Voting fraud? Sometimes, it changes history

Democrats are crowding courtrooms across the country, fighting tooth and nail to eliminate reasonable laws to prevent fraud at the ballot box.

As Byron York points out in the Examiner, sometimes, the consequences of voter fraud can change history:

On the '08 campaign, Republican Sen. Norm Coleman was running for re-election against Democrat Al Franken. It was impossibly close; on the morning after the election, after 2.9 million people had voted, Coleman led Franken by 725 votes.

Franken and his Democratic allies dispatched an army of lawyers to challenge the results. After the first canvass, Coleman's lead was down to 206 votes. That was followed by months of wrangling and litigation. In the end, Franken was declared the winner by 312 votes. He was sworn into office in July 2009, eight months after the election.

During the controversy a conservative group called Minnesota Majority began to look into claims of voter fraud. Comparing criminal records with voting rolls, the group identified 1,099 felons -- all ineligible to vote -- who had voted in the Franken-Coleman race.

Minnesota Majority took the information to prosecutors across the state, many of whom showed no interest in pursuing it. But Minnesota law requires authorities to investigate such leads. And so far, Fund and von Spakovsky report, 177 people have been convicted -- not just accused, but convicted -- of voting fraudulently in the Senate race. Another 66 are awaiting trial. "The numbers aren't greater," the authors say, "because the standard for convicting someone of voter fraud in Minnesota is that they must have been both ineligible, and 'knowingly' voted unlawfully." The accused can get off by claiming not to have known they did anything wrong.

Still, that's a total of 243 people either convicted of voter fraud or awaiting trial in an election that was decided by 312 votes. With 1,099 examples identified by Minnesota Majority, and with evidence suggesting that felons, when they do vote, strongly favor Democrats, it doesn't require a leap to suggest there might one day be proof that Al Franken was elected on the strength of voter fraud.

And that's just the question of voting by felons. Minnesota Majority also found all sorts of other irregularities that cast further doubt on the Senate results.

The election was particularly important because Franken's victory gave Senate Democrats a 60th vote in favor of President Obama's national health care proposal -- the deciding vote to overcome a Republican filibuster. If Coleman had kept his seat, there would have been no 60th vote, and no Obamacare.

The idea that there is no voter fraud in Chicago, Philadelphia, or any other large city run by Democrats is laughable. Republican poll watchers are routinely kicked out of Democratic precincts in Chicago and intimidated. One wonders what goes on in those precincts without a Republican to stop the shenannigans. Or are we to believe they kicked the GOP poll watchers out for some kind of innocent reason? Sorry, it doesn't pass the smell test.

They still buy votes in the hills and hollers of West Virginia and Kentucky. Big city machines still play fast and loose with ballot boxes (See 2004 governor's race in Washington and Seattle area vote fraud). There are still tens of thousands of bogus voter registrations across the country. And there is still the motivation for both parties to cheat.

Resistance to Voter ID is for one reason only; if your side is planning to cheat. The Democrats wrap their opposition to ID laws around a sanctimonious charge that it would suppress the votes of minorities and the young. But when the opportunity presents itself for fraud, are we to think that the Democrats are so pure and noble of heart that they wouldn't go for it?

Nuts to that.


If you experience technical problems, please write to helpdesk@americanthinker.com