Battle Stations! The Voter Purges are Coming!

One of the Left’s favorite scare tactics is to claim that Republicans want to ruthlessly purge members of Democrat-friendly demographic groups from the nation’s voter rolls.

They claim Republicans want to do this because they hate minorities and the poor. This is simply propaganda but it persists election cycle after election cycle.

So it shouldn’t be surprising that on the day of the first meeting of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity, career leftist Vanita Gupta published what PJMedia’s David Steinberg called a “‘Moon Landing Was Faked’-level rant about the Committee’s supposed dangers to American democracy.”

Gupta ran the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in the final two years of the Obama administration. During her tenure, the Civil Rights Division ignored its legal responsibility to safeguard voter rolls. So naturally Gupta is upset.

“The institutional Left really, really does not want this Committee,” Steinberg writes, “or anyone else, doing anything to address the 1 in 8 U.S. voter registrations that contain a serious error, according to a Pew Charitable Trusts study.”

The title of Gupta’s New York Times op-ed is “The Voter Purges Are Coming.”

In it, she expresses horror that the Civil Rights Division under Attorney General Jeff Sessions “forced” 44 states to explain “how they keep their voter rolls up-to-date.”

Of course, federal law requires the Justice Department to monitor such electoral integrity-related matters so that dead people can be removed from voter rolls. It is essential that people who are not eligible voters be “purged” from the rolls to prevent voter identity theft and other forms of vote fraud, but Gupta claims the request for information is actually “a prelude to voter purging,” presumably on a massive scale.

“Purging voters is part of a larger malicious pattern that states have employed across the country,” she writes. “Georgia and Ohio are being sued for carrying out early versions of what we can expect from the Trump administration.”

Gupta also claims the feds will use the data states send it to “create a national database to try to find things like double-voters,” which is something fair-minded Americans think is a good idea.

Gupta’s opinion piece “does a tremendous job of making the case for an immediate purge of Obama-era executive branch hires,” Steinberg adds.

Gupta is currently president and CEO of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights. She was previously Deputy Legal Director of the American Civil Liberties Union and Assistant Counsel at the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Her legal brethren believe voter fraud is a myth Republicans use to disenfranchise people they don’t like.

It’s nonsense.

While some claim voter fraud is a myth “as common as unicorns and Sasquatch,” and others insist fraud routinely affects election outcomes, “the truth lies somewhere in between,” according to election law expert J. Christian Adams. “The truth is that voter fraud occurs frequently, and it determines who wins elections infrequently.”

But the “integrity of the electoral process is perhaps more important than who wins and loses an election,” he said. “Lawlessness in elections corrodes the entire democratic process.”

Reasonable people can disagree over how serious a problem voter fraud is in today’s America, but the evidence it exists cannot be ignored.

No matter what activists like Gupta may say, the creation of the Presidential Advisory Committee on Election Integrity is a step in the right direction.