OPINION

Voter Fraud Is Real—Here’s How Democrats Want to Steal the 2020 Election

NEWT GINGRICH
Newsweek

Make no mistake: Voter fraud is real. Democrats, the media and the so-called public interest groups on the political Left will tell you otherwise, but they are either lying or totally ignorant. Voter fraud is a threat to the integrity of our elections, the heart of our democracy—and Democrats want to make the problem worse with their new voting laws.

I believe this issue is incredibly important, now more than ever. So, as part of my ongoing Election 2020 podcast series, I decided to examine voter fraud in depth in this week’s episode of my podcast, “Newt’s World.”

My guest is Hans von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and manager of the think tank’s Election Law Reform Initiative. He is one of the preeminent experts on election law and election fraud, and he explains how Democrats are pushing proposals that will clearly make fraud more prevalent.

Anyone who denies the existence of voter fraud in the U.S. needs to go to Heritage’s online database, where they will find 1,285 proven instances of it—including 1,110 criminal convictions. Some of the stories are quite striking. In 2016, for example, Elbert Melton, the former mayor of Gordon, Alabama, illegally notarized two ballots, without witnesses present, while running for re-election. Melton won the race by only 16 votes—many local and state races are decided by such small margins. He was convicted of absentee ballot fraud, removed from office and sentenced to one year in prison.

The biggest way to expand voter fraud is to expand voting by mail. And Democrats want to impose universal vote-by-mail across the country.

Traditionally, citizens can request that an absentee ballot be mailed if they have a valid excuse—the physically disabled or sick, of course our troops stationed abroad and their families. This is still the case in most states, but some, such as Oregon, simply mail an absentee ballot to every single registered voter.

The problem with mailing ballots like this is that lists of registered voters across the country are in terrible shape, and states do a poor job of cleaning their voter rolls. In fact, most states have given up on doing so. Every time they try, well-funded liberal groups accuse them of purging active, eligible voters from the rolls to suppress voting. As a result, ballots get mailed out to people who no longer live at the same addresses because they have moved or died.

Therefore, a precious item, perhaps our society’s most valuable—the ballot—is just out there, for anyone to exploit. It isn’t that difficult to imagine how people could fill out fraudulent ballots, mail them in and have them counted.

Continue reading at:
https://www.newsweek.com/voter-fraud-realheres-how-democrats-want-steal-2020-election-opinion-1509180