BY HANS VON SPAKOVSKY – In August, three voters in Wake County, North Carolina, were charged with voting twice in the 2008 presidential election, apparently for President Barack Obama. In April, a member of the executive committee of the NAACP in Tunica County, Mississippi, was convicted on 10 counts of fraudulently casting absentee ballots and sentenced to five years in prison. She voted in the names of six other voters, as well as in the names of four dead voters. There are pending indictments of city council members and an ongoing grand jury investigation of ballot fraud in Troy, New York, over a 2009 primary involving the Working Families Party.
These are just a few of the current stories involving individuals violating the integrity (and security) of the U.S. election process. We have encountered this problem all too often in our history—a fact that the U.S. Supreme Court recognized when it upheld Indiana’s new voter ID law in 2008, because such fraud has been well documented by “respected historians and journalists.”
One of the respected journalists who has helped document such fraud is John Fund, a senior editor at the American Spectator, former Wall Street Journal columnist, and author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens our Democracy. Fund will be appearing at The Heritage Foundation on Thursday, October 6, to discuss voter fraud and the danger it poses to the integrity of the voter registration and election process. “The Constitution and the Right to Vote: Protecting Against Voter Fraud” is part of a series sponsored by the Center for Legal & Judicial Studies as part of Preserve the Constitution month. It will be hosted by former Attorney General Edwin Meese III.
Citizens often wonder what they can do to participate in the democratic process and protect the integrity of elections. Joining Fund in discussing that will be Catherine Engelbrecht, Founder and President of True the Vote. True the Vote is an inspiring, citizen-driven initiative that started in Houston, Texas, in 2009 to protect the right to vote and the integrity of U.S. elections. It sent citizen volunteers to the polls as observers, and they were shocked at the violations of the law they found. True the Vote also used its volunteers to check the accuracy of the county’s voter registration list and found many problems, including individuals registered at vacant lots, voters who were not U.S. citizens, and numerous other problems.
I will also be speaking on the panel about the research I have done on voter fraud and how states can improve the security of their elections. Our panel will address these concerns in light of the 2012 election.