Tuesday, January 31, 2017

Why the Obama administration didn’t protect this whistleblower

Why the Obama administration didn’t protect this whistleblower

Stefani Butler
Meet Stefani Butler.
She has been my inside source at the Census Bureau. Butler is the whistleblower who approached me more than three years ago about wrongdoing that was occurring on government surveys, including the one that forms the basis for the monthly unemployment report.
Butler says she came to me after the Census Bureau wouldn’t do anything to stop data falsification. She chose me because I’d already written about odd stuff going during the 2010 decennial census.
Together, Butler and I have gotten the House Oversight Committee to recommend a lot of changes and reforms in Census Bureau procedures. And we think we’ve made it harder for people at the bureau to cheat. And, I have to modestly say, we’ve probably made economic, crime and health surveys more reliable.
At the very least, we know that some of the people responsible won’t be doing any more cheating since several Census Bureau higher-ups decided that early retirement was in their best interest once we started to investigate.
As part of our agreement, I kept Butler’s identity secret — although others weren’t as careful.
She was instrumental in a congressional investigation, but staffers disclosed her name in a report about Julius Buckmon, a person who reported to Butler and who she caught falsifying data on enough surveys to affect the national jobless rate.
Congress said her name was revealed to shield her from reprisals — but if that was the plan, it didn’t work.
Even though the head of Census assured Congress that Butler would be protected, she was punished. “They basically said, ‘Why don’t you quit? We are just going to find a way to fire you anyway. But we know you’ll probably sue us,’ ” Butler said.
But rather than fire her, Census decided on more- clever actions. It tried to reassign the Washington, DC-area resident to inconvenient places — once to Ohio to do surveys on a Native American reservation.
There were also hang-up phone calls, she says, and warnings from bosses. Democrats even tried to strong-arm her as she waited to talk with a congressional committee.
And lawyers for the Commerce Department, which oversees Census, pulled her out into the hallway right before the hearing and tried to coach her about what to say.
“Basically, they tried to intimidate me,” she said.
Butler is still technically employed by Census but she hasn’t worked or been paid by the bureau in more than two years. She’s currently negotiating a settlement for her whistleblower complaint.
I just wish whatever settlement there is would come out of the pockets of the culprits rather than taxpayers.
Data falsification is no small matter. This past presidential election turned on how people felt about the economy versus what we were being told was happening by Census data-gatherers. And policies are made in Congress, at the Federal Reserve and in corporate boardrooms based on what leaders are being led to believe.
Despite my urging, Butler said she was reluctant to have her name published while former President Obama was still in office because she didn’t trust his Census Bureau director.
Butler has worked at the Census Bureau since 1998. She says cheating has always occurred but it “was the most blatant under Obama. It was more subtle before that.”
I already wrote about Census Bureau laptops loaded with data that went missing before the 2012 presidential election. The bureau never explained that or looked into it.
The importance of the Census Bureau shouldn’t surprise anyone. When Obama took office in 2009, one of his first moves was to try and get the bureau to report to him and not Congress. He failed.
But at the time, with the big 2020 census coming up that would determine how much representation states would have in the House and how much tax money they get from Washington, the logic of that power play was clear.
Let’s look at the one case that set Butler off — the cheating done by Buckmon, who is now deceased.
Buckmon would complete more than 100 cases in 10 days — more than three times his peers.
It turns out that Buckmon wasn’t actually surveying people. He was making up data and collecting overtime to account for the time it would have taken to get those interviews.
And this one man alone was cheating on such a large scale that it could affect the national jobless numbers since the bureau’s Current Population Survey is scientifically weighted and each response counts as 5,000 households.
So Buckmon’s 100 cases equaled 500,000 households — and he wasn’t the only one caught faking data, Butler said.
I asked Butler if she regretted turning in her superiors.
“Yes and no,” she said. “I’m kind of bothered by the fact that I couldn’t trust the Obama administration. Laws to protect whistleblowers weren’t being enforced. I didn’t even feel safe.”
And some of the main culprits still work at the Census Bureau. One has even been promoted and oversees more people and more surveys.
This is one swamp that President Trump, who has questioned US economic data, needs to wade into.
And I’m going to do my best to make sure he does.

Trump is playing with the press: Glenn Reynolds


Trump is playing with the press: Glenn Reynolds


He's gaslighting them and they fall for it every time.

Why are the relations between Donald Trump and the press so bad? There are two reasons. One is that Trump is a Republican, and the press consists overwhelmingly of Democrats. But the other reason is that Trump likes it this way, because when the press is constantly attacking him over trivialities, it strengthens his position and weakens the press. Trump’s “outrageous” statements and tweets aren’t the product of impulsiveness, but part of a carefully maintained strategy that the press is too impulsive to resist.
The first thing to understand is that one of the changes going on with Trump generally is the renegotiation of various post-World War II institutional arrangements. One of those is the institutional arrangement involving the press and the White House. For decades, the press got special status because it was seen as both powerful and institutionally responsible. (And, of course, allied with the Democrats, who were mostly in charge of setting up those postwar institutional arrangements). Press quarters inside the White House and daily press briefings made it easy for everyone to get together on the story of the day.
Now those things have changed. If the press were powerful, it would have beaten Trump. If it were responsible, it wouldn’t be running away with fake news whenever it sees a chance to run something damaging to Trump. And, of course, there’s no alliance between Trump and the media, as there was with Obama.
So things will change. The press’s “insider” status — which it cherishes — is going to fade, with Trump’s press people even talking about moving them out of the White House entirely, and ignoring their existing pecking order in press conferences. (This is producing waves of status anxiety, as are many other Trump-induced institutional changes). And, having abandoned, quite openly, any pretense of objectivity and neutrality in the election, the press is going to be treated as an enemy by the Trump administration until further notice.
In fact, Trump’s basically gaslighting them. Knowing how much they hate him, he’s constantly provoking them to go over the top. Sean Spicer’s crowd-size remarks on Saturday were all about making them seem petty and negative. (And, possibly, teeing up crowd size comparisons at this Friday’s March For Life, which the press normally ignores but which Trump will probably force them to cover).
Trump knows that the press isn’t trusted very much, and that the less it’s trusted, the less it can hurt him. So he’s prodding reporters to do things that will make them less trusted, and they’re constantly taking the bait.
They’re taking the bait because they think he’s dumb, and impulsive, and lacking self-control — but he’s the one causing them to act in ways that are dumb and impulsive, and demonstrate lack of self-control. As Richard Fernandez writes on Facebook, they think he’s dumb because they think he has lousy taste, but there are a lot of scarily competent guys out there in the world who like white and gold furniture. And, I should note, Trump has more media experience than probably 99% of the people covering him. (As Obama operative Ben Rhodes gloated with regard to selling a dishonest story on the Iran deal, the average reporter the Obama White House dealt with “is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns.” In Rhodes’ words, “they literally know nothing.”)
If you read Don Surber’s election book, Trump the Press, it becomes pretty obvious that the press hasn’t been very good at understanding Trump’s strategies, or at responding to them. So far, there’s no sign of that changing as we move from the Trump campaign to the Trump administration.
POLICING THE USA: A look at race, justice, media 
So what should the press do? It can keep responding the way it has responded so far, or it can change its approach. But the latter may require more self-discipline than it’s got.
The killer counter-move for the press isn’t to double down on anti-Trump messaging. The counter-move is to bolster its own trustworthiness by acting (and being) more neutral and sober, and by being more trustworthy. If the news media actually focused on reporting facts accurately and straightforwardly, on leaving opinion to the pundits, and on giving Trump a clearly fair shake, then Trump’s tactics wouldn’t work, and any actual dirt they found on him would do actual damage. He’s betting on the press being insufficiently mature and self-controlled to manage that. So far, his bet is paying off.
That’s too bad. If we had a better press, we’d be much better off as a nation, and Trump’s strategy of capitalizing on the press’s flaws is good for Trump, but will probably make that problem worse, if such a thing is possible. But the truth is, we don’t have a better press. And as long as the press is mindlessly partisan and bereft of self-discipline, capitalizing on that is just good politics.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds, a University of Tennessee law professor and the author of The New School: How the Information Age Will Save American Education from Itself, is a member of USA TODAY's Board of Contributors.

Even if there were zero voter fraud, wouldn’t you want to know rather than just guess?

Even if there were zero voter fraud, wouldn’t you want to know rather than just guess?

 BY JAZZ SHAW

We’ve now heard that Donald Trump will be calling for a serious investigation of voter fraud. This is a move which was met by howls of protest from liberals across the board. This frustrating conversation is once again sucking up the news cycle, with Dan Balz at the Washington Post going so far as to say that the new president is endangering democracy itself.
The reality is that Trump is the only one proposing something which has even a chance of ending this debate once and for all. His critics are saying that he’s making claims about voter fraud which are ether flat out lies or, at minimum, can’t be proved. The second part of that claim is correct. He can’t prove it. Of course, the uncomfortable (for some) truth is that the people saying there wasn’t any widespread voter fraud can’t prove that either.
The reason is one which I’ve been carping about for a long time now. When I first began to examine this subject I quickly arrived at the conclusion that we have no idea how much voter fraud there is, and in order to know why you need to know about the murder rate in New York City. Yes, the two are related. And if you think this is something I cooked up to “defend Trump” you should know I wrote that almost five years ago. Suffice it to say that if you think you know that there is either no voter fraud or there is some amount of it which you can accurately estimate, you’re fooling yourself.
With that as a starting point, here’s some of what we do actually know. In the most recent election, 1/3 of voting machines in one Michigan county recorded more votes than the actual totals. In Florida, just before the election, five people complaining about not receiving their absentee ballots discovered that somebody else had cast them for them. (And those were five people in one small area who actually took the time to go complain. Yeah… I’m sure they were the only ones, right?) In Illinois, people were found to be offering cash for votes. When somebody bothered to check in one Colorado county, the dead were found to be voting with alarming regularity. In one southern California county there were hundreds more votes cast by the dead.
I could go on, but it would quickly bore you I’m sure. But here’s the point. Those do remain isolated incidents in terms of what can actually be documented. Maybe those five absentee ballots in Florida were the only ones. Or maybe there were thousands and those were just the ones we found. Either way… wouldn’t you want to know?
Maybe those two counties in Colorado and California are the only counties in the nation where people are showing up, signing in the book under the names of dead people and voting. Or maybe there are hundreds of them in most of the more than one thousand counties across the country. I have no idea… but wouldn’t you want to know?
Maybe the voting machines are nearly flawless with only a handful of exceptions, or maybe they are spewing out mathematical fictions right and left, either through poor designs or intentional malfeasance. Isn’t that something that we really should know?
We can continue to stand here and hurl stones at each other across the fence citing nonsense factoids which prove nothing and never settle the question. Or we could have a comprehensive review, comparing the voter rolls against people known to be dead or living elsewhere. We can have a comprehensive spot check of absentee ballots and ask those voters if they actually sent them in. We can recheck the majority of voting machines the same way they did in Michigan. It’s a long, tedious process but it could most assuredly be done. I don’t know how it would turn out. Maybe there has been massive, rampant fraud which will horrify all of us. Maybe voter fraud will turn out to be isolated in a few places and not add up to much more than a hill of beans.
But at least we’d know. And seriously… wouldn’t you want to know?

Monday, January 30, 2017

Media in fact-free fall over immigration

Media in fact-free fall over immigration
Reminder: How the Clinton administration handled refugees:



On Saturday, every weekend part-timer and stringer in every news agency in America became an expert on America's immigration laws because they are journalists and they know everything.

This came after President Trump put a 90-day hold on immigrants and visitors from six war-torn nations and Iran until Homeland Security -- under new management -- can figure out how to screen visitors and immigrants from these lands.

Green card holders are not affected, although airport officials were confused at JFK on Saturday.

This is legal and with precedent.

From the New York Times editorial board:
Donald Trump’s Muslim Ban Is Cowardly and Dangerous
First, reflect on the cruelty of President Trump’s decision on Friday to indefinitely suspend the resettlement of Syrian refugees and temporarily ban people from seven predominantly Muslim nations from entering the United States. It took just hours to begin witnessing the injury and suffering this ban inflicts on families that had every reason to believe they had outrun carnage and despotism in their homelands to arrive in a singularly hopeful nation.
The editorial said "Muslim Ban" in the headline. They know better. They deliberately misled the public to discredit the man the public elected president.

The editorial said: "The order’s language makes clear that the xenophobia and Islamophobia that permeated Mr. Trump’s campaign are to stain his presidency as well. Un-American as they are, they are now American policy."

Was President Obama un-American. xenophobic and Islamophobic when he issued the same order on Iraq only in 2011?

Did the media even notice that Obama ended a 50-plus year policy of accepting Cuban refugees?

Where are the editorials in the New York Times decrying Obama's xenophobia?

USA Today did the usual journalist-as-social-justice-warrior schtick of elevating liberal advocates as experts:
Experts question legality of Trump's immigration ban on Muslim countries
This is a legal and unfortunately necessary action. These are not experts. They are liars with law degrees.

We know this is legal because President Trump is doing what his predecessor did.

Years ago, Congress gave the president the power to do this.

On November 8, voters elected the candidate who saw the threat to our security as coming from Iran -- not Cuba.

The media thinks it can now fool the public into believing this action is unAmerican.

Reince Priebus pushed back on "Meet the Press" with Chuck Todd:
"The fact of the matter is that 325,000 people from foreign countries came into the United States yesterday, and 109 people were detained for further questioning. Most of those people were moved out. We’ve got a couple dozen more that remain. I would suspect that as long as they are not awful people, they will be moved through today. If they’re folks that shouldn’t be in this country, they’re going to be detained. So we apologize for nothing here."
Trump ain't backing down.

From the Associated Press:
To build his highly touted deportation force, President Donald Trump is reviving a program that deputizes local officers to enforce federal immigration law.
The program received scant attention as Trump announced on the same day his plans to build a border wall and hire thousands more federal agents as he looks to fulfill promises from his campaign.
The program has fallen out of the favor in recent years amid complaints from critics that it promotes racial profiling.
"Racial profiling"? The 1990s called. It wants its fake issue back.

Meanwhile, as flash crowd protesters take over airport terminals, the Muslim world responds.

From Reuters:
Emirates airline has changed pilot and flight attendant rosters on flights to the United States following the sudden U.S. travel ban on seven Muslim-majority countries, but it said U.S. flights continue to operate to schedule.
The world's largest long-haul carrier, who flies daily to 11 U.S. cities, has made "the necessary adjustments to our crewing, to comply with the latest requirements," an Emirates spokeswoman told Reuters by email on Sunday.
President Donald Trump on Friday temporarily suspended the entry of people from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen. The decision caught airlines off guard, according to the International Air Transport Association.
The ban applies to pilots and flight attendants from the seven countries, even though all flight crew who are not U.S. citizens already need a special visa to enter the country.
Another Emirates spokeswoman said the impact of the ban on operations would be minimal. The airline employs over 23,000 flight attendants and about four thousand pilots from around the world, including the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
This is a temporary moratorium that inconveniences a few people.

Sort of like TSA inconveniences Americans who want to fly. The aim is the same: to thwart terrorism.

The difference is the TSA inconveniences won't end in 90 days.

Meanwhile, remember how Fake News Media covered Katrina?

@@@

Please read "Trump the Press," in which I skewer media experts who wrongly predicted Trump would lose the Republican nomination. "Trump the Press" is available as a paperback, and on Kindle.

It covers the nomination process only. The general election is covered in a sequel, "Trump the Establishment," which will be published in paperback on February 7.

http://donsurber.blogspot.com/2017/01/media-in-fact-free-fall-over-immigration.html?spref=tw&m=1

REVIEW THIS

REVIEW THIS

Kim Strassel delivers today’s good news in her Wall Street Journal column “A GOP regulatory game changer” (accessible here via Google). She introduces the Pacific Legal Foundation’s Todd Gaziano to explain the mechanics of the rarely used (and almost always unsuccessful) Congressional Review Act of 1996 to undo executive agency regulations. (The text of the Congressional Review Act is accessible here.)
As a staffer to Rep. David McIntosh at the time, Gaziano was “intimately involved” in drafting the law. According to Strassel, “No one knows the law better.” Here’s the beauty part:
The accepted wisdom in Washington is that the CRA can be used only against new regulations, those finalized in the past 60 legislative days. That gets Republicans back to June, teeing up 180 rules or so for override. Included are biggies like the Interior Department’s “streams” rule, the Labor Department’s overtime-pay rule, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s methane rule.
But what Mr. Gaziano told Republicans on Wednesday was that the CRA grants them far greater powers, including the extraordinary ability to overrule regulations even back to the start of the Obama administration. The CRA also would allow the GOP to dismantle these regulations quickly, and to ensure those rules can’t come back, even under a future Democratic president. No kidding.
How does it work? Kim alludes here to 5 U.S.C. § 801(a)(1)(A) and § 802(b)(2)(A) & (B). With a little help from Gaziano, she explicates the text:
It turns out that the first line of the CRA requires any federal agency promulgating a rule to submit a “report” on it to the House and Senate. The 60-day clock starts either when the rule is published or when Congress receives the report—whichever comes later.
“There was always intended to be consequences if agencies didn’t deliver these reports,” Mr. Gaziano tells me. “And while some Obama agencies may have been better at sending reports, others, through incompetence or spite, likely didn’t.” Bottom line: There are rules for which there are no reports. And if the Trump administration were now to submit those reports—for rules implemented long ago—Congress would be free to vote the regulations down.
Let me pause here to ask Steve Hayward to tune in:
There’s more. It turns out the CRA has a[n] expansive definition of what counts as a “rule”—and it isn’t limited to those published in the Federal Register. The CRA also applies to “guidance” that agencies issue. Think the Obama administration’s controversial guidance on transgender bathrooms in schools or on Title IX and campus sexual assault. It is highly unlikely agencies submitted reports to lawmakers on these actions.
“If they haven’t reported it to Congress, it can now be challenged,” says Paul Larkin, a senior legal research fellow at the Heritage Foundation. Mr. Larkin, also at Wednesday’s meeting, told me challenges could be leveled against any rule or guidance back to 1996, when the CRA was passed.
The best part? Once Congress overrides a rule, agencies cannot reissue it in “substantially the same form” unless specifically authorized by future legislation. The CRA can keep bad regs and guidance off the books even in future Democratic administrations—a far safer approach than if the Mr. Trump simply rescinded them.
It sounds too good to be true. Nevertheless, to quote Lyndon Johnson as he undertook the vast expansion of the edifice of the administrative state: “Let us begin.” Roll away the administrative stone!

Why Trump's probe of voter fraud is long overdue

John Fund and Hans von Spakovsky: Why Trump's probe of voter fraud is long overdue

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Trump on combating terror: We're fighting 'sneaky rats'
President Trump has announced that his administration will be launching a major investigation of voter fraud, including those who are registered in more than one state, “those who are illegal” and those voters who are dead but still registered. This followed a media firestorm in which the New York Times and others called Trump’s assertion a “lie.”  
But just last week, President Obama told a whopper at his last news conference that went almost completely unnoticed, much less criticized.
He promised he would continue to fight voter-ID laws and other measures designed to improve voting integrity. The U.S. is “the only country among advanced democracies that makes it harder to vote,” he claimed.
This is demonstrably false. All industrialized democracies — and most that are not — require voters to prove their identity before voting.
Britain was a holdout, but last month it announced that persistent examples of voter fraud will require officials to see passports or other documentation from voters in areas prone to corruption. 
The real problem in our election system is that we don’t really know to what extent President Trump’s claim is true because we have an election system that is based on the honor system. 
What we do know, despite assertions to the contrary, is that voter fraud is a problem, and both sides of the political aisle should welcome a real investigation into it -- especially since the Obama administration tried so hard for eight years to obfuscate the issue and prevent a real assessment. 
Former Justice Department attorney Christian Adams testified under oath that he attended a November 2009 meeting at which then-deputy assistant attorney general Julie Fernandes told DOJ prosecutors that the administration would not be enforcing the federal law that requires local officials to purge illegitimate names from their voter rolls.
This refusal to enforce the law came despite a 2012 study from the Pew Center on the States estimating that one out of every eight voter registrations is inaccurate, out-of-date or a duplicate. About 2.8 million people are registered in more than one state, according to the study, and 1.8 million registered voters are dead. In most places it’s easy to vote under the names of such people with little risk of detection.
The Obama administration did everything it could to avoid complying with requests from  states to verify voter registration records against federal records of legal noncitizens and illegal immigrants who have been detained by law enforcement to find noncitizens who have illegally registered and voted.   
The Justice Department has also opposed every effort by states—such as Kansas, Arizona, Alabama and Georgia—to implement laws that require individuals registering to vote to provide proof of citizenship. This despite evidence that noncitizens are indeed registering and casting ballots.
In 2015 one Kansas county began offering voter registration at naturalization ceremonies. Election officials soon discovered about a dozen new Americans who were already registered—and who had voted as noncitizens in multiple elections.
These blatant attempts to prevent states from learning if they have a real problem with illegal votes makes it impossible to learn if significant numbers of noncitizens and others are indeed voting illegally, perhaps enough to make up the margin in some close elections.
There is no question that there are dishonorable people who willing to exploit the loopholes in our honor system. 
An undercover video released in October by the citizen-journalist group Project Veritas shows a Democratic election commissioner in New York City saying, “I think there is a lot of voter fraud.”
A 2013 sting operation by official New York City investigators found they could vote in someone else’s name 97 percent of the time without detection.
A second O’Keefe video showed two Democratic operatives mulling how it would be possible to get away with voter fraud.
They were both fired.
How common is this? If only we knew. Political correctness has squelched probes of noncitizen voting, so most cases are discovered accidentally instead of through a systematic review of election records.
The danger looms large in states such as California, which provides driver’s licenses to noncitizens, including those here illegally, and which also does nothing to verify citizenship during voter registration.
In a 1996 House race, then-challenger Loretta Sanchez defeated incumbent Rep. Bob Dornan by under 1,000 votes. An investigation by a House committee found 624 invalid votes by noncitizens, nearly enough to overturn the result.
How big is this problem nationally? One district-court administrator estimated that up to 3 percent of the 30,000 people called for jury duty from voter-registration rolls over a two-year period were not U.S. citizens.
A September report  from the Public Interest Legal Foundation found more than 1,000 non-citizens who had been removed from the voter rolls in eight Virginia counties. Many of them had cast ballots in previous elections, but none was referred for possible prosecution.
There are many other examples of Justice’s dereliction of duty. In 2011, the Electoral Board in Fairfax County, Va., sent the Justice Department, under then-Attorney General Eric Holder, information about 278 noncitizens registered to vote in Fairfax County, about half of whom had cast ballots in previous elections. There’s no record of anything being done.
A 2011 study by three professors at Old Dominion University and George Mason University used extensive survey data to estimate that 6.4 percent of the nation’s noncitizens voted in 2008 and that 2.2 percent voted in 2010.
This study has been criticized by many academics who claim that voter fraud is vanishingly rare. Yet the Heritage Foundation maintains a list of more than 700 recent convictions for voter fraud.
A postelection survey conducted by Americas Majority Foundation found that 2.1 percent of noncitizens voted in the Nov. 8 election. In the battleground states of Michigan and Ohio, 2.5 percent and 2.1 percent, respectively, of noncitizens reported voting. 
The best argument for a real investigation into just how big voter fraud is stems from the refusal of the general public to believe the media’s claims it is insignificant.
The Washington Post conducted a poll last October using the Pollfish firm that found 84 percent of Republicans believe that a “meaningful amount” of voter fraud occurs in U.S. elections, along with 75 percent of independents. A majority of Democrats -- 52 percent -- also believed there was meaningful voter fraud.  When it came to types of fraud, nearly 60 percent of Republicans told Pollfish they believed illegal immigrants were voting, but so too did a third of independents and a quarter of Democrats.
One Democrat who has personal experience with voter fraud is Bruce Franks Jr., a 31-year-old Black Lives Matter activist in St. Louis, who ran for state legislature last year. Last September, he got a local judge to call a new primary election after irregularities in hundreds of absentee ballots were found. He went on to win the new election with 71 percent.
Conducting an investigation that will help resolve the size of the voter fraud problem is straightforward. The Department of Homeland Security should cooperate with states wanting to check the citizenship status of voters on their rolls.
The Justice Department should put pressure on, or sue, counties and states that refuse to clean up their rolls.
The IRS has issued 11 million Individual Taxpayer Identification Numbers, most of them to illegal immigrants so they can file taxes. Privacy rules allow the IRS to share information for some law enforcement purposes, but not in a way that results in deportations. Those rules could be tweaked to allow states to compare the names of illegal immigrants the IRS has with their voter records.
Our honor system for voting doesn’t work. We don’t know how big of a problem voter fraud really is because no systematic effort has ever been made to investigate it.  But the public doesn’t think it’s as insignificant as the media insists.
It’s time to learn more about just how many people are exploiting weaknesses that damage election integrity.
John Fund is a columnist for National Review. Follow him on Twitter @JohnFund.
Hans A. von Spakovsky is a Senior Legal Fellow at The Heritage Foundation and former Justice Department official. Along with John Fund, he is the coauthor of “Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk” and “Obama’s Enforcer: Eric Holder’s Justice Department.”