Easy dots to connect

It is hard to imagine anybody thinking this won't be noticed, but apparently some folks think it will slip by. Below, first we have Holder's comments on voter registration, and then we have Wisconsin's lack of signature checking on the recall ballots. Geez... whatever could they have in mind?

Holder's Voter Fraud program
From Powerline's Holder Unveils Voter Fraud Program:

Holder continued with point three, his most radical proposal–an effort to do away with voter registration altogether. Try to follow this one carefully:

 "One final area for reform that merits our strongest support is the growing effort – which is already underway in several states – to modernize voter registration.   Today, the single biggest barrier to voting in this country is our antiquated registration system.   According to the Census Bureau, of the 75 million adult citizens who failed to vote in the last presidential election, 60 million of them were not registered and, therefore, not eligible to cast a ballot."

Well, yes. This country has always had a system of voter registration. Only eligible, registered voters can cast a ballot. Why? This is the most elementary check on voter fraud: you can only vote if the local electoral authorities know who you are and have certified that you are eligible. An attack on this system is astonishingly radical, but that is exactly what Holder has in mind.

 "All eligible citizens can and should be automatically registered to vote. The ability to vote is a right – it is not a privilege.  Under our current system, many voters must follow cumbersome and needlessly complex voter registration rules."

Are you kidding? It has never taken me more than a few minutes to register to vote. It is easier than, say, driving to the local liquor store to buy a six-pack of beer.

 "Fortunately, modern technology provides a straightforward fix for these problems – if we have the political will to bring our election systems into the 21st century.  It should be the government’s responsibility to automatically register citizens to vote, by compiling – from databases that already exist – a list of all eligible residents in each jurisdiction. Of course, these lists would be used solely to administer elections – and would protect essential privacy rights."

It is hard to understand what this means. What databases will tell us who lives in a particular precinct and is an eligible voter? Is there a database for illegal aliens? For felons, who in many jurisdictions are not eligible to vote? And assuming that we have a database of sorts, how exactly would a system that does not include voter registration work? Evidently a person can show up at the polls and claim to be anyone who is automatically on the list as a voter. In Eric Holder’s world, there is no registration–same day or otherwise–and certainly no requirement to present identification. So I take it that the Democrats could identify all of the people who are listed as eligible voters in a given precinct (putting aside the difficulty of doing so), and send activists to the polls, pretending to be the one-third to one-half of automatically-registered voters who will not, in fact, show up to vote. There is no registration process, no identification requirement, nothing to prevent Democratic Party activists from casting millions of fraudulent votes. Is that what the Obama administration has in mind? I think so. If not, Mr. Holder or one of his representatives should explain to us how his proposed system will work.

The Obama administration needs all the votes it can get, given its unpopularity with the American people. The question is, will the administration get those votes by persuading legitimate, eligible voters, or will it try to make up the deficit by enabling the casting of millions of fraudulent votes by Democratic Party activists? At the moment, it looks as though the latter is the Obama administration’s chosen course.

Wisconsin Recall Signatures
From Hot Air's “Mickey Mouse” is free to petition for Scott Walker’s recall:

Just as Attorney General Eric Holder speaks out against voter identification laws, a government board in Wisconsin yesterday signaled that it will accept the signatures of “Mickey Mouse” and even “Adolf Hitler” on petitions for an election to recall Gov. Scott Walker. Politico has the story:

 Signatures of names like Mickey Mouse and Adolf Hitler are being considered valid on recall petitions of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker as long as they are properly dated, a government board indicated Tuesday.

Suspicious signatures will be noted, but reviewers on the Government Accountability Board will be looking primarily to see if the signatures are joined by a Wisconsin address and were signed during the appropriate time period, according to WISN12.

“We will flag them, but we will not strike them without challenge,” said board elections specialist David Buerger, when asked if Mickey Mouse’s signature could count. He added that in previous petitions Hitler’s name was only struck because the address was in Germany, not due to the name itself.

What does Buerger mean when he says, “We will flag them, but we will not strike them without challenge”? I hope he means that the elections board will do the detail work to contact the residents of the addresses associated with the sketchy signatures to verify that someone from those residences did, in fact, sign a petition for Walker’s recall — but something tells me that hope is in vain. Now that the board has transparently stated its willingness to accept weird signatures, its members are covered. They can accept the suspicious signatures without verifying and how would anybody ever know? It’s not as though outside folks could look at the petition and say, “Hey, Mickey Mouse’s name is on here!” The board members would just say, “Yes, we flagged that.”