(Raleigh, NC)—MAR 20, 2013—The NC State Board of Elections has confirmed their intent to prosecute five people on suspicion that they voted in both Florida and NC during the November 2012 election, according VIP-NC Finds Dual Voters in FL & NC, according to the North Carolina chapter of the Voter Integrity Project.

(Raleigh, NC)—MAR 20, 2013—The NC State Board of Elections has confirmed their intent to prosecute five people on suspicion that they voted in both Florida and NC during the November 2012 election, according to email records provided by the Voter Integrity Project of NC, the group that investigated and identified the voters to both states’ election offices earlier last month.

The group initially identified what it thought were 33 potential instances of double voting. Of these, they classified “19 as ‘highly likely,’ six as ‘probable’ and eight as ‘possible’ vote fraud candidates.” The NC Board of Elections, however, determined that several apparent instances of double voting were clerical errors. After a VIP-NC search consuming who knows how many man-hours, the NCBOE confirmed 5 for possible prosecution by matching signatures on voter rolls in NC and FL.

If successfully prosecuted, double voting is punishable as a felony. And it should be.

VIP-NC is frustrated that the state BOE cannot prosecute the five remaining cases itself. That is the purview of local District Attorneys. So VIP-NC is asking the legislature to expand the BOE’s jurisdiction. They don’t want local prosecutors determining whether or not to prosecute alleged voter impersonation fraud — which these five cases are not. The voters who allegedly cast ballots in two states (which is still illegal) did so in their own names. And while alive, too.

The Voter Integrity Project believes these five cases are “only the tip of the iceberg,” says Executive Director, Jay DeLancy.

You remember Jay DeLancy. He’s the amateur sleuth who challenged 550 voters’ registrations in Wake County last year. The Wake County BOE found only 18 that merited further investigation. After the board threw out those remaining 18, DeLancy “snatched his microphone off the board’s table mid-meeting, kicking glass doors open in front of him as he stormed out of the meeting room,” WRAL reported.

On the VIP-NC site, DeLancy dismisses those who insist that voter ID is a solution in search of a problem, saying, “Vote fraud deniers make nice poetry and they give good sound bites, but the idea is as absurd as claiming that no speeding happens on I-40 unless the Highway Patrol writes tickets.”

Except the Highway Patrol is not expected to prevent all speeding. The force is sized and budgeted as a deterrent, to minimize speeding and to prosecute it when they find it. If, for example, the Voter Integrity Project really expected the Patrol to prevent all speeding violations, they had better hand their wallets to the tax man. They would end up creating a lot of those government jobs that government never creates and find themselves living in the police state that tea party members fear.

If on the other hand, DeLancy wants increased enforcement of existing voting laws to eliminate the potential of, say, five double-voters found only after an exhaustive search, fine. Perhaps they’ll also find that funding that enhanced enforcement is cheaper than inconveniencing millions of legitimate North Carolina voters with a Voter ID law instead.

And how many of DeLancy’s five suspects already had photo IDs that played no part in preventing double voting? If the suspects can flit back and forth between their NC and FL addresses by car, the odds are all of them. This will not likely dissuade Republican legislators in Raleigh from passing a Voter ID law in the current session. Their leadership recently abandoned voter fraud as the primary rationale for passing it anyway, which means that for all the pious hand wringing about protecting the integrity of the election process, they never took their own warnings seriously.

If instead of a preventing someone from casting an illegal vote at a polling place, the discussion was about preventing someone from buying a firearm at a gun show illegally, supporters of North Carolina’s Voter Integrity Project might make a very different argument. To wit, they might claim that no amount of legislation would prevent a determined criminal from getting his hands on a gun. Instead, laws passed to stop him will simply interfere with law-abiding Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed right to keep and bear arms.

Just don’t expect them to believe that a Voter ID law will interfere with law-abiding Americans’ constitutionally guaranteed right to vote.

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)

Citing UCLA corporate law [...]]]> As cities around the country trade notes on how to crack down on peaceful Occupy protesters, a chant goes up: ‘Who do you protect? Who do you serve?’ As the empire strikes back, Chris Hayes offers a plausible answer. It’s the reason for Occupy in the first place.

Citing UCLA corporate law professor (and Republican) Lynn Stout, David Kay Johnston writes [emphasis mine]:

Against $15 trillion of mortgage bonds, Stout said, Wall Street marketed credit default swaps in 2008 with a notional value of $67 trillion. Worldwide, traded swaps at their peak equaled $670 trillion or $100,000 for each person on the planet, vastly more than all the wealth in the world. Those numbers make it a mathematical certainty that the swaps were mostly speculation, not hedging.

There is a reason people have taken to the streets — in London, in Madrid, in Athens, in Dublin, in Reykjavik, in hundreds of cities across the planet. In Europe, see IMF austerity measures that require the public to cover the gambling losses of a financial industry unaccountable for committing massive fraud in derivatives. In the U.S., see the deal to immunize banks from prosecution: With few exceptions, state attorneys general want to hand the banks “get out of jail free” cards and sweep the crimes under the rug. See Kelo v. City of New London or Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission. In literature, see Orwell: All “persons” are equal but some “persons” are more equal than others.

#Occupy is asking the right question — a dangerous question — not only of police, but of the entire system: ‘Who do you protect? Who do you serve?’

The crowds chant,“WHO DO YOU PROTECT, WHO DO YOU SERVE?”

(Cross-posted from Scrutiny Hooligans.)