By Rick Manning
James Ware, a candidate for Controller in the state of California in 1978, was frustrated by the mail in voter registration system and decided to publicize the potential for abuse. Ware proceeded to register his cat to vote, and let the media in on the secret.
State authorities proceeded to threaten Ware with prosecution due to his abuse of the system, but his point was made, anyone or anything could be registered to vote, and with mail in voting, there was no way for the government to prevent voter fraud.
Incredibly, 35 years later, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down an attempt by Arizona to at least ensure that only legal citizens of the United States were registering to vote by requiring basic proof of eligibility to be provided with a registration.
Texas Senator Ted Cruz summarized the ruling on his Facebook page on Monday writing, “The U.S. Supreme Court ruled today that the federal ‘motor voter’ law preempts Arizona’s proof-of-citizenship requirement for voter registration.” Cruz continued by concluding, “This hole in federal statutory law allows non-citizens to register and thereby encourages voter fraud.”
To close the loophole, Cruz is promising to offer an amendment to the immigration bill currently in the Senate that would allow states, like Arizona, to include proof of citizenship requirements before someone could become a registered voter.
Fair and honest elections are foundational to the American concept of government by the consent of the governed.
This concept differentiates the United States from a country like Mexico, where a young Mexican tour guide once told me that rather than spending money on elections, it would be better to give it to the farmers. You see, he knew the election results had been fixed, and the system was corrupt.
The Supreme Court decision may have been the right one under the law, but it points to a larger problem in our current voting system — mail fraud.
A person, or an organization purporting to be a number of persons, can register to vote and vote and vote using mail-in systems without any actual, real live person confirming the voter’s existence.
While this system may be convenient, it is obviously fraught with the potential for fraud. In 2008, the far left advocacy group ACORN exploited these loopholes so egregiously, that Congress attempted to cut off any federal funds, compelling them to reconstitute into newly named entities run by the same fraudsters.
The group True the Vote was formed to root out this and other voter fraud around the country with the specific intent of trying to defend and restore faith in our nation’s election system without which the very legitimacy of the government is in doubt.
The result of True the Vote’s resolve has been well documented in the media through the IRS scandal where the founder of the group Catherine Engelbrecht found herself subjected to unprecedented IRS and other government harassment from a laundry list of alphabet agencies.
It is now 35 years since James Ware’s cat became a registered voter in California. It is past the time for our nation to have voting laws that both protect legal voters’ right to vote, but also protect the integrity of the electoral process.
Failure to do so will further rip the deeply frayed fabric of our nation’s social compact that holds us together.
Rick Manning (rmanning957) is the Vice President of Public Policy and Communications for Americans for Limited Government.
