Morning Bell: Stopping Voter Fraud

Conn Carroll / November 02, 2010

Voter fraud happens. Just ask Olivia Alair, press secretary for the U.S. Department of Transportation. Alair was regional communications director for the 2008 election in Ohio under White House press secretary Robert Gibbs. In 2008, Alair and two other Obama campaign staffers registered to vote in Ohio. The problem was that Alair did not live in Ohio and had no permanent plans to do so. By Ohio law, this made her ineligible to register. Only after this was made public did Alair and her cohorts send letters asking that their registrations be canceled. If the press had never made this public, would Alair have gone ahead and committed a felony by voting? Only she knows. But her cavalier attitude toward our nation’s voting laws permeates the entire Obama administration.

In 2004, an immigrant illegally registered to vote in Putnam County, Tenn., and then voted illegally. This is a felony three times over! 18 U.S.C. § 1015(f) makes it illegal to claim you are a U.S. citizen in order to register to vote for any election; 18 U.S.C. § 611 prohibits a noncitizen from voting in an election where there is a federal candidate on the ballot; and 18 U.S.C. § 911 makes false claims of citizenship in general a felony. Instead of prosecution, the Obama administration sent the immigrant a letter asking him when he “discovered” that he was “not a United States Citizen.” Protecting the ballot box was not their priority (you can read more about The Threat of Non-Citizen Voting, here). (more…)