President Trump’s assertion that millions of illegal votes were cast in the November election has elicited howls of protest from offended national reporters and pundits who demanded proof. Instead of recoiling, the President doubled down with an executive order to find out just how much voter fraud exists.

It is hard to fathom how anyone, especially those inquiring minds of the Washington press corps, legitimately would be so uninterested in finding the truth.  Despite insisting that the President provide evidence of voter fraud, he is being assailed even more vehemently by the Democrat pols, late-night talk show hosts and reporters when he offers to do just that. 

A 2014 report based on an investigation conducted by a consortium of 28 universities found that 6.4 percent of the 20 million adult non-citizens in the U.S. had voted in our elections.  The study also concluded that, “Non-citizen votes likely gave Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress.”  That would translate into 1,280,000 illegal votes being recorded, of which an estimated 81 percent, or more than a million, would have gone to Hillary Clinton. But instead of being shocked and dismayed that this level of criminality may be underway, most in the press gloated that Mr. Trump had overstated the voter abuse. 

Questionnaires used by the consortium however, revealed a significant number of non-citizens who admitted to voting in our Presidential elections – leading the researchers to conclude this group alone could have cast between a low of 38,000 to a high of 2.8 million illegal votes.  We don’t know the extent of the abuse because there has been no attempt to find out, and the liberal press will go to great lengths to keep it that way.

To bolster its case that election fraud is statistically insignificant, the press points to the very few criminal convictions that have been secured by state or federal authorities.  But do any of us believe that only those who are ticketed had sped down our highways on a holiday weekend?  And state troopers actually make some effort to curtail traffic violations.   The Justice Department, however, has been blithely indifferent to preventing possible election fraud.

Obvious but unreported is the fact the Democratic Party pushes an open borders agenda specifically to increase its voter base and rails against “vote suppression” whenever anyone points out that these same illegal immigrants might be participating in and distorting our elections.  Fraud long has been an ugly element of American politics, and it has been almost exclusively the dominion of Democrats.

From the reckless corruption of the Boss Tweed and the Tammany Hall thugs in New York during the mid-1800s through the heavy-handed precinct politics favored by Mayor Richard J. Daley and his successors in Chicago during much of the 20^th century, to the wide-spread graft of today, the Democratic Party has virtually sole claim to the mechanisms of election corruption.

The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), of which former President Barack Obama has had a close working association and heavy funding for his campaign coffers, has a 40-year rap sheet of widespread voter registration fraud.  Untold thousands who went to their just rewards years ago are resurrected on each election day to cast one more ballot for their favorite Democrat pol, while an estimated 2.8 million are registered to vote in more than one state and often do.

In a recent interview, former Immigration and Customs Enforcement Special Agent Claude Arnold described the ease with which illegal immigrants can obtain falsified government documents in California.  “In every neighborhood where there is a significant illegal alien population, there are at least several document vendors that provide this service,” Arnold explained.  “Typically people buy what we refer to as a three-pack – either a counterfeit resident alien or work authorization card, a counterfeit California drivers license and a counterfeit Social Security card.”

Securing an illicit voter registration card at this point is no problem because the veracity of the documents is seldom confirmed by election officials in the state.  “I have worked in six locations across the United States,” Arnold said.   “I’ve probably arrested more than 1,000 illegal aliens in my career, and I routinely encounter people in possession of voter registration cards and many admit to having voted.”

It is no coincidence the 18 states plus the District of Columbia that demand no form of identification are those that normally support Democratic Party candidates.  California, Illinois, New York, and New Mexico have disproportionately large numbers of immigrants and little effort is made to ensure which are legally entitled to vote.  State officials in these jurisdictions actively avoid finding out what is going on.

Officials in these states advance the predictably patronizing notion that members of minority groups are somehow less capable than Caucasians of securing any of the many legitimate forms of identification, and therefore are disproportionately turned away from the polls.  Despite the fact that study after study prove this to be untrue and minority voter turnout essentially is unaffected by ID requirements, the left plods on with these foolish assertions.

Mississippi, a state with strict photo ID requirements, now has the nation’s best ratio of black-voter turnout to white-voter turnout, and is one of several Southern states in which voter-registration is higher among blacks than whites.  So which state has the greatest racial disparity?  It happens to be none other than Massachusetts, which requires not one shred of identification to cast a ballot.

Many nations (Germany, Sweden, Italy, Switzerland, Canada, France, Belgium, South Africa, etc.) require identification to vote.  Americans want the same.  A 2012 Pew Research Center poll found 77% of all respondents favored photo IDs.  Fox News and Washington Post polls produced similar results.  About 65% of African-American and Hispanics citizens also support voter IDs.

Democrat bosses cling desperately to the threadbare canard that any request for photo identification is demeaning and racist.  And yet to board a commercial airliner, acquire a business license, purchase a six-pack of beer, open a bank account or cash a check, secure a library card, apply for welfare or other social services, purchase a gun, rent a car and so much more require photo IDs.

Our people have a right to expect that only U.S. citizens of voting age are allow to vote – and just once in each election cycle.  Each state should be required to put in place measures to protect the integrity of our elections.

More than half a century after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed to strip away Jim Crow laws that corrupted the election process in many states.  It is time for the federal government to take similarly decisive steps to require states to certify federal voting standards are uniformly and strictly applied.