Standing Watch for Clean Elections

Here we are the day before Election Day and the Obama machine continues to work overtime to try to “fix” the elections to re-elect Barack Obama. And they are doing it with the full weight of the Obama administration behind them.

Never before has the line between a presidential administration and a presidential campaign been so indistinct. And never before has a Department of Justice (DOJ) been so hostile to election integrity laws.

Case in point: The Obama administration’s multi-pronged strategy to increase the number of illegal voters in 2012 in order to ensure the president’s re-election – a strategy that includes:

• Using Section 7 of the National Voter Registration Act (NVRA) to register greater numbers of voters on public assistance, a key Obama campaign demographic. (I call it Obama’s “Food Stamp Army.”)
• Ignoring Section 8 of the NVRA, which is designed as a counter-balance to Section 7 to ensure that states maintain clean voter registration lists.
• Blocking states from implementing reasonable election integrity provisions, such as voter ID laws, even going so far as to file lawsuits against state election officials. 
• Failing to enforce our federal laws against illegal immigration and effectively ending the deportation of illegal aliens, thereby swelling the population of potential illegal voters.
• Deploying thousands of lawyers to challenge voting results that do not favor the Obama campaign on Election Day.

To this list I might add a sixth component: Fighting to suppress the military vote, a demographic widely seen as critical to Governor Romney’s chances to win the White House.  (Some polls cite a double digit advantage for Governor Romney with military voters.) 

In Ohio, for example, the Obama DOJ filed a lawsuit to reverse the state’s long-standing early voting policy for members of the Armed Forces. Some have also accused the Obama administration of allowing the government’s military voter assistance programs, initiated in 2009 to boost military voting numbers, to languish. 

The result? Requests for absentee ballots for military voters are down – way down. In the battleground state of Virginia, for example, press reports show the number of requests for absentee ballots by military voters is just 30% of what they were just four years ago.

Judicial Watch has made election integrity a centerpiece of its activities. Judicial Watch neither supports nor opposes candidates for public office. But we have a deep and sincere interest in making certain that every vote cast is legitimate. And we will work to stop any attempt by a political campaign – no matter the political party – to undermine the integrity of the voting process.

For this reason, we initiated our 2012 Election Integrity Project, which was launched with an in-depth investigation that exposed a dozen key states that have the dirtiest voter registration lists.  We put election officials in these states on notice that they must either clean them up in accordance with the law, or face a Judicial Watch lawsuit.

In some states, Judicial Watch’s warning letters got action. Lincoln County, West Virginia, for example, immediately initiated an effort to clean up its lists following a warning letter from JW, an effort that will continue right up through Election Day. Judicial Watch also prompted the State of Florida to clean up its voter registration lists and now is in court to try to help the state beat back a challenge from the Obama Justice Department, which objected to this critical election integrity initiative.

And we filed historic lawsuits against states that refused to follow the law and clean up their voting rolls.

Judicial Watch, in partnership with True the Vote, filed lawsuits against Ohio and Indiana, when election officials in those states failed to heed Judicial Watch’s warning and initiate steps to make sure its voter registration lists were clean in accordance with the law.

Judicial Watch was also a key player in a legal battle in Pennsylvania. Commonwealth Court Judge Robert Simpson upheld the its new voter ID law in a ruling against a legal challenge from the Pennsylvania ACLU. Judge Simpson incorporated in his ruling much of the legal argument that Judicial Watch lawyers had made in a “friend of the court” brief JW filed in support of the Pennsylvania law. Ultimately, after a battle in the State Supreme Court, the voter ID law was upheld and is on track for enforcement in 2013 and beyond.

Judicial Watch undertook similar legal campaigns in South Carolina, which will implement its voter ID law in 2013 over the objections of the Obama DOJ, and Tennessee as well.

Judicial Watch continues to battle for records detailing the Obama administration’s sordid partnership with the allegedly defunct ACORN and Project Vote, President Obama’s former employer. Judicial Watch continues to fight in court to stop the Obama administration’s scheme to “legalize” illegal aliens through its amnesty initiatives, while opposing illegal alien sanctuary policies that entice greater numbers of illegal aliens to cross the border.

Now, as I say, liberals protest that voter fraud is a phantom problem. They contend that it doesn’t exist. It was invented out of thin air by conservatives to justify the disenfranchisement of minority voters, they say. But the problem for liberals is that the facts keeps proving them dead wrong.

For example, last week, I told you about the son of Congressman Jim Moran (D-VA), who was reportedly caught on tape by an undercover reporter conspiring to commit voter fraud. Prior to that, in September, a Maryland Democratic congressional candidate was forced to leave the race after it was discovered she illegally voted in two states at the same time in previous elections.

Now how’s this for irony. As I explained above, the DOJ filed a lawsuit to stop the state of Florida from trying to ascertain whether non-citizens were on voter rolls, citing imagined concerns about the disenfranchisement of Hispanics.  (You will recall that JW prompted Florida’s voter clean-up effort and then, with True the Vote, is now seeking to defend Florida’s efforts in court against the DOJ’s legal assault.)

Are these cases real enough for you? And if Election Day 2008 is any indication, we haven’t seen anything yet. Dirty election lists and resulting voter fraud could tip the balance of the election and cast doubt upon the election result, no matter which candidate wins. 

Again, we’ve looked at the numbers.  In key states, as much as one of every five names on the voting lists could be ineligible to vote (in many cases, for the simple reason that the voter is dead).  Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Colorado are just a few of the states where as much as 20% of the voting rolls could be ineligible to vote.  How can Americans have confidence of the outcome of an election in states with dirty voting lists?  Dirty voting lists can lead to dirty elections.    

With this in mind, I’m going to suggest you do two things to prepare for Election Day 2012. First, click over to watch the election fraud panel I hosted just a few weeks ago. We assembled the nation’s leading election fraud experts to give the inside scoop about what is going to take place during the elections this year. Then, get your hands on a free copy of our special report “8 Things You Can Do Now to Help Stop Voter Fraud” and participate in helping to ensure clean elections.

If you don’t have time to take all of our suggestions in the report, in the least, please follow the “if you see something, say something” rule and alert election officials if you see something fishy or underhanded going on.

It is very important that our campaign, and your efforts, continue right up through November 6 – and beyond. Because after the votes are counted this year, the election fraud problem will not go away. Certainly, we have ample evidence that the political Left is determined to turn our elections into a banana-republic style system. The only antidote to this underhanded campaign is the rule of law.

Judicial Watch investigators are set to go immediately into areas where any serious election disputes occur.  We are independent of the political parties and campaigns, so you can count on Judicial Watch to stand watch for election integrity as the nation goes to vote.