New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt on Voter Fraud

New Jersey Congressman Rush Holt is “angry and astonished” about a secure absentee voter program set up by the Department of Defense. He said that while U.S. military personnel should participate in the political process, "no one is served by introducing possibilities for error, insecurity, and fraud."

As part of the program, many states allow military members deployed overseas to return their completed ballot via fax or the Internet. Those ballots, Smith said, will not pass through the hands of any government officials until they are received by a local election authority.

A Jersey blogger calls out Congressman Holt and asks this question:

Is Rush really worried about the security of the votes of the troops, or is he worried about the votes of the troops?

Holt’s Communications Director, Patrick Eddington, fires back with a lengthy comment, including this:

My question is, why should our service members be given such a shabby and potentially dangerous voting system? Their votes should be as secure and confidential as anyone else’s.

No one is served by knee-jerk partisanship.

Apparently no one is supposed to notice the timing of Holt’s press release or his silence about the “shabby and potentially dangerous” failure of New Jersey to comply with federal voting laws for the fourth straight year.

A 2005 study uncovered thousands of cases in New Jersey where ineligible people voted, voted more than once or voted posthumously in the 2004 election. Last November, Superior Court Judge Linda Feinberg said, "I have great concern in regards to absentee ballots". This was the judge’s response after New Jersey’s Deputy Attorney General testified that voter rolls had not been cleaned up because, "Quite frankly, your honor, the registrar was unaware that this was one of his obligations."

"That is almost impossible to understand," replied Feinberg.

Feinberg turned to Deputy Attorney General Karen DuMars, who was representing Attorney General Peter C. Harvey.

"This is the first time this has come to the attention of the attorney general," DuMars said.

"I'm dumbfounded. I just don't understand it," Feinberg responded.

"The notion that this was a statutory responsibility that was unknown to the registrar is just hard to swallow," Feinberg said.

"It is truly alarming," Feinberg said of concerns that people might have used dead people's names to illegally vote.

Feinberg noted her secretary just received a sample ballot for her dead father.

"How does my secretary's father end up getting a ballot?" Feinberg asked. "How does that happen?"

Racsas said 50,000 to 72,000 people per year die in New Jersey, meaning workers could have been mulling over between 1 million to about 1.5 million names if Feinberg had ordered them to do so.

It’s now November 2006 and New Jersey’s voter rolls still haven’t been cleaned up. Congressman Rush Holt is more concerned with throwing up road blocks and casting aspersions on the military vote than he is about cleaning up the real mess in his own state.

“No one is served by introducing possibilities for error, insecurity and fraud” - except perhaps the political party in power of a state that fails to comply with the law to remove ineligible voters from the rolls. What say you Congressman Rush Holt?