Voter fraud: Investigate, or not?
When it comes to voter fraud, there are generally three kinds of people: 1. Those who are practicing voter fraud and do not want the subject investigated. 2. Those who lost an election due to voter fraud and want it stopped. 3. Those who won elections, despite being subjected to voter fraud, and just want to move on with their lives and their newly-won or re-won offices.
Long before President Trump created the presidential election integrity commission, two reputable organizations: The Heritage Foundation and Judicial Watch were finding some alarming instances of voter fraud in local, state, and congressional elections. One of their key findings is that "Dirty voter rolls lead to dirty elections."
So, how can it be that the secretaries of state in so many states are maintaining dirty voter rolls when this is what is "supposed" to happen: In advance of Primary and General Elections, citizens are supposed to provide local election officials with their correct name, date of birth, party affiliation, address, and proof of U.S. citizenship. Then, when it comes time to vote in the Primary and/or General Elections, the citizen displays a form of government-approved identification, signs the voter rolls, and casts his or her ballot into the ballot box. Stone simple; however, recent modifications such as mail-in ballots, same-day registration, and drive-by voting are making voter fraud more difficult to detect.
The voter fraud industry -- yes, there is one led by the Association of Community Organizations for Reform (ACORN) -- figures out ways to cast the votes of people who are not eligible to vote by reason of being dead, not U.S. citizens, illegally inside the USA, voting in more than one state, or even stuffing ballot boxes. Hopefully, in the fullness of time, the on-going presidential commission will produce its findings and we can decide to believe those findings or not.
But what if a particular case of voter fraud caused an American war to be conducted with its priority being the reelection of a sitting president rather than doing what was necessary to win the war? In Robert A. Caro’s Means of Ascent: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (1991), biographer Caro details how, in 1946, Lyndon Johnson stole/bought enough votes in the Pedernales Valley of Texas to win election to the U.S. Senate by a "landslide" 87 votes.
"Landslide Lyndon" pulled off a case of voter fraud with tragic consequences. H.R. McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies that Led to Vietnam (1997), reveals how Johnson and McNamara micro-managed the Vietnam War with Johnson’s reelection at their top objective, rather than success on the battle fields of Southeast Asia.
If history is, indeed, a continuum of events then, when read side-by-side, Caro’s Means of Ascent and McMaster’s Dereliction of Duty make a compelling case that just this one 1946 instance of voter fraud in Texas led to the political failures of command by President Johnson, to the riots and societal disruptions of the 1960s, and, in 1975, to the ignominious end of the Vietnam War. Can voter fraud destroy lives, families, and have a negative impact on American history? We report. You decide.
Nationally syndicated columnist, William Hamilton, is a laureate of the Oklahoma Journalism Hall of Fame, the Nebraska Aviation Hall of Fame, the Colorado Aviation Hall of Fame, the Oklahoma University Army ROTC Wall of Fame, and is a recipient of the University of Nebraska 2015 Alumni Achievement Award. He was educated at the University of Oklahoma, the George Washington University, the U.S Naval War College, the University of Nebraska, and Harvard University. For more, see: www.central-view.com.
©2017. William Hamilton.
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