Muslim Rep. Keith Ellison: ‘Why You Should Have to Register to Vote?’

In the keynote address at the recent U.S. Vote Foundation’s Voting and Elections Summit, Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) said he believes “we need to make voting easier,” and added, “I’ve often asked myself: ‘Why you should have to register to vote?’”

As CNSNews.com reports, Ellison complained that voting in the United States is difficult.

“In other countries it’s easier,” he said. “Why should voting be so difficult? Tuesday? Who thought that up? I mean the fact is, is that there’s wide variation in when people can vote. You can’t necessarily register to vote on Election Day.”

Ellison continued that voting should be somehow “automatic.”

“We have to protect voting rights,” he said. “We need to make voting as easy as possible, and we need to fix our broken campaign finance laws.”

The congressman was critical of conservatives whom he said “know that the data doesn’t support the need for these restrictive laws,” and said when he was a state lawmaker in Minnesota he made the case that there is no voter fraud.

“[W]hy do we need those photo I.D. laws?” Ellison said he asked at that time. “Well, I was missing the point. The point was they [conservatives] wanted to restrict the right to vote.”

In July of 2013, Melowese Richardson, a long-time Hamilton County poll worker who admitted on camera to illegal voting was sentenced to five years in prison for voter fraud, and was one of six people accused of voter fraud in 2012 in Hamilton County alone.