Lately we have been hearing political double speak about how the heartless Republicans want to “disenfranchise” poor, down-troddened, or minority populations. How? By requiring voter registration. Imagine, wanting to ensure that a voter is who he claims to be. Nowhere else in America does anyone have to show an i.d. except at a polling booth.
Is it that the anti-voter registration forces believe that voting is not consequential enough to warrant scrutiny of the prospective voter? Even Democrats regularly need to present i.d. cards to rent an automobile or to board an airplane, but they scoff at voter cards, apparently valuing car rental and air travel over the integrity of our election system.
Perhaps the anti-voter registration crusaders forget the widespread 2007-2008 Acorn-induced, pro-Obama voter registration scam that ultimately led to Acorn’s congressional investigation and conviction for fraud. Why should anyone want to bar illegitimate voters? If we are willing to give convicted felons and illegal aliens free education and health care, why not let them vote as well?
Anti-registration people are quick to remind their registration-favoring opponents that one person, one vote has been the explicit law of the land since at least 1965, and they claim that requiring voter identification could prevent some people from having their vote count.
To that argument I ask: What does it mean to have one’s vote “count”?
If 100 people vote legally and I am one of them, then I and everyone else has an equal, one percent, say in the election outcome: One person and one equal unit of voting power for each voter. On the other hand, if 100 illegal voters are permitted to participate in the same election, the voting power of each legal voter is diminished by half. The issue, then, is not merely voting per se, but the right to have one’s view represented with weight equivalent to his/her legitimacy in the community as a whole. Some totalitarian or terrorist states occasionally permit sham or show elections—elections that fraudulently diminish the voting power of the legitimate populace by multiple nefarious means.
Even in the United States, politicians have been known to deny persons the right to vote by “legally” manipulating the electoral process. Consider Barack Obama. The now-President first won political office in 1996. How did he do it? By challenging the primary election nominating petitions of his Illinois Senate Democrat rivals. And in that election, Obama and his handlers managed to use election nominating challenges to eliminate not one, not two, not three, but four persons who wanted to run. Those who sought the seat included his predecessor, Alice Palmer, who initially had graciously endorsed Barack before she lost her bid for the United States House of Representatives and then wanted to try for re-election to the seat she voluntarily had vacated.
Through his nominating petition challenges, then, Barack had disenfranchised every single citizen in the district who had wanted at least to consider voting for anyone other than Obama.
The now-President had made superfluous any vote other than a vote for him, cutting his political teeth on “legal” voter disenfranchisement. Obama did not have the “audacity” to run opposed for fear that he might lose to someone. For that election, the only hope and change that he advocated was his hope to change the customary electoral process to move himself from failed community organizer to ineffective freshman legislator. I bet those whom Barack disenfranchised in 1996 would have preferred being able to show a voter identification card and having a choice between at least two Illinois Senate candidates.
If Barack Obama and the Democrats now truly fear that voter identification requirements could somehow disenfranchise legitimate voters, they can devote their energies to ensuring that each and every legitimate voter has an i.d. card. Obama et al. had no trouble in “organizing” Barack into the Whitehouse by using Internet and grass roots means when it was to their advantage.
The current Democrat resistance movement has nothing to do with voter identification cards and everything to do with winning re-election in any way possible. Across the USA and the world, they are boisterously, righteously trumpeting about “unfair” voter identification requirements, but making nary a sound about the risk of enfranchising fraudulent voters, since those voters are most likely to pull the Democrat lever.
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