Tuesday, March 24, 2009 , 12:02 a.m. Going soft on voter fraud


In 2004, The Associated Press looked into irregularities in voter registration rolls in Missouri. What it found was alarming.

Many counties had more people on the rolls than their entire voting age population. The worst case was Reynolds County. There, the number of people registered was 151 percent of the actual number of people in the county who were of voting age.

Whether through fraud or a careless failure to purge the rolls of residents who had moved away or died, it’s obvious that many people who ought not to have been permitted to vote in Missouri remained eligible to do so. That diluted the votes of legal voters. So the U.S. Justice Department filed a lawsuit accusing Missouri of violating a federal law requiring that states get ineligible people off the voter rolls.

Unfortunately, the Justice Department under President Barack Obama does not seem very concerned about voter fraud. The department plans to have the lawsuit dismissed. According to the AP, Justice Department lawyers think the evidence “might not reflect the current situation in Missouri.â€