In 2008, after the US Senate race was ultimately decided by just 312 votes, it was discovered that over 1,000 ineligible convicted felons had unlawfully voted in the general election. Nearly 200 have since been convicted and approximately 100 more are awaiting trial. Most ineligible felon voters were never charged because they pled ignorance of the law and in Minnesota’s election statutes, this is actually a valid defense. The standard for conviction is “ineligible voter knowingly votes.” If an ineligible voter maintains ignorance, it’s very difficult to prove otherwise beyond a reasonable doubt. No one is convicted for “accidental” voter fraud.
Now that the problem of ineligible voters has been discovered by a non-governmental non-profit group, some see
legalizing felon voters as the solution. This is akin to determining that too many people are robbing banks and solving the problem by legalizing bank robbery.
Why are felons denied the right to vote?
Article VII of Minnesota’s Constitution is explicit that people convicted of felonies are not to be entitled or permitted to vote in any election in the state. It states in part, “The following persons shall not be entitled or permitted to vote at any election in the state… a person who has been convicted of treason or felony, unless restored to civil rights; a person under guardianship, or a person who is insane or not mentally competent.” The framers had good reasons for this.
Felons are the most anti-social of all criminals. Their crimes are of the worst, most harmful and offensive nature. Murder, rape, robbery, gross fraud and conspiracy are examples of felony crimes. People who have demonstrated such gross disregard for the law, society and government should not be allowed to participate. They are outlaws, living outside the law and thus should not be allowed a hand in creating the laws that the law-abiding live under.
Besides lawmakers, Judges, county prosecutors and sheriffs are elected positions. It is in the felon’s interest to elect lenient judges and incompetent or corrupt prosecutors and law enforcement officers. Candidates for sheriff should not be in a position to try to solicit the votes of felons under the supervision of the Department of Corrections.
Deprivation of rights is the primary means of punishing and deterring crime in the United States. Felons on probation are prohibited from carrying a firearm, associating with certain people, entering certain establishments, may be subject to curfews and prohibitions of drug and alcohol use in addition to being prohibited from voting, until they have demonstrated their rehabilitation by successful completion of their sentence. At that point, they are considered to have “paid their debt to society” and are welcomed back into the civic process and their rights are restored. Many convicted felons never serve a day in jail. The deprivation of rights while on probation is the entirety of their punishment – should felons be punished for their crimes at all?
Even if the legislature determined that restoring voting rights to convicted felons prior to the completion of their
sentence was desirable, it would likely require an amendment to Minnesota’s Constitution.
The way to prevent corruption of our election process through the participation of ineligible voters, including felons and also non-citizens is to require all voters be subject to equal verification standards before voting. Currently, people who register more than 20 days before an election are verified as eligible before voting. Election Day registration currently requires no verification of eligibility, however, allowing may invalid votes to be cast and counted.
Minnesota is a forgiving state that leaves open the possibility of redemption. Convicted felons are restored to their
rights immediately upon successful completion of their sentence, including supervised release or probation. Our
probation system offers felons a chance to demonstrate their rehabilitation and integration into society. If they can do that, they can vote again. That’s current law and the mandate of the Constitution. It may not be easy, but it’s just.
This short video explores some examples of how Minnesota’s vouching law may have been exploited by organized fraudulent voters in recent years.
Vouching is the process by which one voter vouches for the identity and residence of another voter who does not possess any acceptable form of identification but wishes to register and vote on Election Day.
Minnesota’s unusual combination of election day registration and vouching permits unverified voters to cast live (rather than provisional) ballots that are immediately tabulated.
The proposed Voter ID Constitutional Amendment would eliminate vouching as a means of identifying Election Day registrants.
President Barack Obama got his start as a community organizer, working with groups like ACORN and other corrupt activist groups. ACORN eventually collapsed under the weight of its own corruption, but their tactics live on.
Organizing for America, the DNC project to reelect Barack Obama, is working to reelect the President. The President isn’t very popular right now for any number of reasons, Obamacare, the economy, unemployment, his seeming fetish for apologizing to people who hate us or kill our troops, $5+ trillion in new debt, etc., etc.
Whatever the case, Organizing for America has a steep hill to climb in front of it. Given the President’s affinity for, and past with ACORN, it’s not surprising that OfA would be caught using ACORN tactics.
Even though it was supposedly stripped of federal funding in 2009, a non-partisan government corruption watchdog says the disgraced organization known as ACORN is alive and well and still thriving on government dollars.
Following the 2009 voter registration scandals surrounding the organization, the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (ACORN) transformed itself into a number of smaller organizations with new names, such as Affordable Housing Centers of America and the New York Agency for Community Affairs.
WASHINGTON – More than 24 million voter-registration records in the United States— about one in eight — are inaccurate, out-of-date or duplicates. Nearly 2.8 million people are registered in two or more states, and perhaps 1.8 million registered voters are dead.
Those estimates, from a report published today by the non-partisan Pew Center on the States, portray a largely paper-based system that is outmoded, expensive and error-prone.
“We have a ramshackle registration system in the U.S. It’s a mess. It’s expensive. There isn’t central control over the process,” said Lawrence Norden of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University.
Experts say there’s no evidence that the errors lead to fraud on Election Day. “The perception of the possibility of fraud drives hyper-partisan policymaking,” said David Becker, director of Pew’s election initiatives. But inactive voters do cost money. Inaccurate lists mean wasted money on mailings and extra paper ballots.
There have been several recent comprehensive reports released on various facets of the state of Minnesota’s election integrity issues. For your convenience, all of them are complied here along with some additional information resources. Look for more reports on other aspects of Minnesota’s election system in the near future.
Dozens of felony cases against convicted felons accused of illegally voting in the 2008 elections continued moving through the court system this week in Dakota County.
More than 30 felons appeared Monday in court on ineligible-voter charges.
The investigation into alleged fraudulent voting started after the Dakota County attorney’s office received 282 referrals alleging illegal voting after the 2008 general election, said County Attorney James Backstrom. Of the tips, 202 came from Minnesota Majority, a grass-roots advocacy nonprofit that calls itself a “state legislative watchdog group.”
It’s “unusual” to get that many tips about fraudulent votes, Backstrom said.
But “these are not our highest priorities,” he said. “I’m not condoning someone voting illegally, but we only have so many resources to review the cases sent to our office.”
In years past, Dakota County has received maybe a handful of tips about illegal voting, he said. But the high-interest 2008 election made voter fraud a hot topic.
Minnesota Majority estimates that 1,500 felons statewide voted illegally in 2008, said Dan McGrath, the group’s executive director. To find them, the group compared a list of offenders under the state Department of Corrections’ supervision with voter records.
The organization forwarded its list to 30 county attorneys.
“I see this problem of ineligible voters that we’re able to detect as an overall barometer of voter fraud,” McGrath said. “It all ties into problems in the system overall.”
Last month, a collection of groups funded by George Soros held a conference on election law and the upcoming 2012 election. PJ Media has obtained details of the event from an attendee. Our eyes and ears are extensive. The meeting was one long attack on voter integrity efforts in the 2012 election. The sponsor was the Fair Elections Legal Network, a group that has received $105,000 from the Soros-funded Tides Foundation since 2007.
The speakers were Deven Anderson of the “Black Youth Vote!”; Robert “Biko” Baker of the League of Young Voters Education Fund; and Eric Marshall of the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law. Anderson was the recipient of a fellowship from the Soros funded radical organizing outfit Center for Community Change. The panel was moderated by Megan Donavan of the sponsor organization, the Fair Elections Legal Network. Donovan hails from the vote fraud denying Brennan Center for Justice by way of the Center for Reproductive Rights, proving that ideology may be more important than specialization.
These types of groups exist primarily to attack any effort to combat voter fraud or ensure the integrity of elections. As I write in my book Injustice, there is “an enormous and well-funded industry of voter fraud deniers that provides an intellectual smokescreen for this lawlessness.”
Congressman Keith Ellison of Minnesota’s 5th Congressional District wants to impose Minnesota’s loose election system on the nation. He’s introduced two bills to impose the worst two aspects of Minnesota’s system on the entire country. The combination exponentially undermines election integrity.
Ellison’s “Same Day Registration Act” would require all states to allow unverified voters to register and vote on Election Day. This bad idea is exacerbated by the second bill, the “Voter Access Protection Act,” which would prohibit states from requiring voters to show photo ID.
Ellison says his proposals are needed to “curb voter suppression” and protect the rights of young, elderly and minority voters, but photo ID laws in 14 other states have been challenged in the US and state Supreme Courts and plaintiffs have not yet produced a single voter who would be disenfranchised by those laws.
The net effect of Ellison’s two bills is to allow anyone and everyone to cast a ballot on Election Day without any mechanism to verify their identity, citizenship, eligibility, or that they live in the state and precinct they are voting in.
Our votes control trillions of public dollars, yet Ellison would have us believe nobody would ever steal them. We can trust everybody, right? Would you keep your money in a bank that allowed people to make withdrawals without checking their identity and verifying that they are entitled to the money?
Ellison’s bills are modeled after the system now employed in Minnesota, which as Minnesota Majority recently reported, now leads the nation in voter fraud convictions. Evidently Ellison is pretty proud of that dubious distinction, since he wants to export Minnesota’s loose election system to the other 49 states.
The impact of Ellison’s plan would probably be even worse in many other states whose numerous other election laws and regulations wouldn’t have been designed with Election Day Registration in mind. In Minnesota, at least we have some steps to verify voters after they have voted, to ostensibly clean up the voter rolls between elections. Other states could be flung into electoral chaos, or be forced to completely rework their election systems leading to several likely unintended consequences that could obscure fraud and errors.
The manner of conducting elections has traditionally been left to the individual states, so Ellison’s proposal would be an unprecedented federal intrusion that should be rejected by voters everywhere.
There is a way to securely manage Election Day registration, but it requires computerized registration systems, and it requires voter identification.
Combining Election Day voter registration with a prohibition on requiring identification is the very worst possible mix of policies for election integrity. It’s a wide open door to undetectable and untraceable voter fraud. In short, it’s completely batty.
Minnesota is on the verge of correcting this giant blunder through a constitutional amendment expected to be on the ballot in 2012, but Ellison would rather take it national.
Group Home Residents Deemed Incapable of Voting by Courts Were Brought to Vote by Caregivers
Minnesota Majority and the Minnesota Freedom Council today released a joint paper concluding that mentally incapacitated individuals under guardianships voted while legally ineligible to do so in Minnesota’s 2010 general election.
Attention was first drawn to the problem when Monty Jensen observed a group of mentally incapacitated residents of Clark Lake Groups Homes voting under the direction of their caregivers at the Crow Wing County Courthouse in October, 2010. Feeling that something wasn’t right, Jensen contacted the Minnesota Freedom Council, Minnesota Majority and filed an affidavit describing what he saw with the county attorney, Don Ryan, triggering an investigation.
A recent grand jury probe into the incident hasn’t produced any criminal indictments, but the Minnesota Freedom Council has unearthed conclusive evidence that several wards deemed by the courts to be incapable of exercising the right to vote were brought to vote by their caregivers in the 2010 general election.
When Al Stene learned that his mentally incapacitated son James was brought to vote without his knowledge, he was upset and he removed James from the group home. “It is apparent to me that James was exploited by these individuals by bringing him to vote,” he said.
James suffered a traumatic brain injury from nearly drowning while rescuing his sister when he was 12 years old. Asked by a reporter who he voted for, James responded, “Gerald Ford,” but he also said he hadn’t wanted to vote at all.
Freedom Council president, Ron Kaus is a friend of the Stenes and has been at the center of a swirl of controversy in Brainerd since Jensen first reported the voting by wards residing at Clark Lake Homes. “It just makes my heart sick,” Kaus said, “but getting to the bottom of this and finding a way to correct it keeps me going.”
“This situation is particularly troublesome,” said Minnesota Majority president Jeff Davis. “Families are trusting group home operators to appropriately care for their loved ones. Now we find some are bringing ineligible wards into the polling place. The caregivers should know better than that.”
The joint report recommends 3 reforms to protect vulnerable adults and the electorate from errors and abuse, including repeal of the 2003 statutory change, eligibility verification at the polling place and new requirements for caregivers.
Update: Sad news. Al Stene, the father of group home resident James Stene has died of a heart attack while hunting in Montana shortly after returning home from the grand jury probe in Brainerd. Al had courageously stood up for his son and in defense of mentally challenged persons vulnerable to exploitation. Fox News noted his passing at the end of a segment on voter fraud on October 30th.
The Stene family will be in our thoughts and prayers.
From a Minnesota Majority position memo:
There have been several recent comprehensive reports released on various facets of the state of Minnesota’s election integrity issues. For your convenience, all of them are complied here along with some additional information resources. Look for more reports on other aspects of Minnesota’s election system in the near future.
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