Bovard: The Democrats’ Three-Decade War On Honest Voting

Authored by James Bovard,

When did preventing election fraud become a violation of the Voting Rights Act?

According to President Joe Biden’s Justice Department, it is now a federal crime to prevent illegal ballots in presidential elections. 

Barely 30 days before the 2024 election, the Justice Department sued the state of Virginia to prohibit its removal of the names of noncitizens from voting rolls. Gov. Glenn Youngkin was enforcing a 2006 Virginia law, but the Biden administration portrayed that action as an attack on “the cornerstone of our democracy.” Youngkin denounced the federal lawsuit as “a desperate attempt to attack the legitimacy of the elections” in Virginia.

The Virginia lawsuit is simply the latest in Democrats’ long war against honest voting, which began with the Clinton administration’s Motor Voter Act. That 1993 law mandated voter registration in every welfare and food-stamp office in the nation. Brent Thompson, executive director of the Fair Government Foundation, observed in 1996, “The Motor Voter law did away with a panoply of anti-fraud mechanisms long relied on by the states to police and deter fraudulent voting.”

In 2015, the Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton condemned voter identification requirements as part of a “sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people and young people.” A Washington Post headline aptly summarized her message: “Hillary Clinton Declares War on Voter ID.” Verifying identification was unnecessary because, as long as enough ballots showed up with a check by Hillary’s name, she would be irrevocably entitled to all the power she could seize in the following four years. 

Lax voting procedures in some states were insufficient to enable Hillary to capture the White House. But the panic induced by Covid-19 enabled politicians to radically loosen the rules for the next presidential election. Many states made it easier—if not automatic—to vote by mail, even though a 2012 New York Times analysis concluded that “fraud in voting by mail is… vastly more prevalent than the in-person voting fraud that has attracted far more attention.” Some states abandoned any effort to verify mail ballots, dropping requirements for matching signatures, return addresses, or having a witness verify the person and the vote. Civil Rights Commissioner J. Christian Adams noted that “Democrats succeeded in tossing out state laws related to absentee ballot verification, deadlines and a whole range of laws all in the name of Covid.”

Neither the Elections Clause of the U.S. Constitution (rules for federal elections “shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof”) nor state law stopped the rigging of the 2020 vote. Michigan sent “unsolicited absentee-voter ballot applications by mail to all 7.7 million registered Michigan voters…without signature verification as expressly required” by state law. The Wisconsin Elections Commission approved setting up to 500 unmanned ballot drop boxes in major Democratic cities in violation of Wisconsin law. That commission  and local election officials encouraged all Wisconsin “voters to unlawfully declare themselves ‘indefinitely confined’—which under Wisconsin law allows the voter to avoid security measures like signature verification and photo ID requirements,” as the Texas Attorney General noted in a brief to the U.S. Supreme Court. The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that election officials acted illegally, but that did nothing to nullify the hundreds of thousands of votes that came in via illicit loopholes. Biden carried Wisconsin by 20,000 votes.

To stifle controversy over electoral rule changes, Biden’s media allies created a fairy tale. A week after Election Day, the New York Times ran a banner headline across the top of the front page: “Election Officials Nationwide Find No Fraud.” How did the Times know? Their reporters basically called election officials in each state and asked, “Did y’all have any fraud?” A total lack of fraud in an election with more than 100 million voters would have required divine intervention to achieve. Biden’s 2020 victory became the election equivalent of the Immaculate Conception. A Washington Post headline scoffed that anyone who doubted Biden’s victory was an “Election Denier”—placing them in the same odious category as Holocaust deniers. An ABC News analysis portrayed distrust of the election results as a form of mental illness.

Most of the American media pretended that voter fraud was so rare that the mere suggestion of its occurrence was a heresy against democracy. But a few weeks after Biden was sworn in as president, a federal investigation revealed that the U.S. government bankrolled some of the most brazenly corrupt elections in modern times. The Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR), issued a report titled, “Elections: Lessons from the U.S. Experience in Afghanistan,” that should have received far more attention in Washington and beyond. SIGAR revealed that the net result of 15 years of U.S. pro-democracy assistance was that Afghanistan’s 2019 presidential election was “the most corrupt the country had ever held.” U.S. tax dollars poured into the coffers of Afghanistan’s Electoral Complaints Commission to safeguard voting, but that agency was a prime source of the most shameless vote stealing. U.S. aid enabled the Afghan government to purchase sophisticated electronic voting systems. But SIGAR’s report warned that “because governments often control electoral commissions and the procurement of election technology, they are well placed to use it to commit fraud.” SIGAR ruefully noted, “The true purpose of adopting election technologies may not be to actually reduce fraud, but to create the illusion of doing so.” A U.S. Army colonel who deployed several times to Afghanistan told SIGAR that as early as 2006, the Afghan government had “self-organized into a kleptocracy.” Officials who were stealing everything else never hesitated to steal votes. The collapse of democratic legitimacy paved the way for the collapse of the U.S. puppet regime in Kabul in August 2021.

The Biden administration sought to exploit Covid-era precedents to turn America into a Drop Box Democracy where minimal efforts by voters automatically sanctify maximum power for politicians. In 2021, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 1, the For the People Act, to force all states to adopt the most unreliable electoral procedures used during the pandemic. The bill, which failed in the Senate, would have compelled all future federal elections to permit paid ballot-harvesting and universal mail-in voting, prohibit checking voter identification, and require states to count ballots that arrive ten days after an election. Many of the same Democrats who championed Covid vaccine passports, which disproportionately barred blacks from restaurants and gyms, also insist that requiring voters to show identification is Jim Crow at its worst.

Histrionics and shenanigans continue to be the Democrats’ preferred substitute for election integrity:

Kamala Harris objected to voter identification requirements because she bizarrely claimed it was “almost impossible” for rural voters to photocopy their identification papers.
The city of Detroit responded to a Republican National Party Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for ballot drop box surveillance footage by claiming that the footage had been deleted—after the FOIA request was received. Detroit was notorious for shrouding its vote counting on Election Night 2020, blocking poll watchers from witnessing Biden’s miraculous comeback.
In Georgia, Judge Thomas Cox on Wednesday struck down the Georgia State Election Board’s new rules to require video surveillance of ballot drop boxes and to regulate ballot-harvesting.
Lawsuits are proceeding regarding lax standards for absentee mail-in ballots in North Carolina, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Texas, and elsewhere.

Preventing bogus ballots should not be treated like a moral or theological issue. When did verifying votes become a crime against democracy? Why is the Justice Department crusading to turn voting into an entitlement program for non-citizens? Do Democrats seek to make the actual voting as fraud-ridden as politicians’ campaign promises?  Elections need rigorous safeguards against fraud because, as Thomas Paine warned long ago, “the trade of governing has always been monopolized by… the most rascally individuals of mankind.” Four presidential elections since 2000 have been heavily tainted by allegations of foul play. American democracy has zero legitimacy to spare at this point.