Purging ‘Ghost Voters’ Who Don’t Have IDs Isn’t Racist, It’s Necessary

REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

Remember your name and where you live — because it’s all you need to prove you’re authorized to make decisions in the most powerful democracy on earth.

Democracy is among America’s defining characteristics. It’s part of who we are as a nation. Unfortunately, dangerously relaxed rules governing how we vote compromise the integrity of this democracy. Ballot security in 2020 should concern us enough to start verifying every voter at the polls.

Right now, most polling places have large binders full of names and addresses. So long as a voter is able to state a name and corresponding address in the polling place’s book, he or she will get a ballot. That system doesn’t seem so bad until you consider that, according to the Pew Research Center, the books in 2012 contained 24 million invalid or inaccurate voter registrations.

If we were to create a ghost state populated by those bad registrations, it would displace Florida as the third largest state in the union. Only California and Texas would surpass it.

Citizens from that “ghost state” are voting. “These numbers are large enough to plausibly account for … victories in a few close elections,” according to the authors of research conducted by the Cooperative Congressional Election Study.

How has that affected Americans? In 2008, Minnesota’s now-disgraced former Sen. Al Franken won by a margin of .01 percent — or 312 votes. A group called Minnesota Majority discovered that between 1,099 and 1,670 counted ballots were cast by felons ineligible to vote. Had Minnesota enjoyed a more robust system for identifying who received ballots, Franken may not have won.

If Franken had never been a senator, American politics would look noticeably different. The 2017 proposal to repeal ObamaCare, which failed by one vote, may have succeeded. The impact of 1,099-1,670 illegal votes is difficult to overstate.

Read the rest of the story HERE.

If you like what you see, please "Like" us on Facebook either here or here. Please follow us on Twitter here.