A struggling Hillary Clinton caught media attention with a bit of magic about voting rights. Magic? Yes, because we saw yet another attempt at sloppy sleight of hand.
If I have this right, HRC proclaimed a right to automatic registration for all 18 year-olds at the same time she railed against purported GOP vote suppression. In Houston, she pulpited: "We have a responsibility to say clearly and directly what's really going on in our country -- because what is happening is a sweeping effort to disempower and disenfranchise people of color, poor people, and young people from one end of our country to the other."
Naturally, her friends in State Media—those so-called journalistic organs that reflexively parrot talking points pushed by leftist royalty (irony intended), have joined the claque replaying her bid for populist-in-chief. The rest of us have our own responsibility—once we catch our breath—to call her speech what it is: a cynical, specious, even vile bid to divide us and inherit Obama’s vaunted chokehold on certain voting demographics. Were I a member of one of the groups she highlighted, it wouldn’t be hard to feel a bit taken for granted. Worse, I might feel insulted by the suggestion that I was too lazy or dumb to get off the couch, and that I need special laws to “protect” me.
Record numbers of each group HRC mentioned have registered to vote everywhere across the land, a process made especially easy in many locales, and voting itself is easier almost everywhere else than in her home state. There have also been reports of increased participation in those states where vetted Voter ID laws have been enacted, and state fees for the highly useful ID cards are typically less than that charged for a standard driver’s license. So why do liberals want even more extended voting, unverified registration, and no ID at the polls? To keep things honest? Really?
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Interestingly, a 2009 presentation by Hans von Spakovsky of The Heritage Foundation presciently damned the HRC initiative: “This push for universal registration is especially ironic given that many of its proponents are the same liberal groups that have filed lawsuits, some successfully, trying to stop states from verifying the accuracy of new voter registration information by running data matches with other state records, such as driver’s license databases. They claim those records are too inaccurate and cause large numbers of mismatches, disenfranchising voters. Yet now these same groups claim those records are accurate enough to be a source of automatic voter registration.”
Von Spakovsky’s observations are backed by a 2012 Pew study which showed that 24 million registrations are inaccurate or are otherwise invalid, 2.8 million people are registered in two or more states, and at least 1.8 million voters are dead. Yet, HRC’s minions cite ad nauseam only 31 instances of proven voter fraud! Who’s kidding whom?
And why is this a sleight of hand? With an abundance of chutzpah, HRC and her adherents make these charges on top of new polls showing her favorability/trustworthiness ratings at new lows, the cumulative result of an unbroken chain of falsehoods and misconduct practiced by this candidate for over a decade. Second, drawing our attention to bogus issues related to vote suppression takes our attention away from the real threat to election integrity: the massive electronic vote fraud possible in the 2016 POTUS race.
In my book, Turnover, the nerds demonstrate—albeit in a fictional venue—exactly how such a high crime could be accomplished. Proof that it could actually occur did not exist until April 2015, when Virginia revealed the ease with which that state’s former electronic system could have been hacked by a remote, third party. Without in-place systems of auditable presidential voting, the question of a domestic or foreign entity perverting the outcome of a national race is not IF.
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