The National Voter Registration Act, aka Motor Voter, aka auto fraudo, ostensibly was set up to ensure that people would be able to vote without much effort at all.  It has now been hijacked to enable noncitizens to register and vote.

As part of that act, an independent commission, the Election Assistance Commission (EAC), was set up, with two members each nominated by leaders of the two major parties in order to help states comply with the law, despite the fact that the 17th Amendment of the Constitution explicitly lays out that the states have the power to set the “[q]ualification requisite for electors.”  In this murky situation, opportunities for mischief are created.

Writing at National Review, Hans von Spakovsky explains what has developed:

… when Arizona sought to include citizenship-verification requirements with voter-registration forms, the institutional Left — including the League of Women Voters, People for the American Way, Common Cause, Project Vote, and Chicanos for La Causa — brought a lawsuit claiming that the EAC hadn’t approved such requirements. Incredibly, this fight over whether states can ensure that only citizens are voting went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In 2013 in Arizona v. Inter Tribal Council of Arizona, a divided Court said that Arizona could not implement such a requirement unless and until the EAC agreed to change the instructions for use of the federal form to include the Arizona requirements.

However,  the majority opinion in that case, written by Justice Antonin Scalia, stipulated that if the EAC refused Arizona’s request to accommodate the proof-of-citizenship requirement, the state could sue the EAC and establish in court that “a mere oath will not suffice to effectuate its citizenship requirement and that the EAC is therefore under a nondiscretionary duty to include Arizona’s concrete evidence requirement on the Federal Form.” The Court went so far as to say that Arizona could also claim that a refusal by the EAC would be “arbitrary,” since the agency “has accepted a similar instruction requested by Louisiana.” Indeed, the Court noted, the EAC had ”recently approved a state-specific instruction for Louisiana requiring applicants who lack a Louisiana driver’s license, ID card, or Social Security number to attach additional documentation” to the federal voter-registration form.

Arizona asked, and a single bureaucrat at the EAC named Alice Miller, who was not an EAC commissioner, but only the acting executive director, denied the request. It’s not even clear that Miller had the right to make this — or any other — decision.  At the time, a quorum did not exist on the bipartisan, four-member independent commission.

The decision was reversed. But on February 12, a lawsuit was filed by many of these same nonprofits in D.C. federal court seeking to reverse this reversal.  And the agency tasked with defending the EAC is none other than the Justice Department Voting Section lawyers:

... who fought in federal court to keep Kansas from enforcing a similar state law to ensure that only citizens registered to vote. One of those lawyers, Bradley Heard, engaged in potentially unethical conduct when he tweeted on his private Twitter account his impressions of the federal judge after a hearing in Kansas. Justice Department lawyers are not allowed to use social media to share with the public confidential assessments about the cases on which they work. According to a source, Heard’s actions prompted a quick internal memo from DOJ ethics officials reminding Voting Section lawyers they may not take to social media to bash Kansas and talk about ongoing Justice Department litigation.

On the Twitter account that landed Heard in hot water, he calls himself a “Voting Rights Gladiator . . . Outside Agitator.” Before joining the Voting Section, Heard worked for a number of years at the Advancement Project, a radical left-wing voting organization. The Advancement Project has worked closely with the ACLU, NAACP LDF, Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, and other liberal advocates to oppose voter-ID statutes, felon-disenfranchisement laws, and citizenship-verification regulations, and has adopted extreme positions on many other state and federal voting-rights laws. My sources tell me that Heard is the attorney who made and wrote the EAC’s decision to reject Kansas’s and Arizona’s request to modify the voter-registration form to include state requirements in the first place.

Can you say, “The fix is in”?

How vigorously will the DoJ layers fight to defend the overturning of a decision one of them may well have written?

And why on Earth is anyone opposed to ensuring that noncitizens don’t get to vote?

For too long, high voter turnout has been equated with good government.  Thus, we get the Advertising Council donating free advertising to register and vote in campaigns and tax-exempt nonprofits devoting energy to registering as many voters as possible.  But if someone is only casually interested in politics, does not bother to be informed, and picks a candidate based on good hair or good voice or just picks randomly when voting, how does it benefit the polity?  

Based on this theory that getting the most people possible voting is a good thing, we have the auto fraudo act, which is enabling unqualified people to vote.  Each of these votes cancels out the vote of a legitimately qualified voter.  That is also disenfranchisement.

Hat tip: Clarice Feldman