Voter Fraud: Impinging on Your Rights

I am reading a LOT these days about voter fraud in the upcoming presidential election. And in most cases, the liberal organization ACORN seems to be at the center. Hot Air has a great roundup, with lots of links:

Investors Business Daily asks what Barack Obama knows about the epidemic of voter fraud in ACORN, and it’s not an unfair question. Not only has Obama publicly endorsed ACORN, he has paid them at least $800,000 for their services, an amount that he didn’t immediately disclose until pressed. ACORN has responded in kind, with their voter-registration efforts that have resulted in criminal investigations in more than a dozen states.

(You did catch the Obama ties in that paragraph, right? Lots more at the link.)

In Nevada, ACORN workers submitted false registrations in the name of the entire Dallas Cowboys starting lineup--at least those are easy to catch! Here's more info on problems in Nevada:

[ACORN's] office was raided Tuesday morning by agents of the Nevada Secretary of State and Attorney General who alleged in an application for a search warrant that ACORN had hired 59 felons through a work release program as canvassers and submitted nearly 300 apparently fraudulent voter registration cards as part of the drive.

The submitted voter cards included addresses and names that do not exist in Nevada, duplicate registrations, names culled from telephone books and names of Dallas Cowboys players, an investigator for the Secretary of State alleged in his affidavit for a search warrant.

It's hard to tell whether anyone is voting under false pretenses, since many states don't require ID at the polls. It's hard to prove after the fact. But I did run across an article about recent elections in Texas, where dead people apparently voted.

Why does it matter? Granted, every bogus registration doesn't translate into a bogus vote. But thousands of bad forms to comb through do tax local elections boards and reduce the manpower available to find other serious problems. And some bogus votes probably do get cast. In a post on the fact that Indianapolis has apparently registered 105% of its adult residents, Lawhawk summarizes (via Instapundit, who has more links):

The New York Times and Washington Post forgets that every bogus vote cast or indicated means that your legitimate vote gets offset by someone who is voting illegally. Your right to vote is harmed by these illegal and bogus votes. That's the crime committed here...

This is a serious issue of trust in our election system. Granted, in most cases, the presidential vote in a given state isn't close enough to be swayed by a few thousand illegal votes. But if I recall correctly, Florida in 2000 had a margin of something like 500 or 600 votes, and that state decided the election. Plus, the state and local races often have much closer margins, and those are important too.