A Lincoln County, West Virginia Sheriff and Clerk are to plead guilty to charges of vote fraud in the 2010 Democrat primary after the pair were arrested during an election fraud investigation conducted by state and federal authorities.

Sheriff Jerry Bowman and Clerk Donald Whitten were caught in a scheme to file fraudulent absentee ballots in an effort to get Whitten elected Circuit Clerk. Whitten will also plead guilty to lying to an FBI agent hired by WV Secretary of State Natalie Tennant to investigate the false absentee ballots.

Sheriff Bowman, who is at the tail end of a second term and is term-limited from running again, conspired with Whitten and a thus far unidentified candidate for county commissioner to help Whitten win a close election with the fraudulent absentee ballot scheme.

“The Candidates further agreed that they would complete absentee ballot applications for voters,” the agreement documents said. “The Candidates also agreed that on those applications they would state certain reasons that voters were legally eligible to vote absentee, regardless of whether those reasons were true.”

In 2004 several Lincoln and Logan County officials were convicted of vote fraud in a federal vote-buying case. Convicted included Lincoln County Circuit Clerk Greg Stowers and county Assessor Jerry Weaver. Amazingly, Weaver is now running for county sheriff.

But, remember… left-wingers and Democrats say there is no vote fraud in the USA.

(Washington Post) The Obama administration on Tuesday will wade into the increasingly divisive national debate over new voting laws in several states that could depress turnout among minorities and others who helped elect the president in 2008.

A dozen states this year tightened rules requiring voters to present state-issued photo identification at the polls, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Although Democratic governors vetoed four of the measures, liberal and civil rights groups have been raising alarms about the remaining laws, calling them an “assault on democracy” and an attempt to depress minority voter turnout.

We’ve talked about this numerous times, and, I just have to wonder, is it racist to think that minorities aren’t capable of getting state issued IDs? I think it just might be. It is pretty damned simple to get a state issued ID, and not particularly expensive. Most people have them. They are needed for tons of stuff in our daily lives. Yet, Democrats think minorities, and they are mostly talking about Blacks, do not have one for one reason or another. I bet Eric Holder has an ID. In my previous job, I saw IDs all day long, from people who made lots of money to people in Section 8 housing who lived on welfare. Some of them were minorities, and they all had ID. Who doesn’t have ID? Heck, in some states even illegal aliens have state issued IDs.

With the presidential campaign heating up, Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. will deliver a speech Tuesday expressing concerns about the voter-identification laws, along with a Texas redistricting plan before the Supreme Court that fails to take into account the state’s burgeoning Hispanic population, he said in an interview Monday.

“We are a better nation now than we were because more people are involved in the electoral process,’’ Holder said in the interview. “The beauty of this nation, the strength of this nation, is its diversity, and when we try to exclude people from being involved in the process .?.?. we weaken the fabric of this country.’’

First, some people are too uniformed to vote, as witnessed by thinking “hope and change” is a political platform. But, we can’t exclude people, even if they are idiots. Second, can the AG point to anyone being excluded because they do not have ID who could legally vote otherwise? No? Damn.

When it comes to voting fraud, some conservatives have long argued that it is a serious problem, although others say the number of such cases is relatively low. Studies of the issue have reached different conclusions on the extent of the problem.

“You constantly hear about voter fraud .?.?. but you don’t see huge amounts of vote fraud out there,’’ Holder said.

So, the AG of the USA has no problem with some violations of federal law? Is anyone surprised?

Democrats freaked after the 2000 and 2004 elections, claiming massive voter fraud which put Bush in the White House and saw his re-election. They latched on to many things, but one thing that stops some fraud is the requirement for ID. They do not want their people who vote multiple times to have to prove they are who they are. Furthermore, they are having a conniption fit over reduced early voting. Last time I checked, the Constitution gave Congress the duty to choose a voting day, and by law they made it the 1st Tuesday in November following the 1st Monday in November. That’s why it is called “Election Day” not election weeks.

Anyhow, Democrats talk a good game about doing all that can be done to reduce election fraud, but, when push comes to shove, they know it is a necessity in order to get Democrats elected, as Powerline points out in wondering if the Obama admin. is coordinating with left wing groups on this issue.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach.

News has emerged that a Michigan public school illegally used its automatic phone calling system to call the homes of every student to urge parents to join the recall effort against Republican Governor Rick Snyder last month. To imagine that they can illegally use public school facilities for a partisan, left-wing political effort, this is the arrogance of left-wingers in our mis-educational system writ large.

It is certainly illegal for a school to put it’s telephone alert system for partisan political use, but that is what happened nonetheless. Here is what the message said:

This is a message from the Lawrence Public Schools (inaudible) alert system. This is an informational item and not directly associated with the school. Concerned parents interested in cuts to education . . . we’re here to inform you that there is information about the problem. Also, be advised that there is a petition to recall Governor Snyder. If you want, stop by Chuck Moden’s house right by the school June 7th/8th between 3:30 and 4:00 pm. Thank you. Goodbye.

(To hear a recording of the message, click here.)

The school robocall system is supposed to be used to alert students and parents to school closings due to weather and other school business but not to push partisan political efforts.

Lawrence Public Schools Superintendent John Overley told Michgan Capitol Confidential that it wouldn’t happen again. But it shouldn’t have happened at all. According to Robert LaBrant , senior vice president of political affairs and general counsel for the Michigan Chamber of Commerce, the action by the district violates, “Section 57 of the Michigan Campaign Finance Act.”

LaBrant imagines that any finding of a violation would bring a fine to said persons of up to $20,000.

But all that aside, it is the arrogance of these leftist union hacks to imagine that they have the right to use the tools given them for the education of our kids for partisan political attacks on those they don’t like. It is an outrageous misuse of resources that all citizens, left-wing and conservative, pay for.

Left-wingers, however, feel that government is theirs and theirs alone and they see nothing wrong with violating laws as long as their agenda is furthered. This is yet another example of why government employees should not be allowed to unionize.

Obviously, the health and welfare of the union was more important to this school than the integrity of their education.

Noticed an uptick in lefty comments on your favorite conservative blogs? Do they all have the same ‘flavor’? The same gist? Are there suddenly more Eeyores seeking to convince you that all is lost?

Take notes. Copy/paste your best examples here.

Barack Obama’s Executive Order that requires federal contractors to disclose the political contributions they have made is garnering bi-partisan opposition on the Hill this month.

The order would force contractors to reveal any political donations as a condition for being allowed to bid on a contract to work for the federal government. And the order doesn’t only require the company to disclose donations but would also force the directors or company officers to reveal their personal donations as well. Naturally, this same requirement is not forced on unions. (You can see a draft of Obama’s order HERE)

This forced disclosure, however, is not sitting well with either Democrats or Republicans.

Last week 21 Republican House members sent a letter to Obama denouncing this anti-free speech order.

In a letter sent to Obama on Friday, 21 Republicans, including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), called the proposed executive order “a blatant attempt to intimidate, and potentially silence, certain speakers who are engaged in their constitutionally protected right to free speech.”

This week, top House Democrat Steny Hoyer joined the chorus against Obama’s executive order.

“The issue of contracting ought to be on the merits of the contractor’s application and bid and capabilities,” Hoyer told reporters at the Capitol. “There are some serious questions as to what implications there are if somehow we consider political contributions in the context of awarding contracts.”

He added, “I’m not in agreement with the administration on that issue.”

Of course, the main problem with this thing is that it wouldn’t take a big stretch of the imagination to assume that Obama would find any contractor that has donated to Republicans to be the sort of contractor that he would not want to hire for federal work. And even if that were not the case, this order might stifle companies preventing them from even applying for federal contracts because they might be afraid that their campaign donations could bring them undue notice based on politics instead of on the company’s track record and success rate at completing contracts.

Further, it simply is no business of the government what political campaigns these companies donate to. There is a little thing called political free speech in this country and we must never be required to go hat-in-hand to government and explain who we support politically before we are allowed to get work.

The DISCLOSE Act that this EO is based on has failed repeatedly in Congress and that is why Obama is lawlessly taking matters into his own hands and trying to implement the rules by presidential fiat.

Even the Federal Election Commission (FEC) is resisting this policy. And that was after the Supreme Court ruled that it was un-constitutional in the first place.

So, Obama is trying to move forward to introduce a policy that has Democrats AND Republicans against it, that has the FEC AND the U.S. Supreme Court against it, yet in the face of all this opposition, he insists on going forward. This is just one more example of how this president wants to rule by fiat and shows that he is certainly contemptuous of nearly every other branch of government.

The left-wing website Talking Points Memo (known as TPM) is worried that the Tea Party-backed True The Vote effort in Harris County, Texas — home of the City of Houston — is going to successfully enlist Texans to join an effort to “true the vote” by battling vote fraud. Because of this fear, TPM has been trying to undermine the event with several left-slanted blog posts.

TPMs latest posting is artful for its vague accusations and spin, but it is short on any actual proof of the nefarious goals that the left-wing site is trying to ascribe to the True The Vote National Summit, coming up on March 25 and 26. Read closely TPM’s post also has the odd effect of coming to the support of vote fraud by seeming to discount the True The Vote event. Sadly, this dismissive attitude is of a piece with the left’s desire to shy people from paying attention to the massive vote fraud that they, themselves have been involved in for decades.

Typical of left-wing alarmism, TPM’s rhetoric casts suspicion on everything that True The Vote is trying to do, but never makes any actual accusations. For instance, of the addition of John Fund, Andrew Breitbart, and Hans von Spakovsky to the event program, TPM calls them “three of the biggest voter fraud alarmists in the country.” I guess from this we can assume that TPM doesn’t care about voter fraud because it is merely alarmism?

Further down in the piece, TPM discusses the vote fraud that the Obama-supported and later criminal organization ACORN was involved in. And like much of the rhetoric the left uses, TPM contradicts itself in just a few short lines.

First, TPM says this:

ACORN had been accused by conservatives of engaging in voter fraud.

Notice how TPM puts the onus on the conservatives and not ACORN. It is just conservatives “accusing” ACORN of vote fraud in TPM’s formulation. Notice how TPM uses its rhetoric to minimize the vote fraud as but the conservative’s “accusations.” Yet the very next sentence is this one:

Several employees of ACORN were prosecuted for defrauding the organization by submitting fraudulent voter registration forms, but those typically don’t lead to actual votes.

Notice that TPM tries to make the convictions for vote fraud seem less than it is. TPM said, “Several employees of ACORN were prosecuted…” Notice that TPM does not inform its readers that they were also convicted? Also notice that TPM tries to minimize the number of convictions to a meaningless handful by saying only “several” were “prosecuted.” The truth is, it has been far more than just “several.”

Additionally, if there were actual convictions for vote fraud, then it wasn’t merely conservative “accusations,” now was it? It isn’t a simple matter of partisan, right-wing accusation at all. It is FACT. There WAS voter fraud. And a lot of it.

In 1986 12 ACORN members were convicted of vote fraud in Missouri. In 2004, six more were convicted of it in St. Louis. In 2007 eight ACORN employees were convicted for vote fraud in The Show Me State. And these are just a few of the conviction just in Missouri alone. Over the last three decades or so, dozens and dozens of ACORN members and workers in affiliated organizations have been convicted of voter fraud.

It has hardly been only “several” ACORN members convicted of vote fraud.

Also all this poopooing of voter fraud tends to cause the reader to wonder if TPM is really in support of voter fraud? After all, that is the corresponding assumption when someone dismisses something. The impression is left that what is being dismissed is unimportant or not worth doing anything about. And TPM is dismissing vote fraud.

Naturally, the reason leftists like those at TPM dismiss voter fraud is because it is nearly exclusively a practice of the Democrat Party and has been for generations. Vote fraud is de rigueur for Democrats. No wonder TPM dismisses it. Vote fraud benefits their ideology!

And what exactly is so alarming or wrong with trying to make sure that the integrity of the vote is assured? Why should anyone be against making sure that our elections are “true”?

The left’s dismissing of this whole effort is telling, for sure.

Now, if you are in or near Houston, Texas and would like to attend the True The Vote National Summit visit the event info page now.

Just prior to the election we discovered that in the state of Nevada the former chief of the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now’s (ACORN) affiliated Project Vote organization was under indictment for voter fraud. This week we learn that Amy Busefink has copped a plea deal on charges of illegally paying “bonus” payments to workers registering voters during the 2008 election.

Busefink entered a plea on two gross misdemeanor counts of conspiracy to commit the crime of compensating people for registering voters and faced 13 felony counts for the same. The fact that Busefink accepted this plea deal means that she as much as admitted that the state had the evidence to convict her.

Busefink will soon be sentenced.

Judge Donald Mosley is scheduled to sentence Busefink on Jan. 10. She probably will receive a $1,000 fine and up to 200 hours of community service, Stolworthy said. She faces a maximum of up to two years in jail and a $4,000 fine, according to Edie Cartwright, a spokeswoman for the state attorney general.

Naturally ACORN is pointing fingers at everyone else claiming that shadowy conservative groups are out to get Busefink. ACORN is also claiming that the charges against Busefink were specious. One wonders why the plea deal was so readily accepted if the charges were so absurd, of course.

This whole situation is just one more ice crystal in an avalanche of evidence tying ACORN to vote fraud and other illegal activities. It’s no wonder that ACORN has developed such a bad reputation. It’s also no wonder that skittish Congressmen have cut off federal funding for ACORN.

But that funding has not been permanently cut off. It can be restored at any time the Democrats get enough support to do so. On top of that ACORN is currently attempting to reinvent itself under a series of other names in order to escape its creditors.

ACORN has other troubles, too. Government auditors want ACORN to repay $3.2 million in federal funds meant to have been used for lead removal services that seem never to have been performed.

The federal funds were paid out to ACORN in 2004 and 2005 and were to be used to remove lead in low-income housing but federal investigators say that the money went to several ACORN affiliates and were used for political campaigns and fundraising instead of the congressionally approved purpose.

It should shock no one that ACORN claims that the government is out to get them and that all charges are false. Imagine that.

Marc Theissen recently asked some very important questions about where the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) is getting the mountains of cash that it spends on Democrat political campaigns. He finds that it is coming from foreign sources, but the SEIU is refusing to yield to requests for transparency.

If the SEIU is getting the millions of dollars it is spending on Democrats from foreign sources, this should put a major dent in the alarmist claims that Obama has been making about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce supposedly getting its money from outside the country — a charge that was resoundingly refuted. After all, if one of Obama’s biggest left-wing campaign supporters is suffused with foreign cash, why should it be such a big deal if anyone else is?

Sadly, the Old Media will never play up this aspect of Obama’s hypocrisy, but that is another subject.

In any case, Theissen asked the SEIU where its political cash was coming from because federal financial reporting records seemed to prove that it could not have been coming solely from the dues of American union members. Since the SEIU has thousands of members in foreign nations, Theissen wondered how that factored in.

Initially the SEIU lied to him and claimed that “most” of its political cash came from domestic dues payers. But Theissen persisted with his doubts. It wasn’t long before the SEIU admitted that they were lying previously.

“Most” of the money the SEIU uses for “political purposes” does not come from [the union's Committee on Political Education] COPE (to which you must be a U.S. citizen or permanent legal resident to contribute). “Most” of the SEIU’s political spending, he now admits, comes from other accounts.

Theissen still has more questions, ones that the SEIU is still stonewalling.

And who funds those other accounts? “Our own members,” Youngdahl writes. Well, the SEIU’s members include foreign workers and — as an SEIU executive boasts in this video — illegal immigrants. Youngdahl has twice failed to answer my question, so I will ask it a third time: Do the SEIU’s foreign workers and illegal immigrant members (who are by definition foreign nationals) contribute any money to the accounts that the union uses for “political purposes”?

It seems pretty clear that the SEIU is using the dues from illegals and foreign workers for its domestic political operations and that those funds are directed solely toward Obama and his Democrats.

Hypocrites extraordinaire.

Some voters in Boulder City [Nevada] complained on Monday that their ballot had been cast before they went to the polls, raising questions about Clark County’s electronic voting machines.

Voter Joyce Ferrara said when they went to vote for Republican Sharron Angle, her Democratic opponent, Sen. Harry Reid’s name was already checked.

Ferrara said she wasn’t alone in her voting experience. She said her husband and several others voting at the same time all had the same thing happen.

“Something’s not right,” Ferrara said. “One person that’s a fluke. Two, that’s strange. But several within a five minute period of time — that’s wrong.”

How’s this for wrong:

A Craven County [North Carolina] voter says he had a near miss at the polls on Thursday when an electronic voting machine completed his straight-party ticket for the opposite of what he intended.

Sam Laughinghouse of New Bern said he pushed the button to vote Republican in all races, but the voting machine screen displayed a ballot with all Democrats checked. He cleared the screen and tried again with the same result, he said. Then he asked for and received help from election staff.

“They pushed it twice and the same thing happened,” Laughinghouse said. “That was four times in a row. The fifth time they pushed it and the Republicans came up and I voted.”

It’s not enough to beat Democrats. You have to beat them by the margin of fraud, which gets increasingly wide the more brazen the party becomes in its corruption. Democrats are the party of taking by force and trickery what others have earned. That applies not only to money but to votes.

On tips from nancz and Anonymous. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

There are always concerns about voter fraud on Election Day, but this year many new groups are popping up to keep an eye on the polls. That, in turn, has some people worried that legitimate voters will be intimidated and discouraged from voting.

Along with all the other campaign ads they will hear this week, voters in Minnesota’s Twin Cities are being treated to a provocative radio ad.

Listen to the ad. Do you find it “provocative”? Well, I suppose if you are a Democrat, and looking to win at all costs, it might be.

The ad warns that the group is training thousands of citizens to set up surveillance teams outside polling places to look for voter fraud. It’s even offering a $500 reward for information leading to convictions.

Apparently, that’s mean.

“We’re just the people concerned about the integrity in our election process,” says Dan McGrath, executive director of Minnesota Majority, a conservative watchdog group that alleges that past elections in the state have been marred by fraudulent votes. “We go to vote. We want to know that our vote counts, fairly, and that someone else’s ineligible vote isn’t diluting it.”

Oh, I get it, it’s because they are Conservative groups. And there are many, many more cited. You know what that means, right?

Chad Dunn, general counsel for the Texas Democratic Party, says the most aggressive poll watching in early voting has been at African-American and Latino precincts, which lean Democratic.

Our old buddy raaaaacism.

The county attorney’s office and the U.S. Justice Department are now investigating, though no charges have been filed. Still, tensions are high, and the county attorney is recommending that election officials put tape on the floor to separate poll watchers and voters.

Expect to hear lots of calls of “stealing the election,” Republican dirty tricks, and election fraud from Democrats starting early on the 2nd, and reaching a fever pitch as the election precincts start reporting how bad the Democrat losses are on November 2nd, with the Usual Suspects going Force 10 Moonbat when they have woken up from a drunken stupor on the 3rd.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove. Follow me on Twitter @WilliamTeach. Re-Change 2010!