"There is a massive effort under way to register illegal aliens in this country."
How many? According to the Congressman’s office, there are five million: Democrats, he says, who are not good Americans – they’re Mexicans!
Really?! Holy Cow! The Senator has uncovered a conspiracy to flood the voter rolls with Brown Hordes who’ve swum the
Thank the Lord for vigilant citizens like Senator Pearce. His efforts, along with the work of other patriotic (Republican) politicians, successfully stopped 300,000 voters from obtaining ballots in 2004 – because these voters had brought the wrong ID to the polls. New ID laws in
On Wednesday, the Republican majority on the US Supreme Court indicated it would vote to uphold these new voter ID requirements.
And just in time. If not for these new ID laws, warns Senator Pearce and other Republicans across the nation, a dark wave of illegal aliens would vote again in our upcoming Presidential election.
Or maybe not. Maybe there aren’t five million illegal voters for Hillary or Obama or Edwards. Maybe there are just five hundred. Maybe there are none.
I called Senator Pearce’s office to get a couple of the names of these illegal voters. After all, it should be easy as pie to catch them: they have to give their names and addresses to register and vote. Odd thing, out of five million illegal registrants, the Senator, after a week of looking, couldn’t provide me the name of one. Not one.
Another Republican politician, this one in
I called her, Representative Justine Fox-Young (yes, that’s her name, and she has the ID to prove it).
Q. Justine, you’ve uncovered felony criminals [illegal voting is a jail-time crime in every state]. Do you have the names?
A. Oh, yes!
Q. Really? Wow! Did you turn these names over to the US Attorney?
A. Well, no ..
Q. You had evidence of a crime and you didn’t have the bad guys arrested?
A. Not exactly ..
Fox-Young promised to send me the names of the illegal voters. The names never arrived. But shortly thereafter, based on her claim, the Legislature passed, and Governor Bill Richardson signed, a voter ID law certain to knock out Hispanic citizens. (In fairness to
Our investigations team talked to some of
In 2004, the Catholic Church organized a bus and caravan to take newly registered Chicano "low-riders" to a
One of the rejected young Chicanas said she wouldn’t return to try again to vote; one round of humiliation was enough. "They don’t want me to vote there anyway," she said. And they don’t.
But hey, what’s wrong with requiring voter ID? I’ll give you a million reasons. Since 2004, when 300,000 citizens lost their right to vote because of ID challenges, the number of states that have passed voter ID laws has quadrupled. Expect the challenges to quadruple as well, to over a million in the upcoming 2008 presidential election. Does ID challenges make a difference? In
In
In
Four years ago, the Jim Crow era ended when biased impediments to voting were struck down by the courts and Congress: poll taxes, "literacy" tests, citizenship tests that blocked Blacks more than whites. From that time until now, almost every state has accepted your signature matched to prior records as proof you’re a legal voter. Now we’re going to change this system to prevent the crime of folks voting more than once and the crime of aliens voting. The odd thing about these crimes: they virtually don’t exist. Yet to prevent crimesiglesiasandpalast.jpg that aren’t committed, we are allowing elections officials to commit a greater crime: stopping legal voters – especially new, young, Hispanic voters – from having their piece of our democracy.
Who was behind these viciously undemocratic, racist Jose Crow attack on brown-skinned voters? His initials are Karl Rove. In 2006, I smelled out the link to Rove, then White House political chief, when I reached out to the US Attorney for
That US Attorney, David Iglesias, had indeed investigated the "illegal" voters identified by Fox- Young, working from a list of 150 sent to him by Republican officials. After marching all over the mesas with the FBI, Iglesias found exactly zero cases to prosecute.
So, finding folks innocent, Iglesias did not arrest them. That was a mistake – at least for his career. Karl Rove, visiting
Iglesias told me, "This voter fraud thing is the bogeyman. It was designed to scare up, rile the [Republican] base. I looked into [the fraud allegations] …We didn’t find the evidence."
I met with Iglesias at the park overlooking the Statue of Liberty in
(Rove won’t respond to BBC’s requests for his views – nor respond to a subpoena from Congress to explain his involvement in the firings.)
Whatever Rove’s political motives, I did have to ask if there’s a legitimate reason for these new ID laws. I challenged the leader of the New Mexico Catholic Charities voter drive, Santiago Juarez, to answer Ms. Fox-Young’s charge that, without voter ID, his new citizens could steal elections by voting more than once using someone else’s name.
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Greg Palast is the author of the New York Times bestsellers, Armed Madhouse and The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Obtain the film on DVD of Palast’s investigations of
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