Dead Voters, RIP

Liberals love to laugh off voter fraud.

Its "a made up problem invented by GOP operatives," Robert Koehier, a self-termed "peace journalist," snickered in the Jan 5 Huffington Post. Regarding ballot hijinks, Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz chuckled: "There is almost none."

But recent news is not so funny. One probe caught on tape shows how easily anybody can vote on behalf of dead Americans. Elsewhere, the total ballots cast by the dead exceeded the winning margins in several high-profile elections. These cases confirm the urgent need for all voters to prove they are alive and to correctly identify themselves via photo ID - just as Americans do on non-election days.

James O'Keefe, the conservative video journalist whose hidden-camera sting operation doomed the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), struck again during the New Hampshire primary. O'Keefe's organization, Project Veritas, dispatched three videographers to the Granite State. On Jan 10, they visited precincts in Manchester and Nashua and asked poll workers, one by one, if their voter rolls bore the names of several deceased people. The poll workers handed out 10 ballots, never once asking for a photo ID.

"Live free or die," a poll worker reassured one investigator she thought was Reynold Caron, who died on October 14, 2011. "This is New Hampshire, No ID needed."

O'Keefe's team members never cast these ballots. They returned them, unmarked, to precinct workers. New Hampshire Democrats seem unconcerned that their voter rolls contain the names of dead people and, absent ID rules, fraudsters conveniently could vote the ballots of the expired. Instead Democrats want to indict these whistleblowers.

"They should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, if in fact they're found guilty of some criminal act," Democratic Governor John Lynch to WMUR-TV in Manchester.

Republicans, however, consider this deadly serious. Following Project Veritas' revelations, Granite State legislators recently began debating two photo ID bills. The easiest way to disenfranchise the dead is to require every voter to show photo ID. Those who lack identification should get it for free and reasonable accomodations can be made for the infirm.

Let's not hear liberals' scratched record about how mandating a photo ID for voters is step one on the road to lynching. If true, then demanding a photo ID at America's airports would make the TSA equivalent to the KKK. Liberals' oft-cited claim that blacks are too befuddled to possess or aquire photo ID is pure racial profiling. Just how lame do they think black Americans are?

ID cards would help cleanse America's increasingly soiled voting system. Photo ID's would allow people to rest in peace rather than rush to the polls every Election Day.