Review: Fund and Von Spakovsky’s Who’s Counting, Your User’s Manual to Election 2012
Some are concerned that voting machines will alter the results of the 2012 election. A new book by John Fund and PJ Media’s Hans von Spakovsky demonstrates that all of us should be concerned about the machinery of American elections, not the machines themselves.
Who’s Counting: How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk (Encounter Books, 2012) is essential to understanding the electoral mechanisms that will decide the November elections. The authors debunk voter fraud deniers with case after case of fraud, and explain how the fraud affects public policy.
Consider the clown who went to Congress, Al Franken. “Would Obamacare have passed without voter fraud?” Who’s Counting asks and answers that question. The answer, according to the authors, is no.
They document how felons like Sabrina Ruth Hall illegally voted for Franken. When she was asked on camera if her vote might have helped Franken, she unashamedly replied, “I don’t know, but I hope it did.” Naturally, Eric Holder has failed to prosecute Hall under 42 U.S.C. § 1973gg-10(2), a statute which criminalizes casting an illegitimate ballot in a federal election.
But Holder isn’t alone in failing to uphold the rule of law. The authors also call out John Kingrey, the head of the Minnesota County Attorneys Association. Minnesota actually makes it a crime for a prosecutor to fail to investigate when presented with sworn evidence of voter fraud. Why didn’t Kingrey advocate investigations into the rampant election fraud in 2008? According to Kingrey, that course of action “diverted resources from the job that we want to do.” Kingrey was more interested in engagement on legislation related to bong water.
Von Spakovsky and Fund document how the left is outgunning conservatives on election process weaponry. While the Minnesota recount was occurring, GOP lawyers were armed with clipboards and pens. In contrast, for Franken’s team “scanners, laptops, and other mobile devices were used to keep track of every single disputed ballot in every county in Minnesota. Decisions made by local election boards were immediately uploaded to a cloud database set up by the campaign so that [Franken’s team] knew exactly what vote totals were for each candidate … at every point in time.”
The authors also describe the vast and well-funded apparatus of vote fraud deniers and their litigation counterparts like the NAACP LDF, the Brennan Center for Justice, and the wholly partisan League of Women Voters.
Sometimes the activities of the partisans take comic turns, as happened to the League of Women Voters (LWV) in a challenge to the Indiana voter ID law. The LWV had produced a “victim” who could not vote because she purportedly lacked photo ID. It turns out that she couldn’t vote in Indiana because she had produced a Florida driver’s license, was registered to vote in Florida, and had declared a Florida homestead exemption. Such is the stuff that partisans like the League of Women Voters will use to attack election integrity measures, as documented in Who’s Counting.
Another comic episode occurred in Georgia when the ACLU challenge to voter ID was floundering because they couldn’t find a plaintiff who actually lacked voter ID! Daniel Levitas of the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project sent out an all-points-bulletin to left-wing groups and anyone who would listen: “URGENT REQUEST FOR HELP IN THE PHOTO ID CASE.” Please, send plaintiffs.
None appeared.
Artur Davis appears in Who’s Counting. Davis is the African-American former congressman who had a conversion experience on voter ID, because he saw voter fraud up close in his congressional district. He also was privy to the lies used to attack voter ID. My own book Injustice documents a wicked case of voter fraud which occurred in his district that the Justice Department explicitly refused to investigate because the perpetrators were black, and DOJ lawyers said so plainly. Davis grew tired of the lies and orthodoxy about voter ID, and quit the Democrat Party and became a voter ID supporter.
It is wonderful that the authors have doen the scholarly research and amassed the documentation to call bull $!#* on the mealy mouthed Democrat excuse makers who claim voter fraud is so rare.
Right, voter fraud is rare and Cook County politics are clean as fresh driven snow.
What can go wrong when a Radical-in-Chief appoints a racialist AG as his purveyor of ‘justice’? MASSIVE voter fraud.
Ditto with other corrupt administrations, but exponentially more so with the current one. Ends justify the means….
This is precisely one of the reasons why my blog commentary is rife with Holder’s machinations, courtesy of the POTUS.
Specifically, see – ‘The Racialist POTUS Seeks Transformation Via Race-Based Classroom Edicts…Say It Ain’t So?’. This is one of many such commentaries at my blog.
http://www.adinakutnicki.com. Just substitute voter fraud to their laundry list of crimes.
You don’t have to be a registered voter to get called for jury duty. Licensed drivers, federal and state taxpayers, and people who have collected unemployment insurance could also find themselves summoned. There are a lot of people out there who think that not registering to vote exempts them from jury duty, and they get surprised.
In the state in question, as in most states, you DO need to be a registered voter to be called for jury duty.
Good post. In addition to voter fraud, we also need to be looking at election fraud: manipulation of (easily hackable) electronic voting machines. Just as we do not have any sense of the magnitude of voter fraud, we have no sense of election fraud. Hope PJ can become an advocate for this issue!
Regarding those non-citizens called for jury duty:
How many were registered thru Motor Voter? MVA seems to have the potential to facilitate massive voter fraud, no doubt in the way its promoters intended.
I was a pole watcher Clintons first election, one of the three polling place’s I was watching had 3 machines listed but only two were out front, when I asked questions about it, I was told it was kept in the back, in case one broke down. After the poles closed, I was supposed to go back and get a copy of the pole results from each machine. When I got back to that place (last stop of my trio of poling locations) I collected the results from the first two, then stated I wanted the results from the backup machine, there was some hemming and hawing but I was finely let into the room it was stored in, it had 124 votes on it, and I imagine if I would have been later, it would have had more. I reported it, but Clinton won by a landslide and the 124 votes did not matter. Voter fraud is rampant, if you have the time, volunteer to be a pole watcher.
The main reason there are no prosecutions: RNC and congressional GOP leadership. The crap-filled MN lawyer accidently said it for them: it would have “diverted resources from the job that we want to do.”
Makes for a warm and fuzzy feeling all over, doesn’t it? Many here seem confident that Romney will lead the charge to fix it all. Right.
Why do I feel posts like this are DNC operatives?
One way to cut down on voter fraud can be taken from the elections in Iraq and Afghanistan. Put some sort of permanent ink on the hands of people who vote. As someone comes in to vote, check to see if the mark is there, if not, they get to vote. If the mark is there, no vote. It might be the simplest way to prevent voter fraud ever devised, of course, they could always fake the ink and let the people wipe it off, but that would be up to the republican poll watchers to ink the hands of democrat voters and vice versa….
Mr Adams…
do you think there is a reasonable hope that justice and the rule of law can be returned to the USA?
the progs have been doing voter fraud for a long time and get better at it all the time.
I hope that I am wrong but I think that obama will steal the election.
Would Obamacare have passed without voter fraud?
Obamacare was never passed into law. It was enacted in violation of Article I Section 7 of the law of the land, the Constitution. In other words, it was enacted through government fraud, voter fraud was only a precusor.
I know this seems like splitting hairs, after all we’re not really a nation of laws anymore, but converting to government controlled healthcare might rise to the level of needing to be done legally.
Although Mitt probably disagrees with this, and we know Obama does, but given with all the diktat happening now (first healthcare, then the EPA regulations, most recently immigration), no serious political discussion can be made without acknowledging that America has devolved from a democratic republic to a televised democracy… through lawless behavior stretching to municipalities all the way up through Congress into the Oval Office and the Supreme Court, this last room being the enabler.
I deem this modest comment to have been duly passed, by me at least.
Your slip is showing. Or ignorance. Whatever.
The state is responsible for its voting requirements. Eric Holder would never file suit against an individual voter. He would file suit against the state.
I’m curious why someone would falsely attack the Attorney General.
Me, your slip is showing. Or ignorance. Whatever.
The USAG files a lawsuit against a State when it fails to follow the US Code applying to elections involving Federal representation (Senator, Representative, or Presidential Elector). For this reason, Eric Holder should have filed suit against Minnesota for blatantly allowing non-eligible persons to vote, thus diminishing the influence of eligible voters.
The USAG is also supposed to enforce the US Code pertaining to individuals who knowingly cast fraudulent votes in elections involving Federal representation. Doing so is a criminal act under the US Code. An individual so doing is subject to criminal prosecution.
Voting when ineligible, or aiding in same: “A person, including an election official, who in any election for Federal office — knowingly and willfully deprives, defrauds, or attempts to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process, by — procurement, CASTING, or tabulation of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held, shall be fined in accordance with title 18 (which fines shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury, miscellaneous receipts (pursuant to section 3302 of title 31), notwithstanding any other law), or imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both.”
Voting when not a citizen: “Whoever knowingly makes any false statement or claim that he is a citizen of the United States in order to register to vote or to vote in any Federal, State, or local election (including an initiative, recall, or referendum) – Shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than five years, or both.”
Have you casted your vote? http://www.PresidentialElection2012.com