Michelle Malkin - Townhall Conservative

The Left's Voter Fraud Whitewash"

Denial isn't just a river in Egypt. It's the Democrats' coping mechanism for midterm election voter fraud. Faced with multiple reports of early voting irregularities and election shenanigans across the country, left-wing groups are playing dumb, deaf and blind. Voter fraud? What voter fraud?


More cunningly, these organizations are seeking to marginalize complaints about election integrity by casting citizen watchdog efforts as racist "scare tactics." Echoing President Obama's message to the Democratic faithful on the campaign trail, they are accusing political opponents of suppressing the votes of minorities and the poor. On Tuesday, The New York Times quoted a liberal voting rights advocate, Wendy R. Weiser, wringing her hands over individual Americans taking clean elections seriously:

"Private efforts to police the polls create a real risk of vote suppression, regardless of their intent," said Weiser, director of the Voting Rights and Elections Project at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. "People need to know that any form of discrimination, intimidation or challenge to voters without adequate basis is illegal or improper."

Weiser also turned up in a very similar story minimizing voter fraud and voter registration fraud that was published Tuesday by government-sponsored National Public Radio. The NPR report asserted that "most election experts" believe that fears of voter fraud are "overblown." No word on how many "experts" they surveyed (besides Weiser) to report such a conclusion, which flies in the face of dozens of felony voter fraud convictions across the country over the past two election cycles -- and that's just among ACORN-tied cases.

Overblown?

In North Carolina and Nevada, early voters have encountered ballot machine glitches that favor Democrats in hotly contested races.

In Troy, N.Y., and Daytona Beach, Fla., police investigations into suspected absentee ballot fraud by elected government officials are underway.

In Harris County, Texas, the voter registrar admitted that 20 percent of voter registration forms submitted by liberal activist Houston Votes had problems. Election whistleblowers there are now being investigated by the Obama Justice Department and have been slapped with an ethics complaint by the Texas Democratic Party and a left-wing billionaire George Soros-funded group called Texans for Public Justice.

In Yuma County, Ariz., election officials denied any fraud associated with thousands of requests for "permanent early voter list" status submitted en masse by open-borders group Mi Familia Vota (a social justice satellite group of the Service Employees International Union). But election officials admitted that some 6,000 out of 14,000 requests fielded by the Yuma County Recorder's Office "were reviewed and rejected, under Arizona law, either due to the fact the request was a duplicate or the requestor was not eligible to vote in this election or within the jurisdiction."

Liberals shrugged their shoulders at reports of illegal alien canvassers trolling for votes in Washington State. Never mind the radical goals spelled out by SEIU International Secretary-Treasurer and Mi Familia Vota founder Eliseo Medina, who views illegal alien amnesty as a powerful Democratic recruitment tool to capture millions of new progressive voters.

Funny. For the past two years, Democratic leaders have had nothing to say about the militant New Black Panther Party goons who took it upon themselves to police a Philadelphia voting booth in 2008 wielding billy clubs and shouting anti-white slurs to suppress votes. Now, they're treating citizen election monitors as if they are the jack-booted thugs. When I lauded efforts like the Minnesota Majority, which is training volunteers to watch polls and report on voter fraud, liberal critics accused me this week of "fascism."

Silence dissent. Criminalize watchdogs. Whitewash fraud. Discourage grassroots engagement. Deny, deny, deny. These are the signature tactics of the left in the age of Obama. On November 2, Americans get their chance to say: Enough.

Michelle Malkin is the author of "Culture of Corruption: Obama and his Team of Tax Cheats, Crooks & Cronies" (Regnery 2010).
 
http://townhall.com/columnists/MichelleMalkin/2010/10/27/the_lefts_voter_fraud_whitewash/page/full/