Unnatural Selection [Voting]
Politics/Elections Opinion (Published)
Keywords: FELONS, MENTALLY ILL, DEMOCRATS, VOTING, FRAUD
Source: FrontPage Magazine
Published: November 3, 1999
Author: Lowell Ponte
Posted
on 11/03/1999 06:33:44 PST by JeanS
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DEMOCRACY, YOU MIGHT THINK, happens when voters select those who will govern. The opposite, increasingly, is closer to the truth. As one judge said in the case of a racially gerrymandered Texas congressional district, nowadays, "the politicians select their voters."
With the 2000 election only a year away, some fascinating efforts have been underway to select not only candidates but also voters-to shape who can and will cast votes next November. Whoever is able to pick and choose who votes will determine who gets elected. Consider the following examples:
America's Second Lady Tipper Gore has declared mental health the focus of her concern. She has also acknowledged taking medication for a serious mental problem herself, but has declined press requests to identify her diagnosis or the drug she has been using. This seemed a purely humane effort until the Empowerment Project was revealed.
An estimated 5.6 million Americans have serious mental illnesses, according to the National Institute of Mental Health. How many next November will have their strait jackets removed for a day to vote as they are told-for a straight Democratic ticket? (Some states are also moving to let those with certain mental problems sit on juries, presumably to hear defendants plead "not guilty by reason of insanity.") As columnist Don Feder notes, "The mentally ill may be uniquely qualified to understand American politics."
· Democrats enthusiastically support efforts to let convicted felons vote. Thus far only four states-New Hampshire, Vermont, Maine, and Massachusetts-grant prison inmates this privilege. In 1988, Michael "Free Furloughs for Killers" Dukakis's campaign had a massive voter turnout effort in Massachusetts' prisons. Al Gore will almost certainly have a major, if unannounced to the press, primary campaign for penitentiary votes in New Hampshire, where imprisoned felons spend their days stamping out automobile license plates that read "Live Free or Die."
Fourteen states deny the vote for life to felons, even after their release. Thirty-two states prohibit voting by those on parole, as the Washington Post reported last February 22, and 29 ban voting by offenders on probation.
Worse than unfair, liberal Democrats argue, this is racist. Because a disproportionate share of convicted felons are black, such laws disenfranchise blacks. In ten states more than one in five black men is unable to vote because of a criminal record. Nationwide, 13 percent of African-American men are thus prohibited from voting.
In Florida, where an effort to restore the vote automatically one year after a felon's release won qualified backing from Republican Governor Jeb Bush, an estimated 31 percent of black males have been barred from voting. In Alabama, 7.5 percent of all adults-but more than 31 percent of African-American men-are legally disenfranchised. In Virginia, about one in four black men is prohibited from voting. In Texas, 4.5 percent of adults-but 21 percent of black adult males-are forbidden to cast a vote because of one or more felony convictions. In many cases these felons were guilty of no violent crime, just illicit drug use or dealing.
· Early in the ClintonGore Administration, Democrats rushed to enact the "Motor Voter" law, which set out to register those in welfare and other government offices where people come for government money. Although short of its goal, by one estimate, "Motor Voter" has added more than seven million people from the welfare rolls to the voter rolls. Who is more likely to vote Democrat than non-working folks who live as parasites on government money squeezed from working taxpayers? "Motor Voter" also contains provisions to make it as difficult as possible to remove false names from the voter lists, thereby giving ten more years of life to the voting dead of Chicago graveyards and other key Democrat ghost voters. Democrats have also been frantic to register "the homeless," who have no traceable address to verify their legitimacy as voters.
· The online satire service BNN, the Bogus News Network, "The Nation's Second Leading Source for Misinformation," headlined a 1999 story, Democrats Plan to Give Non-Citizens the Right to Vote. In practice, alas, this is no more humorous than Democrats rushing to give the vote to felons
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The Aztlan Whore |
In some San Diego, California, public-school classrooms, the pledge of allegianceto the American flag is no longer said because Mexican students greet the ceremony with verbal and other disruptions. Democrat activists in San Diego have been working to let non-citizens vote in elections for local school board members, a precedent that can be expanded to include other offices and issues.
Vice President Al Gore has worked closely with the Southwest Voter Registration Project, and has appeared on stages with activists who wear the brown berets of "Aztlan." This Aztlan movement aims to restore Southwestern states lost more than a century ago by Mexico to Mexican cultural and political control. Ask former Republican Congressman from Southern California Bob Dornan about his narrow loss to a Latina woman and he will show you evidence of many hundreds of undocumented immigrants who cast ballots in his district. The Democratic Party has taken legal action to prohibit anything, such as posted warning signs or uniformed security guards
 FOR VIOLENCE |
ClintonGore and the Democratic Party have also solicited and received millions of dollars from Chinese generals, Russian gangsters, and Communist Cuban druglords with which to buy television ads, in effect letting foreigners "vote" in our elections with bucks instead of ballots.
· The Democratic Party also is pushing for same-day registration, mail-in ballots, and other processes that would make vote fraud harder to prevent, even among illegal aliens. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has just announced that it will punish companies that "discriminate" by firing illegal immigrants, even though as, the Libertarian Party notes, it is against federal law to hire undocumented workers in the first place. But with Hispanics, Democrats are taking a risk, because when Latinos move out of the barrio and escape the Spanish-only ghetto of language isolation, these industrious family-values people start voting Republican in the same proportion as other Americans.
Manipulating the electorate is as old as the American republic.
Although in its earliest days New Jersey briefly extended voting
rights to women, the franchise was long limited in most states
to those who were male, free, white, 21 years of age, and owned
property. Candidate Andrew Jackson knew how to give away free
food and hard cider to entice voters while clouding their minds.
· James Madison's Vice President, Elbridge Gerry, practiced the art of shaping congressional-district boundaries to produce more congressmen of his own party. When the map shape of one such contrived district in his own state of Massachusetts resembled a salamander, it was soon called a "Gerrymander," a democracy-subverting monster that continues to beslime our politics today. In one election during the 1980s, the total difference nationwide in ballots cast for Democrats vs. Republicans for Congress was only 125,000 votes. But Democrats had so successfully rigged the vote distribution by gerrymandering districts that they came out with 41 more seats and total control of the House of Representatives.
Today such vote-rigging remains with districts shaped to favor election of racial-minority candidates to the House of Representatives, almost all of whom are Democrats. This is necessary, say supporters, to make up for slavery, Jim Crow, the Klan, Bull Connor, literacy tests, and poll taxes, all of which denied African Americans the right to vote. Supporters do not remind voters that all these slaveholders and racists who kept blacks from voting were Democrats. The present Democratic effort to introduce a ten percent "fudge factor" into Census numbers would open the door to more power-tilting racial gerrymandering. All such manipulations have the potential to neutralize the votes of some citizens while giving extra weight to the votes of others, to tilt the process against genuine democracy.
You might be thinking: "Shouldn't everybody have an equal vote, even if a felon, greedy parasite, or schizophrenic?" (Heck, just as John Stuart Mill believed that college graduates should be given two or three votes, shouldn't schizophrenics get a vote for each of their multiple personalities? Anything less would be unfair.) Ralph Nader once proposed making it a crime not to vote, as in the late Soviet Union. Democrats believe that the rapist, psychopath, and addicted street person too incompetent to support himself should be able to cancel out your vote with his own. Would such unnatural selection, with politicians pandering to these oddball voters, turn decent Americans into an endangered species?
· One secret plan that Al Gore apparently has for victory in 2000 is to go negative, throw lots of mud at his opponent, and drive down voter turnout. 1998 saw the lowest voter turnout since 1942, when millions of Americans were overseas during World War II. This is not merely people voting with their feet against the choice of parties. It is the result of deliberate tactics calculated to turn off voters, to persuade virtuous people that nobody is worthy of their vote. It used to be that Republicans benefited from bad weather, because their work-ethic voters were more likely to trudge to the polls. But today a low voter turnout favors Democrats, who vote not for the common good but for their own privileged place as a parasite sucking on a teat of the sow of big government.
Picked to command Gore's campaign is Tony Coehlo, who was forced to resign his seat in Congress under a cloud of corruption scandal. While head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, Coehlo told a group of business people that they'd better take a major interest in contributing to Democrats "or we can take a very big interest in your business," a threat to use tax and regulatory power to extort money. Also in Gore's high command is Donna Brazile, who was fired by Michael Dukakis during his presidential campaign for spreading false stories that President George Bush was an adulterer. Gore has gone out of his way to hire gutter people, so the logical expectation is that he plans to run a gutter campaign.
Gore's goal: disgust everybody, especially the decent and moral people, so that the only folks coming out to vote in 2000 are those who get a government check or special government benefit of some kind, e.g., fatcat union bosses and trial lawyers along with illegal immigrants, convicted felons, and the mentally ill-the natural constituency of the Democratic Party. All that is needed for evil to triumph in November 2000 is for good people to stay home.
Mr. Ponte hosts a national radio talk show Monday through Saturday that can be heard via TalkRadioNetwork.com. He is a former Roving Editor for Reader's Digest magazine.
