Fresh Eyes: Climate change is fake, voter fraud is real

by Brad Krantz

That headline got your attention, didn’t it?  Full disclosure:  I’ve been a registered Democrat my entire voting life, going back to 1973. As a result, everywhere I go Republicans are telling me that I am “in favor of voter fraud” because I oppose the near-instant, weed-like growth of voter-ID laws in practically every Republican-controlled state house across the country. You and I can laugh off the coincidental enactment of these laws that are an obvious improvement to the democratic experiment known as America all we want. But in our Democratic hearts, we know the only way we’ve been able to ever win has been through well-planned out, massive, systematic fraud… election after election. I must look in the mirror now and acknowledge the hard truth. I love voter fraud and need your help. 

How dare I ascribe any nefarious motives behind the near-instantaneous enactment of these laws in the wake of the election of the first president who doesn’t look like the other ones on our currency? How dare I even THINK it has anything to do with driving down future voter turnout on the margins of the most traditionally Democratic voters — minorities, college students, poorer, older people? I should celebrate the predictably low 15.71 percent turnout of eligible voters in last week’s NC primaries, possibly even lamenting the turnout was too high! News & Record resident genius Charles Davenport leads the way for me in a Sunday column titled “Voter suppression could weed out the ignorant.” As a strict constructionist of the US Constitution, I may have missed the part about IQ or general civic intelligence and engagement being a requirement to vote. But maybe we can get really lucky and go back to the days when states, like this one, weeded out the not-sufficiently smart and educated in cute ways like literacy tests. Davenport, writing that “the ignorant among us… should not be allowed within 100 yards of a polling place. In fact, their votes should be actively suppressed, and until they are, the fewer votes cast, the better,” describes exactly the kind of Educational Elite we need more of.

These well-intentioned laws across America reassure me that future elections will be dripping with integrity compared with the crooked, fixed contests of the past, preventing the persistent in-person voter-ID fraud I have refused to admit has always been there. I have no need or desire to see the communication between lawmakers in North Carolina leading up to passage of our law to know that their aim was true; that their intentions and motives were as pure and clean as the pre-coal ash-laden Dan River.

Several states have already seen their similarly-fashioned voter-ID laws tampered with by out-of-control, legislate-from-the-bench liberal judges. It’s happened in Arkansas, Pennsylvania and, most recently, Wisconsin, where federal Judge Lynn Adelman arrogantly claimed that voter impersonation is a “fake problem that doesn’t need a solution.” Adelman, a former Democratic politician appointed to the bench by Bill Clinton, further states that, “To commit voter-impersonation fraud, a person would need to know the name of another person who is registered at a particular polling place, know the address of that person, know that the person has not yet voted, and also know that no one at the polls will realize that the impersonator is not the individual being impersonated…. Given that a person would have to be insane to commit voter-impersonation fraud, [the law] cannot be deemed a reasonable response to a potential problem.”

I don’t know if Judge Adelman is right about that, but as a Voter-ID Election-Fraud Truther, I invite you Republicans and Undecideds to send me all of the pertinent information on your voting behavior so I don’t get caught impersonating you. Your name, your address, what time of the day you planned to vote (so I can get there before you)… and most definitely let me know if I need to early vote in your place instead of waiting until Election Day. In exchange for that information I have some free pizza coupons for you. This offer is good in 2014 only, unless some crazy judge here or the Feds knock out NC’s law before 2016. Meanwhile, feel free to lose sleep worrying there are lots of people like me out there distorting the will of the people while I prepare my next column to be called, “The joys of gerrymandering.”

Brad Krantz is co-host of “The Brad and Britt Show” on WBT, 1110 AM.