November 7, 2006
The World Is Watching Posted by Joshua Zeitz at 02:00 PM EST John Steele Gordon writes: “Tighter voter registration and voting procedures are consistently popular with the general population and with all subsets of the population, regardless of race, location, and income. And yet the left has opposed each and every attempt to reform the system to
prevent voter fraud. The left is against both voter fraud and any attempt whatever to prevent voter fraud. That can’t be because they feel they can win honest elections.”
As usual, Mr. Gordon has it the wrong way around. Democrats don’t fear honest elections; they fear that Republicans will never let honest elections occur.
There are dozens of reports today, from all around the country, of voting machines that don’t work, voters who have been illegally purged from the rolls, and citizens whose phones have been jammed by the NRCC’s robocall campaign. These scenarios occur predominantly in low-income, heavy-Democratic-turnout wards. Visit www.talkingpointsmemo.com to sample from the chamber of election horrors.
The most egregious violation I’ve encountered thus far today—and it’s only 1:00 p.m. Eastern Time as I write this—is this recording in which a man who has been lawfully registered to vote in Virginia since 1998 is informed by a caller purporting to be from the state elections commission that he will be arrested if he attempts to cast a ballot today. See here.
This example raises two questions in my mind: First, how will Mr. Gordon creatively turn the situation on its head and argue that Democrats, not Republicans, are the real tricksters? And second, do such practices already violate the Voting Rights Act, about which a great deal has been written on this blog, or does the new Congress need to pass tough new restrictions against these anti-democratic shenanigans?
The world is watching us today. It grows increasingly difficult to export our brand of democracy to other regions when our election system is so fundamentally broken and rife with fraud.
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