Posted 8/17/2012
Washington, DC – In a just-released paper analyzing election fraud across the nation, National Center for Public Policy Research Adjunct Fellow Horace Cooper concludes that the Justice Department is failing to use the tools at its disposal to combat election fraud.
“The problem is systemic – it is not isolated and it should be aggressively pursued by the Department of Justice,” Cooper argues in “Voter Fraud is Real: Why the Voting Rights Act Should Be Used to Fight Election Fraud,” his latest National Policy Analysis paper on voter fraud.
“Florida election officials have discovered that the state’s voter polls have 53,000 dead voters still registered to vote. That’s a whole city of dead voters still ‘eligible’ to vote – more than the entire population of Pensacola,” said Cooper.
“Why isn’t the Voting Rights division proactively going to Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and other hotbeds of election fraud?” asks Cooper. “You better believe if men in white hoods were to announce that they were going to be poll watchers on election day, it would be there.”
“We’ve identified some of the most frequent and high profile locations where election intimidation and fraud schemes happen over and over,” Cooper explains.
“Instead of sending out election observers and threatening the jurisdictions with Court orders they sit silently by. Tragically the DOJ is spending most of its time trying to stop a key solution that local and state communities need – requiring voter ID.”
Cooper, a legal commentator who taught constitutional law at George Mason University, is the author of a series of National Policy Analysis papers on election fraud published by the National Center this year.
“The DOJ treats the Voting Rights Act as a relic. Voter suppression and related contrivances that steal elections occur today in many forms and when they happen they are just as illegal now as they were during the Jim Crow era. DOJ should deploy attorneys and election observers to hotbeds of illicit electioneering regardless of whether the voters affected are black or white,” Cooper declares.
Cooper notes, “The Voting Rights Act empowers the U.S. Department of Justice to combat disenfranchisement and vote suppression, and that authority should be used today to fight election fraud, particularly in places like Chicago and Philadelphia, where the citizens have long-suffered the fraudsters’ crooked schemes.”
Cooper concluded, “Today, election fraudsters share the same goal as those who denied black Americans their political voice in the early 20th century – to substitute their own preferred candidates and policy initiatives for those of the electorate.”
Horace Cooper is an adjunct fellow with the National Center for Public Policy Research, a founding member of the African-American leadership group Project 21 and a legal commentator. He was a senior counsel to U.S. House Majority Leader Dick Armey.
Contact: Judy Kent at (703) 759-7476 or jkent@nationalcenter.org Devon Carlin at (202) 543-4110 x12 or dcarlin@nationalcenter.org
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