EDITORIAL: Dead in Ohio, but still voting

OPINION:

The liberal obsession with using election law to promote racial grievance-mongering rather than to protect against voter fraud continues apace. The worst case in point this week is the effort of Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, a highly partisan Democrat who’s forcing Cuyahoga County to waste half a million dollars on unnecessary bilingual ballots while she fails to remove 5,800 dead people from the Buckeye State’s voter rolls.

The Justice Department has been pressuring Cuyahoga’s election board to provide bilingual ballots for all of its nearly 1 million registered voters in order to accommodate about 6,000 people covered by a special Voting Rights Act provision meant to help those educated in Puerto Rico’s Spanish-language schools. On Wednesday, the four-member board split on whether to kowtow to Justice’s demands, but Ms. Brunner cast a tie-breaking vote in favor of the feds’ position.

Ms. Brunner’s priorities are misplaced. “Nearly 5,800 Ohioans who’ve died are still registered to vote, and ballots may have been cast in the names of at least 16 Ohioans after their deaths,” according to press reports. This isn’t surprising because in 2008 Ms. Brunner fought attempts to ensure ballot integrity, particularly against measures to verify authenticity of people registering and voting on the same day.

Georgia is trying to address its problems. On Aug. 25, at the behest of Secretary of State Brian Kemp, officials launched a criminal investigation into alleged fraud in the Peach State’s southern counties. Not that the Justice Department will be supportive. It dropped a case last year against Missouri for failing to clean up its voter rolls even though a third of Show Me State counties had more registered voters than voting-age residents.

Amidst all this voter fraud, immigration officials told an illegal alien in Tennessee he still could become a citizen even though they discovered he had voted while illegal, which is a felony. A government notice asked him to “submit a letter of explanation of … when you discovered that you were not a United States Citizen.” (As if he hadn’t known.) “This frightens me for my country,” Debbie Steidl, the Putnam County administrator of elections, told Fox News. “Why would you let someone who committed voter fraud become a citizen?”

The Obama administration and liberal bureaucrats are working to help everybody vote, whether or not they are eligible (or even alive). This undermines the rights of legal Americans whose votes are improperly diluted of value by fraud. The scandals are an affront to civic order.