Diluting your Vote, your Power, your Freedom

On every front these days, Democrats nationwide--and the neo-Marxist front groups that now are the primarily sources of their funding--are working tirelessly to negate the power of your vote. Of course, what this means ultimately is that they want to take away your power to dilute their power.

Since the 2000 elections--and no doubt before that--ACORN and other leftist "voting rights" groups have been attempting to defraud voters on a grand scale, leading to a number of arrests and successful prosecutions. Yet everyone knows that ACORN gets a majority of its funding from George Soros and the Shadow Party.

These same groups--and the rest of the DNC "machine"--have long advocated giving felons the right to vote (Clinton advocated this in Florida in 2000), and it goes without saying that the entire effort to legitimize illegal immigrants is nothing more than an attempt by Democrats to eventually get millions of illegals to vote en masse...for them. It becomes quite easy to see why there was so much outrage when Democrat Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York tried recently to give illegals drivers licenses. And as you will recall, both Hillary and Obama came out in favor of this.

Now the ACLU and the other Socialist-front groups are bankrolling a case which is scheduled for arguments before the US Supreme Court, which is challenging the legitimacy of an Indiana law requiring a photo ID to vote; a law which has been upheld by lower courts. John Fund has a terrific piece in today's Wall Street Journal about this case, and it may turn out to be one of the more important USSC cases in the new centruy. Because if you do not have to prove your citizenship in order to vote, the Left's campaign to dilute the votes of legitimate citizens and to steal elections will finally begin to bear its poisonous fruit:

Even modest in-person voter fraud creates trouble in close races. In Washington state's disputed 2004 governor's race, which was won by 129 votes, the election superintendent in Seattle testified in state court that ineligible felons had voted and votes had been cast in the name of the dead. In Milwaukee, Wis., investigators found that, in the state's close 2004 presidential election, more than 200 felons voted illegally and more than 100 people voted twice. In Florida, where the entire 2000 presidential election was decided by 547 votes, almost 65,000 dead people are still listed on the voter rolls--an engraved invitation to fraud. A New York Daily News investigation in 2006 found that between 400 and 1,000 voters registered in Florida and New York City had voted twice in at least one recent election.

Laws tightening up absentee-ballot fraud, which is a more serious problem than in-person voting, would be welcome. But, curiously, almost all of the groups opposing the photo ID law before the Supreme Court today either oppose specific efforts to combat absentee-ballot fraud or are silent on them.

No matter how much voter fraud is caused by voter impersonation, Stuart Taylor of the National Journal reports that "polls show voters increasingly distrust the integrity of the electoral process." He also notes that a 2006 NBC/Wall Street Journal nationwide poll found that, by a 80%-7% margin, those surveyed supported voters showing "a valid photo identification." The idea had overwhelming support among all races and income groups.

That sweeping support helps explain why, in 2005, 18 of 21 members of a bipartisan federal commission headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker came out in support of photo ID requirements more stringent than Indiana's. "Voters in nearly 100 democracies use a photo identification card without fear of infringement on their rights," the commission stated. Mr. Carter feels strongly about voter fraud. In his book, "Turning Point," he wrote of his race for Georgia State Senate in 1962, which involved a corrupt local sheriff who had cast votes for the dead. It took a recount and court intervention before Mr. Carter was declared the winner.

Right now, half the states have decided that some kind of ID should be required to vote. It makes sense for the Supreme Court to allow federalism to work its will state-by-state. In 2006, the court unanimously overturned a Ninth Circuit ruling that had blocked an Arizona voter ID law. In doing so, the court noted that anyone without an ID is by federal law always allowed to cast a provisional ballot that can be verified later. The court also noted that fraud "drives honest citizens out of the democratic process and breeds distrust of our government. Voters who fear their legitimate votes will be outweighed by fraudulent ones will feel disenfranchised."

So the high court itself has already defined the nub of the case it is hearing today. On one side are those who claim photo IDs will block some voters from casting ballots, but offer scant evidence. On the other side are those who believe photo ID laws can act as a deterrent to irregularities the public increasingly views as undermining election integrity. Given the obvious political nature of the argument, here's hoping a clear Supreme Court majority reprises its 2006 finding and holds that such questions are best resolved by the elected branches of government and not by unaccountable courts.

Read the whole thing. It is likely that the Supremes will not overturn the Indiana law, if precedent on similar cases in the past means anything. But the fact that the case is even being heard again--so soon after the 2006 ruling mentioned above--is instructive of the Left's unrelenting assault on the very "power to the people" which it so falsely claims to represent.

UPDATE: It turns out that the voter the ACLU is citing in the case as the person who the Photo ID law is "discriminating against" is registered in two states: Florida AND Indiana. (h/t Glenn)