Where Chairman Mao believed that all power comes from the barrel of the gun, the late Mayor Richard J. Daley believed that all power comes from the barrel into which precinct totals have been tossed.
–David Nyham, The Boston Globe, Dec. 16, 1982
In America, it’s understood that power lies at the ballot box. So why is it we shake our heads and wag a finger at news coverage of election fraud thousands of miles away, yet ignore the same swindle when it happens right under our nose? Roman Buhler, former counsel to the House Administration Committee, said yesterday at Heritage’s Conservative Bloggers’ Briefing: “In Zimbabwe we know what to do with people [who commit election fraud], but I don’t think Americans have come to realize that there are parts of the left that view the political process as only something to be manipulated — not something for which integrity is priority one.”
The party that claims to be the champion of the rule of law, the little man and democracy, has a strange way of showing it. Perhaps the prospect of a filibuster-proof Senate is too much. “The left in this country has not had unlimited power since 1965, and they are salivating over the prospect of getting unlimited power,” Buhler said.
As Quin Hillyer wrote in yesterday’s Washington Examiner: “Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, acknowledges there are ‘discrepancies’ on some 200,000 new registrations, but she adamantly refuses to provide the county election boards with the state voter registration information necessary for the cross-checks.”
After a series of legal wranglings, Brunner will not have to verify the 200,000 registrants, leaving the door wide open for “deliberate chaos in the election system,” said John Fund of the Wall Street Journal and author of “Stealing Elections.” False registrations are not in and of themselves illegal, but groups like ACORN have been flooding voter registration offices with last-second applications, many of which prove fraudulent. The result on Election Day is purposefully induced pandemonium at polling stations when people demand their vote be counted, despite registration discrepancies.
During a visit to Heritage last month, Fund explained the situation America could face following Election Day: “The Obama campaign has 9,000 lawyers nationwide ready to file suits on Election Day. The McCain campaign has 5,000 lawyers of its own. A lot of underbrush has grown in our voting infrastructure since 2004, and this year there are over 14,000 people walking around with matches trying to light it.”
Liberal or conservative, American citizens will be the losers when the integrity of our election system is compromised.
