Once again, Project Vote fights election integrity measures. “The new rules included barring non-Texans from becoming volunteer deputy registrars, or VDRs; prohibiting them from accepting applications for residents outside the county in which they were appointed; requiring them to personally deliver rather than mail applications to election officials; and restricting their compensation.”
Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/local_news/article/Texas-AG-wins-round-in-battle-over-tougher-voter-3846125.php#ixzz25ni3eAgG
Author Archives: J Christian Adams
Senator Cornyn on Military Voting Mess
Some election law news sources seem to ignore military voting entirely. We don’t. Here is the letter sent today by Texas Senator John Cornyn (and five other Senators) to the Secretary of Defense about the abysmal track record of the Obama administration on military voting.
So far, DOD has said the solution to the abysmal compliance with the Move Act is Twitter and Facebook. Hopefully the heat that the Senate is about to send will broaden the list of solutions, perhaps to include compliance with the law.
Eric Eversole on Fox on Obama Military Voting Mess
“Pentagon falls behind on requirements to assist overseas military voters”
Government Executive mag.
“Losing it in Charlotte”
PJ Rule of Law. “Lee Atwater couldn’t have written a better script for the Democratic National Convention that just ended in Charlotte. The Charlotte fiasco was a less violent version of the fiasco in Chicago in 1968, except the lunacy was now inside the venue, not outside. . . . Then Julia Rodriguez, a credentialed convention delegate from New York (but waving a Puerto Rican flag and sporting a button seeking statehood), said on camera she “would like to kill” Mitt Romney. The unseemly radicals chanting in the Chicago park were now inside the hall in Charlotte. . . . The Charlotte screenplay borrowed from the Gospels, where delegates weren’t content to deny God’s return to the platform only once. Three times they yelled – “NO!! NO!!” – not me, never heard of the guy. At least Peter felt ashamed after his three denials. I doubt very much the clowns captured on TV standing and yelling “NO” as loudly as they could feel any shame. And because Los Angles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa literally had the single vote and predetermined outcome scripted on his teleprompter, it makes you wonder who’s doing these rewrites.”
I was reminded of a Voting Rights Act case I tried in Mississippi where the United States actually put up nearly identical evidence to demonstrate the rotten racial intent of a Democrat operative named Ike Brown. “Keep Hope Alive, Vote Black in ’95,” was his message. That sentiment isn’t confined to the bowels of Mississippi anymore. . . .
But booing God will be the image from the Charlotte fiasco that will last longer than all the rest. This week, America saw a new kind of Democrat party, one totally unmoored from the long cultural traditions of Democrats and Republicans alike.
Voter Fraud Denial in Denver
The latest partisan attacks against Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler’s efforts to maintain clean voter rolls as required by law are … all part of the Democrats’ monotonous, contrived narrative in this election campaign that Republicans are out to “suppress” the turnout of minorities who vote for Democrats. The argument is nonsense. There’s nothing intimidating about asking legal citizens, regardless of their color or ethnicity, to identify themselves. Only illegal voters have something to fear. But it does appear we have a problem with the Department of Motor Vehicles’ handling of motor-voter registration. There are accounts that they’re indiscriminately “upselling” that option, much like the counter server at a fast-food restaurant who asks if you want “fries with that.” It should be standard procedure that anyone asked by a DMV clerk about registering to vote should also be asked if he or she is a U.S. citizen. More via the Denver Post.
Alabama Voter Fraud
Here. Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange has asked the Justice Department to look into “unusually high” participation rates in an Alabama election where the DOJ monitored this month. Since General Strange has read my book Injustice, I suspect he knows that this request will not go very far. The Justice Department these days doesn’t think anything is usually wrong with “unusually high participation” rates. In fact, as you read in Injustice, for many years, DOJ observers went to these parts of Alabama and facilitated voter fraud involving unusually high participation rates. One Justice Department lawyer in 2006 (which I document at length in my book Injustice. Link over there <——–), put a stop to it. But that lawyer is gone, and now the old guard that permitted racially motivated voter fraud to occur in Alabama is back.
I expect the state of Alabama will have to undertake this one alone.
Holder’s double standard on New Hampshire and South Carolina photo ID laws
This week we got a glimpse of the double standard in place with the Holder DOJ. A bias and different standard are certainly being used with southern states like Texas and South Carolina and northern states like New Hampshire and Rhode Island (no section 2 case).
For example, the New Hampshire photo ID law was administratively precleared and yet that law has fewer acceptable forms of photo ID for use at the polls than the Texas photo ID law. For those voters in New Hampshire that may have not been able to obtain a photo ID, the voter is required to sign an affidavit and have his or her picture taken at the polls for future use.
Similarly, South Carolina has a photo ID law with more acceptable forms of ID than the New Hampshire law and a reasonable impediment affidavit for voters that may have had an obstacle to obtaining a photo ID. Yet in the South Carolina preclearance submission, DOJ delayed, obstructed, and eventually objected not once, but twice administratively.
DOJ simply ignored the safety valve mechanism of the South Carolina reasonable impediment affidavit during its administrative review. It took a full trial on the merits before the federal judge panel in Washington DC asked in shock why they had not heard of the affidavit provision of the law earlier.
DOJ has now precleared the New Hampshire photo ID law, primarily to keep that state eligible for bailout as the Left hopes to use the New Hampshire bailout to argue that Section 5 is still operable. In a nutshell, “lookey here Supremes, New Hampshire bailed out, so can South Carolina one day.”
When the District of Columbia federal panel finally approves the South Carolina ID law after numerous baseless DOJ objections, it will reveal once and for all that the Holder DOJ can not be entrusted with the power to review voter ID laws under the nation’s civil rights laws.
Politics, legal strategy and ulterior motives have infected the neutral review required under the law.
Discerning the Military Voting Problem at FVAP
This blog and the Washington Times have covered the news of the Department of Defense Inspector General Report about the fact that the Federal Voting Assistance Program has failed to comply with the MOVE Act’s command to make voter registration and information facilities available on all installations. (See also Tabella’s post FVAP Has Their Head in the Sand.) Half of all military installations have no such facilities according to the Inspector General’s report. The MOVE Act was passed three years ago and appropriated $75,000,000 dollars for setting up these installation facilities. Yet the task remains only halfway done. At least Bob [Carey, previous FVAP director] had a tiny sense of the outside-the-Pentagon world, having attempted a nonprofit of his own in Manhattan before joining FVAP. Ms. Mitchell is pure, vintage Pentagon. Deny, distract and dismiss. . . . Ms. Mitchell seems stuck in an alternate universe, a “that’s my story, and I’m stickin’ to it,” defense, in spite of the evidence. Again, investing all strategy in social media is a guaranteed fail, and sets DoD up for ridicule. They will end up hiring 10 young girls, paying them $100,000 a year to tweet and post things on Facebook. All you have to do is watch CNBC for an hour to hear the growing understanding the social media has limited effectiveness. So there you have it. How much money will the Pentagon spend on social media while at the same time military voting participation rates remain in the basement?
There is possibly an easy cheap solution to solve the Pentagon’s failures to comply with the law. Offering registration and voting information at base sign-in, whenever a servicemember reports to a new base and completes a stack of paperwork.
An FVAP insider intimately familiar with internal operations provides this troubling insight to ELC, however, into an insular culture that doesn’t adapt easy, effective and obvious solutions. The person tells us about the previous postings at this blog:
Arkansas Democrat Pleads Guilty in Voter Fraud Scheme
A Democratic state legislator from east Arkansas, his father and two campaign workers pleaded guilty Wednesday to conspiracy to commit election fraud after federal prosecutors said they bribed absentee voters and destroyed ballots in a special election last year. Full story here.
“In a nation in which every person’s vote matters, protecting the integrity of the electoral process from those who seek to win office by cheating the system is critical,” U.S. Attorney Jane Duke said in a statement released by her office. “Voter fraud schemes such as that carried out in the 2011 District 54 race have the devastating effect of eroding public confidence in elected officials and disenfranchising voters.”