If this election is a close one, it could well be stolen by what would otherwise be the losing side.

Those weren’t the exact words uttered in a program last Friday at the Heritage Foundation by co-authors of an important new book, but that’s one practical message an attentive listener would take away from the event.

The authors are John Fund, longtime journalist for the Wall Street Journal, The American Spectator and National Review; and Hans von Spakovsky, a Senior Legal Fellow at Heritage and former member of the Federal Election Commission. Their new book is Who’s Counting? How Fraudsters and Bureaucrats Put Your Vote at Risk ...

Fund told the Heritage audience that he first became interested in the subject when he “witnessed voter fraud with my own eyes” years ago in a California state assembly race. Why didn’t he report it to the authorities? Because the fraud was carried out by the authorities.

Yet, as Fund explained, the media says, “There is no voter fraud.”

Just a few weeks ago, a congressional candidate in Maryland withdrew from the ballot after it was discovered that she had repeatedly voted simultaneously in two states in the same elections.

No matter: “There is no voter fraud.”

In Iowa just last week, three non-citizens went to jail for having voted. But “there is no voter fraud.” In Arkansas the week before, a Democratic state legislator (who “won” his race by just eight votes), a city council member and a police official were convicted on 45 counts. Still, say the cognoscenti, “There is no voter fraud.”

Von Spakovsky, meanwhile, devastatingly refuted the leftist arguments against laws requiring voters to show identification at the polls. Critics say the laws make it too difficult to vote, especially for minorities. Yet, as von Spakovsky explained, when voter-ID laws went into effect in Indiana and Georgia for the 2008 elections – after federal judges noted that plaintiffs could not produce a single witness who would be unable to vote because of the new law – minority turnout increased by far more in those states than it did elsewhere in the country.

Many solutions are available, and are recounted in the book Who’s Counting? One (of many) I really like: State election officials should use the employer “E-Verify” system to confirm citizenship of new voting registrants.

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CAIRCO Research

A) Re "3 noncitizens in Iowa charged with voter fraud"

Read More :http://qctimes.com/news/state-and-regional/iowa/noncitizens-in-iowa-char...

B) Re "Four Arkansas men, including elected officials, plead guilty to conspiracy to commit voter fraud"

Read more: http://www.wmctv.com/story/19468391/four-arkansas-men-including-elected-...