Time to Clean Up our Election System

Now that the big presidential election is over, it's time for Americans to tidy up our voting procedures and make sure that no one is cheated by anyone casting or counting a vote illegally. A good guide to our efforts would be a new book called Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk by the national authorities on this subject, John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky. They have developed the research to prove that our system needs attention.

Unfortunately, the subject of vote fraud in the United States is rarely covered, or often denied and discounted, in the media. This makes this new book all the more important. The authors argue that our nation’s “haphazard” and “fraud prone” election system has led to the passage of a lot of bad and ineffective legislation and fostered significant corruption.

Low voter turnout isn’t the only problem with election fraud. “The number of election-related lawsuits has skyrocketed since 2000. … If the trend toward litigation continues, winners in the future may have to hope not only that they win, but that their leads are beyond 'the margin of litigation.'” Plenty of voter fraud goes unprosecuted, and that lack of accountability can have very bad results.

In this book titled Who’s Counting, the authors take a necessary look at a lot of hot-button issues, including ACORN's voter registration projects, voter ID laws, voting by noncitizens, vote buying, absentee ballot fraud, and the disenfranchisement of military voters. Then there is another issue that is seldom talked about: the loss of the secret ballot in Absentee Voting. Americans prize our secret ballot, but when you vote absentee the whole idea of a secret ballot is eliminated. Before the next election, we hope all states will pass voter ID laws.

Listen to the radio commentary here: