Yesterday, the nation watched in shock and amusement as Democrats stole a vote–from themselves.
Against clear evidence to the contrary, Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa declared that proposed amendments to the Democratic Party platform–re-inserting “God” and a commitment to Jerusalem as Israel’s capital–had passed with the necessary two-thirds majority.
It was fraud, pure and simple; even CNN wasn’t buying it.
Nonetheless, Democrats and their allies continue to insist that voter fraud is something that never happens.
The NAACP, for instance, has just issued a statement declaring: “There’s a greater chance of being struck by lightning” than that voter fraud will occur in a federal election.
(Not the best analogy, given that one of the excuses for moving President Barack Obama’s speech indoors was the supposed threat of lightning.)
Yet Americans witnessed fraud in broad daylight at the Democratic National Convention. The cause may have been just; the changes may have been good and necessary; but the fact was that the amendments did not pass by voice vote, and the delegates ought to have taken a roll call vote.
The country deserves to know whether Democrats support their own declared policies and which Democrats, in particular, support or oppose them.
The potential for fraud–and the actual commission of fraud–occurs far more often than Democrats want to admit.
In April, James O’Keefe’s Project Veritas showed that it was easy, without photo ID laws in place, to obtain the ballot of Attorney General Eric Holder himself.
Cheating is also a bipartisan phenomenon: four former staffers working for Rep. Thaddeus McCotter were charged recently for handing in false ballot signatures.
In the 2008 election, Democrats likely committed acts of fraud–both in the close primary fight between Obama and Hillary Clinton, and in the November general election. In North Carolina–where the DNC is being held this week–four residents were charged in 2001 with voting twice for Obama in 2008. In Ohio, activists brought homeless people to the polls for early voting–some of whom apparently lived as far out-of-state as Chicago.
Several organizers from groups supporting Obama were also convicted for crossing into Ohio–a key swing state, in 2008 and again in 2012–and voting fraudulently. There were similar stories (confirmed and unconfirmed) from other battleground states as the Obama campaign and its Chicago tacticians threw everything they could into delivering a win. In January, a former Obama campaign official was arrested for identity theft.
Today, eyebrows were raised during a women’s caucus event at the DNC when First Lady Michelle Obama told supporters: “If you don’t live in a battleground state, get to one!”
She was likely referring to ongoing volunteer efforts in swing states–which the Romney campaign is also organizing–and yet given the history of fraudulent efforts to pump up the vote in swing states, her statement had potentially negative implications.
As John Fund notes in his new book, Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy, voter fraud may be rare but it is also very real. The suspicion of fraud itself, he writes, is a danger to public trust in democracy.
That danger is not lessened by naked displays of manipulation such as the nation witnessed at the DNC yesterday. If our political parties will even defraud themselves, why wouldn’t they defraud the nation?