Could this court order restore voting rights of dead Ohio voters?

Last decade, George Soros worked on electing leftists to secretary of state positions in order to weaken election integrity in individual states. Now the court system, if left unchecked by Congress, will fulfill his dream even in Republican-controlled states by delivering every close election to Democrats.

Earlier this month, the courts blocked states from verifying the citizenship status of individuals registering to vote. Courts around the country have mandated that states provide for specific days of early voting, out-of-precinct voting, same-day registration, pre-registration of minors, and straight ticket ballots — all the while barring states from requiring a photo ID to vote.

Much like in North Carolina, the legal profession, which is full of radical legal defense funds and leftist lower court judges, has attacked almost every common sense election law in Ohio. Adding to the growing list of Soros victories, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday prevented Ohio from enforcing its policy of cleaning voter rolls of deceased, ineligible, or out-of-state voters through a process that has been in place for two decades.

Before discussing this most recent decision, it is important to understand the relevant federal statutes. In 1993, President Clinton signed The National Voter Registration Act of 1993 into law. That legislation placed numerous mandates on states to molly-coddle more people into voting. Section five in particular, otherwise known as the “Motor-Voter” section, was a needless incursion into what was supposed to be the exclusive authority of states, pursuant to Art. I Sec. 4 of the Constitution, except in “extraordinary circumstances,” according to Alexander Hamilton. However, to balance the mandates of expanding voter rolls with anti-fraud measures, section eight of the law gave states the opportunity to clean its voter rolls through a process of its choice. The only limitation to this power is that states could not purge registrants from the voter registration list solely because of the failure to vote and must notify the individual of their potential change in status before rendering them inactive.

Ohio’s system that was “struck down” by the Sixth Circuit was a straightforward and common sense method well within the authority of a sovereign state. The state would use databases to match up names that have not updated their registration or voted for the last two years. At that point, the state would send an address-confirmation notice to that address requesting the voter to verify that their status hasn’t changed (or that they are still alive!). If the voter failed to vote in any election for four consecutive years after the issuance of the notice, then — and only then — would the board of elections remove their name from the rolls.  If they finally woke up from oblivion years later, they could always re-register to vote.   

This is certainly a balanced and effective system to preserve the state and federal interest in ensuring that legitimate voters aren’t disenfranchised by voter fraud. Under this system, Secretary of State Jon Husted removed 465,000 dead voters and 1.3 million duplicate registrations from the voter lists.  In the unlikely event that a legitimate voter would have been removed under this process, there would have been widespread complaints to the Secretary of State’s office. However, George Soros is lucky to have the ACLU and a number of legal agitation groups who will dredge up straw-men plaintiffs to shoot at state laws in court, even when there is no legitimate problem. And whereas our side must win at every level to preserve voter integrity practices, they only need to win at one level to succeed. And there are more than enough liberal judges to succeed.

In this case, the district judge, George C. Smith, properly read the statute and upheld the common sense state procedure to “ensure the integrity of the election process.” But on Friday, in a 2-1 decision, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision and remanded the case back to the district court. The opinion was written by Judge Eric Clay, a Clinton appointee, but was joined by Judge Julia Gibbons, a George W. Bush appointee. This decision will essentially place thousands of ineligible voters back on the registration lists for an election in which Ohio will likely determine the national outcome.    

The state of Ohio has done nothing to clearly violate the language of the statute, and unless their practice manifestly violates the letter of the law, which the majority opinion clearly indicates it does not, deference must be given to the state — pursuant to Art. I Sec. 4 of the Constitution. And in fact, section eight of the law requires states to “make a reasonable effort to remove the names of ineligible voters from the official lists of eligible voters” [52 U.S.C. § 20507(a)(4)(B)].

Contaminated voters rolls poses an existential threat to the integrity of elections, yet, according to the Public Interest Legal Foundation, as of last year there were 141 counties with more registered voters than people of voting age that are alive! “Voter rolls across the nation are badly corrupted with aliens and ineligible voters. This decision will.make that worse," said J. Christian Adams President of the Public Interest Legal Foundation.

Republicans have a very narrow path to winning any national election and many of the critical swing states could be decided by a margin of less than 10,000 votes. When our Founders gave Congress a veto power over state election laws, they did so only to ensure that states would not abolish the federal government by not conducting elections for federal office. The federal judiciary was given no such role.

By misinterpreting congressional statutes to prevent states from fighting voter fraud, the courts are essentially abolishing free and fair elections, the underpinnings of our federal representative democracy.