a two-year investigation into local voting fraud, hidden camera footage surfaced revealing a uniformed and on-the-job Olvera “negotiating an exchange of money for mail-in voter lists.” Olvera is scheduled to be sentenced on May 25.

Steveland Kidd, of Illinois, pleaded guilty to two counts of absentee ballot abuse during a municipal election in April 2013. Kidd took possession of, and delivered, an absentee ballot to election authorities despite being legally barred from doing so.

The crime is a Class 3 felony. Kidd was sentenced to 12 days in the St. Clair County Jail and is now barred from engaging in campaign-related activities or electioneering.

Brian McDouglar, a resident of Cahokia, Illinois, was sentenced to two years in prison on charges of falsifying or tampering with an absentee ballot—a class 3 felony. McDouglar illegally took an absentee ballot from a voter he was not related to, and then placed it in the mail.

Clearly, absentee voting remains particularly vulnerable to fraud.

Simply put, in most states there are few measures in place to sufficiently verify the identity of those casting absentee ballots. Signatures can be forged—a problem that can be addressed by requiring the voter to include a photocopied valid ID along with the absentee ballot.

But more robust identification requirements would only solve part of the problem. They cannot defend against the pernicious targeting of absentee voters by pressuring, coercing, or “assisting” them in filling out their ballots in order to assure that particular candidates or causes prevail.

So long as states continue to allow the names of deceased voters and residents who have moved away to remain on their voter rolls, they are leaving the door wide open to fraudsters who are willing to take advantage of the system by voting in their names.

The Heritage Foundation published “Does Your Vote Count?,” a guide to help voters and policymakers understand the issue of election fraud. That report provides policy recommendations that states should adopt to help thwart illegal activity and ensure that the election process remains free and fair for all.

Procedures that can be implemented include requiring a photographic, government-issued ID and proof of citizenship to register to vote. In addition, participating in an interstate voter registration crosscheck program will help guarantee that people are not voting twice.

Secretaries of state should verify voter registration data with other state and federal agencies, such as the state Department of Motor Vehicles and the Social Security Administration. Such measures will offer a barrier of protection not only to eligible voters, but also to the electoral process in general.

A single fraudulent vote does more than just cancel out the vote of another American. It puts a stain on the results of the entire election.

If voters are discouraged to participate in what they perceive as a tainted process, it only empowers those who would seek to steal elections.

Instead of vilifying those who fulfill their duties to protect the electoral process, the left should embrace the facts. Voter fraud is real, and we must take seriously the task of securing the integrity of our elections. (For more from the author of “While the Left Ignores Voter Fraud, More Evidence Mounts to Prove Them Wrong” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Do Primary Elections in Alaska Work?

/0 Comments/in , /by

According to the Alaska Division of Elections, Alaska taxpayers will pay roughly $2,000,000 to help state political parties choose their nominees this year (note: this does not count the presidential race, which does not use the state primary process). For the price of $2 million in state funding, we should expect an election process that works, and that benefits all Alaskans, right? It seems a fair assumption, but it is also a naïve one. If the past three election cycles are any example, Alaska’s current primary election process has trouble meeting either expectation, which is one of the reasons fewer and fewer candidates are entrusting their bid for office to Alaska’s primary election process.

Of course, in one sense, it is easy to say that the process has worked for the politicians and candidates who emerged victorious from last month’s primary. Winning candidates can often be counted on to defend the process that led to their own election, even when that process utterly fails to deliver for most Alaskans. However, it should be noted that neither Alaska’s governor, lieutenant governor, nor senior US senator won their election through the primary election process. In fact, all three participated in that process and then abandoned it in order to get elected. If bypassing the primary election process worked for three of Alaska’s senior elected officials, why should other candidates not do likewise? And in fact that is what we are seeing today, as candidates openly consider write-in campaigns after primary losses, or bypass the primary entirely by running independent of a party label.

Even as a candidate who was successful in last month’s primary, I would argue that it is fairly easy to see that the current primary election process is not working, and that it needs to be one of the places we look to make cuts in next year’s legislative session. Let us set aside entirely the matter of whether Alaska’s elections are being executed properly. They aren’t, and that will likely be the final nail in the coffin of Alaska’s primary system, but even if they were being executed flawlessly today, I would still have to conclude that Alaska’s current primary election system has failed to deliver.

Voter Participation

According to numbers from the Division of Elections, 12% of Alaskans participated in the 2016 primary election (17% of registered voters). Our senior US senator received support from 5.4% of Alaskans (7.7% of registered voters), which pundits have already hailed as a landslide win. Obviously, her opponents received even less support. But these numbers alone do not tell the whole story.

Primary election participation in Alaska during presidential years has been in free fall since 2008. That year, voter turnout was 40.62%. By 2012, that number had dropped to 25.34%. Now in 2016, that number has dipped to 17.28%, less than one tenth of one percent away from the lowest voter turnout ever recorded and published by the Division of Elections in a federal election cycle.

Public Confidence

While primary election voter turnout is impacted by many factors, of greatest concern to me personally is the impact felt by changes in public trust and confidence in the primary process itself. Simply put, compared to 2008, voters today have less reason to believe that the results of primary elections will be maintained by the candidates and political parties involved. While the results of primary elections used to be a reliable indicator both of which party would be supporting a general election candidate, and of who would be appearing on the general election ballot for that party, today that is no longer the case. Let us review some notable examples, examples that many Alaskan voters will not soon forget:

* In 2010, after pledging to support whichever candidate won the Republican Primary, Senator Murkowski lost her race for the Republican Primary. Instead of supporting the outcome of the primary election, she began negotiations with the Alaska Libertarian Party to appear on the ballot as a Libertarian. When those negotiations failed, she pursued a successful campaign as a write-in candidate, a campaign co-chaired by Democrat Byron Mallott with public support from a number of Republican Party leaders.

* In 2014, after a previous bid for Governor in the Republican Primary was unsuccessful, Gov. Bill Walker returned to the campaign trail as an independent candidate, with running mate Craig Fleener. In the primary election, Byron Mallott won the Democrat Nomination for governor and Hollis French won the Democrat Nomination for Lt. Governor. After the primary election, Mallott replaced Fleener and began campaigning as an independent, and neither Democrat nominee advanced to the general election as a Democrat.

In fact, over the past three primary elections, Alaskan voters have witnessed a number of cases where candidates campaigned under a different party in the general election than they did in the primary, where voters changed party registration to influence the primary election of another party on behalf of their own party, where party leaders supported candidates other than their party’s own nominees, and where the actual results of primary elections seemed to matter very little, as losing candidates either threatened or pursued write-in campaigns, and winning candidates were not assured of support even from their own party. In this type of environment, how do state-financed primary elections continue to make sense?

Party Discipline

This Saturday, the Republican Party will attempt to remove one of its own elected party leaders, Dave Bronson, from office. Ironically, the charge against him is that he has been encouraging voters to support, for US Senate, the candidate who best reflects the Platform of the Republican Party (note: the fracas arose because that candidate is not the candidate who won the Republican primary). Yet, while discipline may exist for party leaders who break ranks in defense of their party’s platform, there does not yet seem to be any corresponding move to pursue discipline for Republican politicians whose official acts undermine the Republican Platform, or who campaign against their party’s own nominees after losing in the primary.

Those trying to make sense of all this should realize that party leadership usually changes biennially, and those currently serving as party officers are likely to be different from those who held those positions two, four or six years ago. However, it does bear mention in the 2010 case, that Sen. Murkowski has had a vote in all official state party business since 2002, and at no point since 2002 has she lost that vote or had her representative removed from party office. In fact, when it comes to official voting leaders of the state party, she has been the one constant.

Conclusion

Perhaps it was once the case that state-funded primary elections served the public by bringing clarity to voters about what candidates of a particular party believed and the positions they would likely hold in office. However, today’s primary election process seems to do more to confuse than to clarify.

When candidates no longer reflect the platform and values of their party, when those who win primary elections do not end up being supported by their party in the general election, when parties ask some of their nominees to drop-out (and others to join competing tickets), when candidates and voters no longer have confidence that the results of the primary election will be honored and maintained by political parties and fellow candidates, then you have all the ingredients for a confusing, dysfunctional system that most voters could simply do without.

Tell me, why should I vote in the primary, if the results of the primary election may not even matter? 83% of registered Alaskan voters chose not to participate this year. They had more important things to do with their time. At some point we need to step back and conclude that the state should not be subsidizing such a dysfunctional process, certainly not to the tune of $2,000,000 every election.

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.

Vulnerable Dems Seek More Aggressive IRS Crackdown on Conservative Groups for 2014 Elections

/3 Comments/in , /by

Photo Credit: AP/Jacquelyn MartinEven with so many unanswered questions still surrounding the Internal Revenue Service targeting scandal, Democrats are demanding the tax agency be even more aggressive in monitoring spending from outside groups going into the 2014 midterm elections.

“There are two things you don’t want in political money, in the fundraising world and expenditure world,” Sen. Mark Pryor (D-Ark.) told The Hill newspaper. “You don’t want secret money, and you don’t want unlimited money, and that’s what we have now.”

Pryor is considered among the most endangered Senate Democrats up for re-election this year.

But that’s no reason to attack the First Amendment rights of citizen groups, said Washington attorney Cleta Mitchell, who is suing on behalf of several conservative organizations given extra scrutiny by the IRS in the 2012 election cycle.

“It is absolutely outrageous that these elected officials are distressed about having a citizens group discuss their voting records – and then calling on the IRS or any agency of government to ‘protect’ them from having to explain, justify or defend their voting records in Congress,” Mitchell told TheBlaze.

Read more from this story HERE.

Hill Democrats, Republicans Set 2014 Agendas with Midterm Elections in Mind

/1 Comment/in , /by

Photo Credit: AP

Photo Credit: AP

Congressional Democrats and Republicans sharpened their political knives Sunday as lawmakers return to Washington this week to begin executing legislative agendas designed to help their respective parties in the November elections.

The first major battle will likely be over restoring long-term unemployment benefits, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid scheduled to hold a preliminary vote Monday on the issue.

“The first thing we want to get done is extend unemployment benefits,” he told Fox News on Sunday.

The benefits were not included in a two-year budget deal Congress reached before adjourning for winter break, but not before House Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, made clear the money will not be restored unless offset but other spending cuts.

The White House is also applying pressure on congressional Republicans, issuing a statement on New Year’s Day that said President Obama supports the bipartisan Senate bill to reinstate benefits for the 1.3 million Americans who lost the insurance in the new budget deal.

Read more from this story HERE.