Update on the Pennsylvania Voter ID Law

Liberals are arguing that because there have been no prosecutions of election fraud, there must not have been any fraud.   The liberals argue a priori that Pennsylvania’s voter identification requirement thus solves a problem that does not exist.  However, there is no legal requirement in the first place that a problem must already exist before legislators address it. 

Indeed, it would be unreasonable to wait for a problem to occur in order to prevent it, like waiting for terrorists to attack instead of neutralizing the threat beforehand.  The voter ID law reasonably address that problem. 

In attempting to minimize voter fraud and other irregularities strictly through the quantification of successful prosecutions, liberals contradict their claims in other cases.  For example, they claim that because most cases of the sexual abuse of minors by legal adults are unreported, the problem is significantly worse than the number of successful prosecutions suggests.  Thus, it appears that in regard to voter fraud, liberals are simply close-minded to the possibility of its existence.

But proof of election fraud does, in fact, exist.  Liberals should have learned their lesson of the truth of the legal maxim that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”  Just as liberals were proven wrong about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq after the United States reported in 2006 that it had found several hundred artillery shells topped with chemical warheads in Iraq, among other prohibited materiel, that had been suspected by United Nations inspectors as never having been destroyed by the Baathist Iraqi regime, liberals are again being proven wrong about voter fraud in Pennsylvania and elsewhere across the Union, where there have been several hundred prosecutions for election fraud, often involving elected officials.

            I had already cited an example of voter fraud in Pennsylvania in my March of 2012 post, Corbett Signs the Voter ID Requirement into Pennsylvania Law http://williamcinfici.blogspot.com/2012/03/corbett-signs-voter-id-requirement-into.html, I was among the candidates on the ballot in the 2000 General Election who were victimized by voter fraud.  For example, in a number of voting precincts in Muhlenberg Township, which was dominated by a Democratic “Gang” that was later removed from power after its leader pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges, voters were fraudulently impersonated by unknown individuals.  After one such incident of impersonation, when a Judge of Elections in one of the precincts questioned a second individual who attempted to impersonate another voter, the impersonator ran out of the polling place!  Therefore, even though there was no fraud prosecution, there was at least one successful voter fraud and a second attempt to commit fraud in just one precinct alone.  That precinct was the only one in the Township that was majority Republican with a Republican Judge of Elections, meaning that there was no safeguard against Democratic fraud in the other precincts.  As I noted in the earlier post, this example is just one of many of various voter irregularities in Democratic strongholds of which I have observed or heard reports of over the years, such as in the City of Reading, both in terms of fraud or other irregularities.  Efforts are made whenever possible to report them to election authorities or encourage witnesses to report them.

Furthermore, a recent investigative report (http://media.philly.com/documents/Voting+Irregularities+Report.pdf) by an election official in Philadelphia County highlighted the problem of voter fraud and related election irregularities.  Even though the report was based only on spot-checking, it nevertheless details numerous examples of voter impersonation, voting by individuals in more than one precinct, voting by non-citizens or others ineligible to vote, more votes cast in precincts than voters who officially voted and various other irregularities.  In short, serious voting irregularities, whether constituting fraud or not, are committed in Pennsylvania in Democratic-dominated areas, of a kind that would be reduced by the requirement of voters to provide photographic identification.  Indeed, liberals mislead by focusing on the term “election” or “voter fraud,” which is legally defined as a crime, while ignoring the more common irregularities of allowing ineligible people to vote when the criminal intent to commit “fraud” is absent. 

Philadelphia County is the same place where armed members of the New Black Panthers engaged in voter intimidation during the 2008 General Election.  The liberal Obama Administration’s Attorney General Eric Holder opted not to prosecute them for voter intimidation, while liberals play the race card by accusing proponents of voter identification of voter intimidation, especially of blacks – a convenient argument that allows Democrats to continue to commit election fraud, especially in Philadelphia, with impunity. 

The liberals’ argument against the voter identification requirement would be worse than saying that a crackdown on bank robbery would represent the taking away of the right to bank.  It would be even worse than saying that cracking down on bank robbery is itself the crime of bank robbery (like saying “the cure is the disease”) because exercising the privilege to vote, as the means to hold government accountable and thereby to safeguard liberty, is more basic to freedom than even the right to bank.