Democrats: It's OK to cheat in elections

The execrable Democratic Party in heavily blue Maryland has made this claim by passing three election related bills that encourage voter fraud and have overridden Republican Governor Bob Ehrlich's vetoes.

Together the election laws would so weaken safeguards against voter fraud as to make Maryland the nation's prime example of Election Day irresponsibility.

The gravity of the changes is causing dismay, and not just for the governor. A bipartisan state advisory commission headed by the revered George Beall, the former U.S. attorney who convicted Spiro Agnew of tax evasion, had urged legislators to sustain the Ehrlich vetoes.

The most troublesome bill undermines the concept of local polling places by allowing all voters to vote anywhere in Maryland using a provisional ballot. ...[T]he Beall commission [to] warn[s] that it would mean "a provisional ballot could be cast successfully in multiple counties and not be detected until after the votes were certified."

Another bill would allow any voter to cast an absentee ballot for any reason... Evidence also shows that absentee ballots are the most susceptible to fraud--and do not increase voter turnout.

A third bill imposes an unfunded mandate requiring all of Maryland's counties to let voters cast ballots during the five days before Election Day...

Common Cause, which supports early voting, urged legislators to delay its implementation until 2008. The warnings fell on deaf ears. "You'll always have fraud, you can forget about that," Democratic state legislator Gareth Murray told colleagues. "I'm sick and tired of hearing we're not ready." Maryland will now become the only state in the nation to allow statewide early voting on touch-screen machines that lack a verifiable paper trail.

The Democrats' dirty desire for stuffing the ballot hardly ends in Maryland:

Last September, a national commission headed by Jimmy Carter and James Baker recommended that all states require a valid photo ID to vote. Indeed, many states are now moving to boost polling safeguards. This month, Georgia's Legislature passed a revised law requiring every voter show a photo ID. Despite claims by NAACP chairman Julian Bond that a photo ID represents "an onerous poll tax," 10 House Democrats voted "aye." After all, the new Georgia law requires issuance of a free ID to anyone now lacking one.

Other legislatures are preparing to pass similar photo ID laws based on the recommendations of the Carter-Baker commission. They include Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, although Democratic governors in the last two are poised to veto them.

Democrats-the party of the people. Their people.