Review: Fund and Von Spakovsky's Who's Counting, Your User's Manual to Election 2012

A U.S. government plane, left, lands at Yokota U.S. Airbase in outskirts of Tokyo on May 9, 2018, carrying three previously detained Americans held in North Korea for more than a year. (AP Photo/Eugene Hoshiko)

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.

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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.”

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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.

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Who’s Counting also does a phenomenal job of documenting non-citizen voting, the lack of response by law enforcement officials, and the outright facilitation of the behavior by the civil rights industry.  The authors note that in just one federal court, three percent of everyone called for jury duty escaped the task by saying they were non-citizens.  One only is called for jury duty after one registers to vote.

In 2010, True the Vote provided the DOJ Voting Section actual voter registration applications of voters who professed under penalty of perjury that they were not citizens but were still registered to vote.  The forms had the question “Are you a U.S. Citizen?” actually marked “NO.” I provided copies of the actual forms to the Justice Department and requested action.

You don’t need me to tell you what the response of Eric Holder’s Justice Department was to bow-tied evidence of non-citizens being registered to vote.

The authors also eviscerate a favorite emerging cause of the left – destruction of the Electoral College.  If you get Who’s Counting for no other reason, read the excellent constitutional discussion defending the Electoral College.  They describe how the constitutional status quo protects liberty and limits federal power.  The authors make the case that abolishing the Electoral College will promote urban voter fraud across the United States.

Even though Who’s Counting is written for a broad audience, it should be a textbook in every law school election law class.  Of course, that won’t happen because most American law school professors teaching election law have a pronounced leftward bias.  They also prefer to use their own academic-press-published books as texts, even if Fund and von Spakovsky sell forty-fold more to a much broader audience, which is certain.

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