Press Release

Election Fraud Radio Show Highlights

Below are highlights from the October 24, 2006, edition of “Organization Watch,” the online radio show of Capital Research Center that is broadcast on www.rightalk.com.

On the show, co-hosts James Dellinger and Matthew Vadum interviewed Jonathan Bechtle, a lawyer who heads the Evergreen Freedom Foundation’s Voter Integrity Project. Bechtle is working on a report, “Election Security Under Fire: A study of the two major players behind the federal case Washington Association of Churches v. Secretary of State Sam Reed.” The report will be released in coming days.

In the lawsuit referred to above, the attorneys for the plaintiffs, who favor leaving voting open to rampant fraud, are the Brennan Center for Justice, a left-wing legal advocacy group based at the New York University School of Law, mere blocks from their legal fellow travelers at the public interest law firm, the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Brennan Center attorneys obtained a preliminary injunction preventing an anti-voter fraud law from coming into effect during next month’s elections in Washington state.

Previously Bechtle wrote “Voter Turnout or Voter Fraud? Interest Groups Push for Election Reform,” which appeared in the April 2006 issue of Organization Trends.

For one-click access to an MP3 recording of the show (you might need QuickTime software available free here) click here.

HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE SHOW:

When asked what should be done to improve voter security in Washington state and the rest of the nation, Bechtle said:

“The first recommendation that we would have is for states to vigorously clean their voting rolls in a constitutional manner. It has to be done in a certain way to make sure that people aren’t thrown off unjustifiably, but they need to check to make sure they don’t have felons, to make they don’t have dead voters, to make sure they don’t have double votes, et cetera, and many states are doing that. But they also need to put in place security measures to make sure that new voters don’t get on who aren’t eligible to vote and that’s what part of this law was about here in Washington. But there are others, for example in Arizona, there are many legal battles right now going on over a new requirement they passed to prove that you are a citizen of the United States before you vote, which seems very basic, but they are the only state that actually requires proof.”

Bechtle discussed the October 24, 2006 Wall Street Journal editorial, “The Don’t Show Me State: The liberal assault on voter ID laws,” (page A18), which begins:

“People in the good state of Missouri need photo identification to cash a check, board a plane or apply for food stamps. But the state Supreme Court has ruled that a photo ID requirement to vote is too great a burden on the elderly and the poor. Go figure.
Public polls consistently show that an overwhelming majority of Americans--regardless of age, race, ethnicity or socioeconomic status--favor voter ID laws. And nearly half of the nation's states have passed them. Yet a string of recent court decisions has blocked their implementation in some places, thus siding with Democrats and liberal special interest groups who would rather turn a blind eye to voter fraud.”

Bechtle also said of activist groups that oppose voter ID requirements:

“A lot of times it looks like they’re trying seize upon the old fear of poll taxes and throw that up as a red flag before the judges, and it has worked on a couple of these occasions. In Missouri they actually went a little farther than just the costs of the ID and looked at what are the costs of the documents you need to get the ID. They said ‘OK, the ID is free but look at all the stuff you have to get behind it, you have to maybe get your birth certificate or something like that -- that costs money and so this is a poll tax.’ But, again, that’s just a minor responsibility, folks have to have those things for lots of issues as well…there are many, many ways to get those documents and [the requirement to present ID in order to vote] certainly is not something that would disenfranchise voters, by any means."

Bechtle also discussed the involvement of the shady activist group known as ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now) in fraudulent voter registration efforts and in the lawsuit:

“In a very ironic way I love their involvement in this case because it’s somewhat along the lines of a wolf being in the sheep pen asking for the shepherd to be voted out, and I say that because ACORN is what you could probably call a poster child for fraudulent voter registrations or voter registrations with errors, inaccuracies, et cetera. They have run multiple voter registration drives the last few big elections in the numbers of millions of registrations. So they’re one of the very big players, always on the Democratic side of course…and so it’s ironic because they’ve also been implicated many, many times in fraudulent and erroneous voter registrations.”

Highlights of the previous "Organization Watch" show (September 26) on so-called smart growth are available here.

(Note: The next edition of “Organization Watch” will air November 21 at 3:05 p.m. Eastern time on www.rightalk.com. The topic to be discussed has not yet been announced.)