Voter ID laws preserve democracy

[Geee]

Washington Times:

 

When the polls closed on the November 2008 U.S. Senate election, I was ahead of Al Franken for the Minnesota seat by 215 votes out of nearly 3 million votes that had been cast.

 

Eight months later, Al Franken was declared the winner of the recount with a margin of 312 votes. A few months after that, Obamacare passed the U.S. Senate on a straight party-line, filibuster-proof 60 votes.

 

 

I have no desire to re-litigate the 2008 election, but elections matter.

 

Because the consequences of elections are so significant, all sides should agree that ensuring the confidence of the governed is critical to the effective functioning of democracy.

 

 

In 2008, we learned that in Minnesota, there were a number of precincts in which there were more votes than voters — and throughout the state, more than 1,000 felons voted. The extreme left-leaning political organization ACORN registered more than 40,000 voters in 2008. This is the same organization that had its funding repealed by a bipartisan vote in Congress after it was revealed that it consistently has engaged in fraudulent practices to register voters in other states. According to the organization Minnesota Majority, 113 people are known to have been convicted of voter fraud committed in Minnesota in 2008.

Elected officials govern with the consent of the governed. If there is a question of whether that consent was truly given, the credibility of our democratic system of government is called into question.

In 2005, the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, led by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, concluded that our “electoral system cannot inspire public confidence if no safeguards exist to deter and detect fraud or to confirm the identity of voters.” As a result, the Carter-Baker Commission recommended that states adopt a photo-identification system.

As Mr. Carter said at that time, “Some critics of voter IDs think the government cannot do this job, but Mexico and most poor countries in the world have been able to register and give IDs to almost all their citizens. Surely the United States can do it, too.”

[Valin]

@Geee

 

Prediction: The Left will call this a case of sour grapes.

 

 

I don't believe Norm took that campaign seriously, Franken was the candidate he wanted thinking it would be an easy win and he wouldn't have to campaign hard.