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Help Prevent the Spread of Oregon Madness

Mar 17, 2015 (RALEIGH) Flying under the banner of “increasing voter participation,” Oregon has taken a dangerous step to  automatically register every person to vote at the same time as they apply for a driver’s license, while ignoring the door this process will open to enterprise-level vote fraud.

The 1993 National Voter Registration Act (commonly called “motor voter”) already requires state DMV offices to offer voter registration as an option for all of their customers, the Oregon law will register the customers without their consent or knowledge.

According to an Associated Press story on the new legislation, the law will require their DMV to then send each newly registered voter a postcard that gives them three weeks to undo the registration for personal reasons.

Here are three quick reasons this law is harmful to open and honest elections:

1. By default, some people who have legitimate reasons not to vote will be registered (in some cases) without their knowledge..

Anticipating this complaint, the program assumption is that DMV will have full knowledge of the citizenship records of all license holders. Setting aside that assumption, we wonder how many violations will it take before lawmakers realize their DMV cannot possibly have such absolute knowledge? In other words, suppose we bet their Governor that we can find non-citizens in possession of a citizen driver’s license. How many would we need to find before they admit to a system failure?

2. Setting aside that fallacious assumption, we’re concerned about how the law will handle persons who are legally barred* from voting. These are persons like felons and those legally declared “mentally incompetent.” The program answer is that a post card, mailed to each voter will give them the chance to undo their registration. If they return the card, they can reverse the registration. If the post card is lost or stolen or otherwise not returned, the voter will be assumed legit and the registration will enter the books.

The fraud potential here is for persons who are registered without their knowledge or consent. Examples would include those just out of prison, living in halfway houses and those living in mental hospitals, nursing homes and group homes. Such registered voters may never learn of their registration, but somebody else will and this gives such persons an extra vote or two or twelve.

Fraud deniers will scoff at this. “Don’t be ridiculous,” they will say. “Nobody would ever do that! The penalties are too high.” To which, I would ask, how would such a stolen vote be detected in real time? And more importantly, who would the state be able to prosecute? The post card precedes a ballot by months or even years, so how will election officials know who is voting with that hip-pocket registration? Unless they can validate (with 100% accuracy) the authenticity of each ballot at the time they receive it, there will be no way to fish it out later and adjust the results.

3. Finally, how will such voters be un-registered? We already know the answer to this question and that is the biggest reason this policy is a disaster. Under the motor-voter law, it takes up to eight years for an election board to remove a voter from the rolls who just moves away and doesn’t vote in that state anymore. Because of that fraud friendly federal law, North Carolina has more than half a million missing voters on their rolls and Ohio (as of August 2014) had 1.1 million such voters. With universal registration, Oregon will soon have even more because registration alone doesn’t morally compel people to vote.

The fraud concern is that such dormant voters are equivalent to the 1960 dead voters in Chicago and Texas who elected the JFK/LBJ ticket. In that case and in the case of inactive voters, the voters do not realize they are still registered in that state, making detection and prosecution nearly impossible. Strict in-person voting with tightly controlled voter ID is the only mitigation for this type of identity theft, but Oregon only allows voting by mail, making positive identification a myth!

The tragic irony is that countries with 100% voter “participation” have these problems worked out . . . and all seem to have socialist governments!

In the immortal words of Josef Stalin: “The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.

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* Note: North Carolina restores voting rights to felons, but only the person has finished both incarceration and any associated parole or probation.  This law varies from state to state. Also, persons legally declared “mentally incompetent” are allowed to vote in North Carolina, but not in South Carolina (unless the court specifically restore that right). This too can vary from state to state.

Source for this rant: http://www.katu.com/politics/Oregon-is-first-state-to-adopt-automatic-voter-registration–296472861.html