While the President has launched a so-called bipartisan Presidential Commission on Election Administration after the 2012 General Election, the Vice-President apparently got the internal political memorandum and is making the “long lines” issue a racial and partisan issue.  Whatever his excuse, he is already undermining any legitimate review of election issues from the previous presidential election.  Biden ignores the evidence of no racial intent in lines where the relatively few lines were in urban area codes that included both whites and blacks and have a history of underfunding of election. 

Instead, the Vice-President of the United States feels the need to make “the lines” an racial and political issue.  Up to this point, few substantive analysts have pointed to intentional racial discrimination for any of the lines on election day.  But there is always Joe Biden.  With these comments certain to alienate Republicans, the White House is setting the Commission up for failure.

Politico reports: 

Before a heavily African-American crowd, Biden seized on a deeply polarizing issue in this state: voting rights.  Invoking a 106-year-old lady who cast a ballot last year, Biden claimed she waited seven hours to vote.  “She said, ‘I tell you what, I didn’t fight this hard, this long, for
anybody to deny me the right to vote,’ ” thundered the vice president.

It wasn’t clear if Biden was alluding to the 106-year-old South
Carolina woman who voted for the first time last year or the
102-year-old Florida lady who famously had to wait for over three hours
to cast her ballot and attended President Obama’s State of the Union
address in February. Or, Biden being Biden, he might have
unintentionally rolled the two anecdotes together and come up with his
own version.

Roll Call reports on the latest in this ongoing saga.  In the latest, a conciliation agreement and $16,000 in penalties for a number of contributors who made illegal contributions.

Going on to talk with Andrea Tantaros 11am EDT to talk whistleblowing and Benghazi.

I was on the Huckabee show this past weekend to talk about Bhenghazi, the Justice Department, New Black Panthers and whistleblowing.

The latest example of the lack of will of prosecutors and incompetency of election officials in South Florida.  Where is Governor Scott to “fix this”?    

The Palm Beach Post reports that: Eight Palm Beach County felons who voted illegally in the 2012 primary
election will not be charged because authorities couldn’t prove they
were aware they didn’t have the right to vote. Meanwhile, two of the
felons remain on the Palm Beach County voter rolls.

The standard of “proving” criminal intent seems to be a bit different in Palm Beach than in the rest of the country.  The story reveals that prosecutors have the registration applications and the absentee ballot paperwork to prove the felons voted illegally.  Note the lack of proof that the “investigators” point to in determining that there was a lack of evidence.  The lack of a confession is not a lack of evidence.

…Romagnoli spoke with seven of the eight men, each of whom said they
hadn’t been told by the supervisor of elections that they couldn’t vote
and hadn’t been turned away at the polls.

Why does anyone believe a felon who again committed another felony by voting is simply going to confess to investigators and admit their guilt to multiple felonies.  The felons deny and investigators simply buy the explanation?  When has that ever been the end of the story.  Since when is there an affirmative duty of a local official to inform citizens not to break the law.  Imagine: “The Sheriff didn’t tell me I couldn’t not grow marijuana in my basement so it must be OK.”

Then there is the response of the local election official pointing fingers at someone else:

… Though Palm Beach County Supervisor of Elections Susan Bucher said she thinks
the system for verifying voter eligibility is “slow and onerous,” she
has few alternatives. By law she is allowed to act on information from
other sources to remove felons from the voter rolls, but doesn’t do so.

She admits she is not taking all steps available, instead relying on “slow and onerous” information.  If the system is “slow and onerous” in processing felons that is something Palm Beach County, Governor Scott and the Florida Legislature should fix.

Secretary of State Scott Gessler says “Colorado voters deserve better” than the election bill soon to be passed out of the Democrat-controlled legislature on straight party-line votes, which “fundamentally changes” how the state will run its elections:

Dead persons voting.  Double voting.  Citizens voting with the registration address of a tennis guard shack.  Election official failures to be sure but the Department of Justice (DOJ) doesn’t enforce that part of the law.  The unsurprising result: “Voter Fraud alleged in Mount Vernon,”  and a cry for help to the DOJ by concerned citizens wanting fair elections.  Don’t hold your breath citizens, DOJ is too busy monitoring photo ID elections in Kansas, that hotbed of historical racial discrimination and defiance of federal voting laws.  

A group calling itself Concerned Citizens of Mount Vernon is claiming
the 2012 school vote was rife with fraud and has sent letters to the
U.S. Department of Justice and state attorney general requesting
monitors for this year’s election and budget vote.“We
have a school board election coming up, and we want a fair and level
playing field for all candidates,” said Maria Caraballo, one of the
group’s members. Caraballo ran for the board last year, losing by 144 votes.

“Ticket please”

“A Columbus County resident could face felony charges of voter fraud for casting a ballot twice in the November 2012 election… One of the ballots was cast at the board of elections headquarters and then another absentee ballot cast at a different one-stop site the next morning.”

It turns out the “honor system” is not an effective way to ensure honest elections.

A very interesting Wall Street Journal article on how stringent Motor Voter laws, mistakes by local DMV bureaucracies, and the lack of citizenship ID verification mistakenly register legal resident aliens to voter rolls.  The result is years of deportation hearings and litigation over the potential felony. Just imagine what “automatic registration” would do exacerbate the issue of “mistaken registration.”

Excerpts from the piece:

Both sides of the debate present compelling arguments: Requiring proof
of citizenship would no doubt guard against voter fraud but could also
inconvenience or deter legitimate voters. Yet witnessing firsthand how
Motor Voter registration plays out for immigrants in Illinois and
Indiana—like the scenario described earlier—I have come to see how a law
like Arizona’s, or at least some validation process, might be good for
noncitizen immigrant

….A legal mechanism requiring proof of citizenship for voter
registration—such as Arizona’s Prop. 200 or some other validation
process—would have saved Ms. Keathley and our overburdened courts years
of grief. One hopes the Supreme Court takes cases like hers into
consideration when ruling on Prop. 200 and the alleged supremacy of the
federal Motor Voter law.