LETTERS TO THE EDITOR: Numbers on voting fraud just don't add up

Once again, the cry is out that liberal voting laws will result in massive amounts of voter fraud and the non-citizens of this county will rule the day in our election process. It is kind of funny when you start to do some real research into voter fraud. In the entire state in the past decade there has been less the 10 documented events in this state of voter fraud. Now, in many crimes, only 10 percent get caught. Assuming that only 2 percent of voter fraud gets caught, at the most in the last election 50 people were voting illegally in Delaware. Even if you tripled that number, not one of the major candidates’ elections would have been affected by that number of illegal votes. And if you believe all the hype of those who claim same-day voting will allow a massive numbers of non-citizens to use the voting process to elect the wrong candidate. You might be underestimating the intelligence of our election commission and the polling place workers. I have a strong belief that if the number of non-resident persons necessary to swing an election in one way or another showed up at a polling places, someone would notice and sound the alarm. (It would have taken in excess of 160,000 illegal votes to change the results of the last governor’s election.) On top of over 100,000 people showing up, a large number of them would not have heeded the info supplied them by their organizers. (In the last group you participated in, how many got the instructions wrong?) And when you involve that many people in a conspiracy, someone will talk, brag to a friend, do the whistleblower thing or just plain screw it up and get caught and spill the beans. This state has trouble getting 400,000 legal voters to vote, how in the world can a secret group arrange for more than 100,000 to break the law? In today’s world of laws and safeguards, the possibility of voter fraud successfully swinging a major election is rare, if not impossible. However, the creation of laws that in effect makes it difficult for poor, elderly or voters of one party to vote are being created by various state legislators that are mostly controlled by Republicans. This makes me wonder what the persons who support such laws consider a non-citizen. Do they believe that we should go back to the system in place in the 1700s where only land-owning white males should be allowed to vote? Does being poor disqualify one to vote? Does being black mean you make bad decisions for your country? Does being old mean you can no longer make good decision? Is being of Latino descent automatically makes you an illegal alien? Or, are they afraid that if the majority of Americans vote, the results will not be what they wish will happen and the “wrong” candidate will win? Voting may not always go the way many of us wish it would. But, it is a major block of our foundation of laws. Chip away at that foundation and soon it will crumble. If these Americans truly believe in the Constitution and its founding beliefs, they would be fighting to free up the voting system to include every voting-age American, not exclude the few they don’t believe will vote in their favor. The days when only land-owning males were the major voting block is gone. The days when women were not allowed a say in our politics is long gone. And the days of forcing minorities to read foreign language text to qualify to vote have been buried with many other restrictive laws. Let’s not step backward. The past was not as great as TV or the movies make it out to be. I know. I lived through it.

Charles T. Waggoner, Sr. Dover