There’s been a lot of yelling and protesting over billboards put up by anti-vote fraud groups that just accurately state the penalty for committing vote fraud. That’s being depicted as an attempt to suppress the vote. But while that’s getting all the press, some genuine attempts to suppress the vote are going on all around us. In Florida, longtime Republican voters have received fake letters that look like official state correspondence, questioning their citizenship and trying to scare them away from the polls. In Virginia, Patrick Moran, son of Rep. Jim Moran, quit his dad’s reelection campaign after conservative filmmaker James O’Keefe caught him on a hidden camera, allegedly helping an undercover agent think up ways to fraudulently cast votes on behalf of people who weren’t planning to vote. And in Florida, Virginia and Indiana, voters have received phone calls telling them they could vote by phone and didn’t have to go to the polls. Needless to say, that’s not true. The original argument against voter ID laws was that vote fraud is so rare, they’re not necessary. You can see why, now, opponents are having to come up with new arguments.
Earlier this week, President Obama told Jay Leno that he opposes laws requiring voters to show a valid ID because America is strengthened when more people vote. I’d agree with that, except I’d argue that it’s only true when more people vote illegally. Every fraudulent vote cancels out the vote of a legitimate voter and robs him or her of the right to have a say in the government. Illegal votes don’t increase democracy they reduce it and debase it.
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