|
by Paul R. Hollrah, Lincoln Heritage Institute Fellow
For most of post-Civil War history Democrats have controlled political outcomes by tampering with access to the ballot box and by perfecting and engaging in every conceivable kind of fraud, violence, and intimidation. They have registered and voted innumerable dead and non-existent persons. They have intimidated many thousands more through arson, violence, and the threat of violence. And they’ve sent night-riding bands of KKK marauders to lynch thousands of blacks and more than a thousand white Republicans. They’ve done all of these things, and much of it continues to this day.
For example, in the 2000 General Election, more than a hundred thousand resident aliens in California, non-citizens, received voting cards from the California Democratic State Committee. The mailing list could only have been supplied by political appointees in the Immigration & Naturalization Service (INS). The cover letter was signed by Bill Clinton.
In August 2004, disabled veterans residing in Florida received letters put out by the Florida Democratic State Committee telling them that the Bush Administration intended to cut their VA benefits.
On October 5, 2004, Democratic activists ransacked the Bush-Cheney headquarters in Orlando. In Miami, Bush campaign workers were physically assaulted. In Knoxville, Tenn,. and Huntington, W.Va., “unknown assailants” fired shots through the windows of Bush-Cheney campaign offices.
In 2004, the Republican Party headquarters in Bozeman, Mont., was vandalized twice in a single week, and in Bellevue, Wash., windows were smashed in Bush-Cheney campaign headquarters. The office was burglarized, computers containing campaign plans and data were stolen, and cars with Bush bumper stickers were vandalized.
On November 2, 2004, Democrat campaign workers entered a GOP headquarters parking lot in Milwaukee and slashed tires on 30 vans rented to transport voters to the polls on Election Day.
On November 6, 2004, a mob of about 100 Democrat “brownshirts,” wearing masks and gloves, attacked the North Carolina GOP headquarters in Raleigh. The attackers broke windows, spray painted vulgar messages on the walls, and set fires inside the building.
In September 2005, New Jersey Republicans announced the results of a study of political registrations. They found 55,000 people who were registered in more than one New Jersey jurisdiction, and that 5,950 had voted more than once in the 2004 elections. They found 170,000 voters who were registered in more than one state, and that, of that number, 6,500 had voted in two or more states in the same election.
In March 2006, the Milwaukee County Board of Elections purged election rolls. 105,000 names (23% of the voting population) were removed because names and addresses did not match with actual persons.
These are but a tiny fraction of the thousands of instances of fraud, violence, and intimidation committed by Democrats in each and every election. So is it any wonder that a New York Times headline of Friday, July 20, proclaimed, “Overhaul Plan for Vote System Will Be Delayed.”
Yes, Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have decided, after working nearly eight years to convince the American people that Republicans stole the election in Florida in 2000 and in Ohio in 2004 – a charge that has produced not a single shred of evidence – that there really isn’t enough time to enact reforms before the 2008 General Election.
For the past seven years, Republicans across the country, in state after state, have attempted to pass legislation requiring voters to show at least one form of photo ID (the same ID they are required to show when they write a $10 check at Wal-Mart) before entering the voting booth. Shamelessly, Democrats have defeated all such proposals by using elderly blacks as human shields…claiming that elderly blacks would be discriminated against because many do not have photo IDs. This issue may soon become moot because a federal judge in Mississippi, Judge W. Allen Pepper, Jr., has ruled that Mississippi must implement a system requiring voters to show photo IDs before voting.
Now, as the Congress considers legislation to require states to provide fair and accurate voting machines – machines that provide a paper trail for use in subsequent recounts – Democrats have found a new constituency to hide behind.
According to the Times, House Democrats are attempting to negotiate a compromise with Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), the bill’s original sponsor. However, those talks have “hit a snag over how to guarantee easy access to voting machines by the handicapped…”
The Times reports that, “Advocates for the blind and the disabled…threatened to oppose the bill if it went too far in discouraging the use of touch-screen machines before the optical scanners were made easier for them to use.”
Reid and Pelosi put up a strong fight – for at least a minute or two – and then they caved. What the heck! If you’re looking for ways to steal elections and you can’t find an elderly black person to hide behind, just grab the first blind or paraplegic person who comes along.
|
