Dead Voters Discovered In California — Voter Fraud Suspected
Dead voters have been discovered in California, according to a report from a local news station in Los Angeles — where most of the dead voters happen to be registered.
The investigation, headed by investigative reporter David Goldstein of CBS2, “compared millions of voting records from the California Secretary of State’s office with death records from the Social Security Administration and found hundreds of so-called dead voters.”
CBS uncovers hundreds of dead voters in greater LA, but Voter ID laws are RACIST & TOTALLY UNNECESSARY:https://t.co/UtDakWqUCN
— Guy Benson (@guypbenson) May 24, 2016
At this point, Goldstein’s report has uncovered 265 dead voters, with 215 of them in Los Angeles County.
For instance, John Cenkner has been dead since 2003. But voting records showed that he “somehow voted from the grave” five times since then, including two years where there were presidential elections, in 2004 and 2008.
“He’s a diehard Democrat, and I was thinking that if somebody was voting under his name, he’s probably rolling in his grave if they were voting Republican,” Cenkner’s daughter, Annette Givans, told CBS2. “It just astounds me. I don’t understand how anybody can get away with that.”
Another dead voter is Julita Abutin, who cast ballots four times since she died in 2006.
While the Los Angeles County Registrar told CBS2 that they remove anywhere from 1,200 to 2,000 dead voters per month, Goldstein “checked all of the dead voters from LA County on the Registrar’s website and found 212 of the 215 were still registered and eligible to vote” in the June 7 presidential primary, less than two weeks away.
The problem with dead voters, Ellen Swensen of “True the Vote” told CBS2, is that they dilute “the voice of the lawful voter.”
“What it does is every single vote that’s cast by a dead voter actually cancels out a vote of a lawful voter cause if they voted for one candidate and you voted let’s say for another, your vote got canceled out.”
Dead Voters: A Long-Time Controversy In American Politics
The controversy over dead voters is nothing new in American politics. As the New York Times noted in a 2011 piece, the controversy over the 1960 election, where John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated the favorite, Republican Richard M. Nixon, rages on over 50 years later.
Specifically, the controversy there was over Illinois, where Kennedy barely won, in part because of alleged voter fraud in Cook County, which Kennedy won by a surprisingly large margin, but where there were “allegations that dead people had been counted as voters.”
Voter Fraud: Not Supposed To Be a Problem Anymore
As CBS2 reported, voter fraud, which can take on many forms, was no longer supposed to be an issue, especially after the razor-thin 2000 election, and the disputed Florida recall. In 2002, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act, which according to CBS2 “mandated sweeping reforms, including a statewide voter registration system that would eliminate ineligible voters.”
However, California is the only state in the nation that is “not compliant with the act.”
“The problem is California has been the most derelict state in the country in implementing statewide databases that are required under federal law,” J. Christian Adams of the Public Interest Legal Foundation told CBS2. “You’re not supposed to have dead people on the rolls.”
Adams himself is a known whistle-blower. Formerly of the U.S. Justice Department, he testified before Congress in 2010 that his then employer “[instructed] attorneys in the civil rights division to ignore cases that involve black defendants and white victims,” according to a Fox News report.
“We abetted wrongdoing and abandoned law-abiding citizens,” he testified at the time.
As a result of the CBS2 report, local investigators have now called for an investigation, according to CBS Local.
What do you think? Could there be more cases of dead voters than just Southern California? Or, is this just an isolated incident?
[Image via Shutterstock]
