On Friday, Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) launched an investigation into the anti-voter fraud group True the Vote. Citizens trained by True the Vote petitioned offices around the country, asking local election officials to review questionable voter registrations and remove dead and duplicates from the voting rolls. True the Vote’s goal: to ensure the veracity of each and every vote. That involves training volunteers to check voter lists and monitor polls on election day to ensure compliance by poll workers.
But Democrats aren’t interested in policing voter fraud; they’re far more interested in allowing improper voters to go to the ballot box. Perhaps that’s because every mass case of voter fraud around the country – from the Minnesota Senate election of Al Franken to the Washington gubernatorial election of Christine Gregoir – seems to benefit Democratic candidates. And voter fraud does happen: as David Fahrenthold of the Washington Post reported this week, “It may still be possible to steal an American election, if you know the right way to go about it. Recent court cases, from Appalachia to the Miami suburbs, have revealed the tricks of an underground trade: Conspirators allegedly bought off absentee voters, faked absentee ballots, and bribed people heading to the polls to vote one way or another.”
Cummings isn’t interested in that sort of stuff. He’s interested only in going after True the Vote. Why? “At some point, an effort to challenge voter registrations by the thousands without any legitimate basis may be evidence of illegal voter suppression,” Cummings said by letter to True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht last week. “If these efforts are intentional, politically motivated and widespread across multiple states, they could amount to a criminal conspiracy to deny legitimate voters their constitutional rights.”
There is no evidence of that at all. Not a shred. But the Los Angeles Times ran a story two weeks ago implying that True the Vote was attempting just that. Their evidence? Somebody trained by True the Vote in Ohio challenged the registrations of people whose residences were listed as commercial properties and dorm buildings with incorrect addresses – people, in other words, who can’t guarantee who they are.
Instead, Cummings is upset that Engelbrecht would train Americans to ensure poll veracity. So is California Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA), who tweeted, “I don’t believe this is ‘True the Vote.’ I believe it’s ‘Stop the Vote.'” She asked the Department of Justice to “protect Americans from voter intimidation … No group can be allowed to intimidate or interfere with this fundamental right that is essential for American democracy.” In other words, don’t purge voter rolls of improper voters. Leave it full of dead folks, people registered to homes that don’t exist, and the like.
How will the accomplish that? By attempting to intimidate poll volunteers – Americans who simply care about the integrity of the voting process. And by accusing them of racism, they not only slander them, they raise the chances of violence against those voting integrity volunteers. The Democrats had no problem whatsoever with the New Black Panthers standing outside polling places with billy clubs – but they have a problem with volunteers asking about whether empty addresses ought to have voters.
Breitbart News spoke with Engelbrecht about Cummings’ and Boxer’s attempts intimidate poll volunteers. “Rep. Cummings has no power to independently issue a subpoena,” Engelbrecht said. “But that didn’t stop him from leaking his letter to the same Los Angeles Times reporter who wrote the original story slandering us. Then Rep. Cummings went on Soledad O’Brien’s show on CNN and, just as Sen. Boxer had done the previous week all over MSNBC, he used his power of office to assault private citizens. Leaders on the left, including Soros funded organizations like Common Cause and DEMOS, are working overtime to discourage citizens from volunteering this election cycle; fear mongering to perpetuate the myth that they are somehow being victimized. Why? They are either trying to rally their base, trying to hide something, or both.
“We’ve trained tens of thousands of honest, hardworking Americans across the country who just want to work at the polls. They shouldn’t be afraid of volunteering in elections because the rhetoric has grown so heated that people show up ginning for a fight,” Engelbrecht told Breitbart News.
“Americans are better than this; we are tired of constantly being pitted against one another so that certain power bases can stay in business. We should all be able to come together around the idea of one person, one vote. Let the best man or woman win, but let it be fair. For Cummings and Boxer to intentionally provoke division among Americans is absurd and insulting.”
But Boxer and Cummings aren’t interested in true-ing the vote. They’re simply interested in stopping anyone who wants to.