Topic: WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily managing editor David Kupelian uses an Aug. 9 column to claim that President Obama's re-election campaign is trying to "suppress, in that pivotal swing state, the votes of America’s military men and women – people who traditionally lean conservative and vote Republican" by filing a lawsuit in Ohio over early-voting laws that allow members of the military three days longer to vote early than civilians.
Needless to say, Kupelian is lying through his teeth. The goal of the lawsuit is to extend civilian early voting to that of the military, not reduce the military deadline to the existing civilian one.
The funny thing is, Kupelian sort of concedes that by admitting that pretty much everyone else, which he disparagingly characterizes as "the vast, perpetually mesmerized pro-Obama media," as well as "the establishment’s arbiters of All Truth On The Internet, Snopes, Politifact and FactCheck," all disagree with that assessment.
But Kupelian has never been one to let facts get in the way, has he? So he stumbles forward with his anti-Obama attack:
What?, you may ask. How could everybody, including the military, having three more days to vote hurt our soldiers? Indeed, “what’s the matter with everybody having three extra days to vote?” is the current establishment refrain, its purveyors claiming incorrectly that all Ohio voters used to have those same three days for early voting. They didn’t: Although state law allowed it, local voting authorizes could decide if they wanted to implement early voting or not. Only “six counties had weekend voting and extended hours and 82 of them didn’t,” lead defendant and Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted told the Associated Press.
And why was that? Husted explained, in a Bloomberg Businessweek interview, that setting limits on early voting for most Ohioans – other than the relatively few in the armed forces – is necessary so Ohio’s election boards can synchronize the early balloting records with those at 9,800 polling places to prevent voter fraud – people voting more than once. And as Ohio’s state GOP chairman, Bob Bennett, said in a written statement: “Nobody is being disenfranchised here, as Ohio’s voters who choose to vote early can do so by mail 24 hours a day, seven days a week or at early voting polls.”
The REAL issue at stake here, the one virtually no one is talking about, and the reason it hurts the military if the judge forces Ohio to open all its polling places for all voters for the final three days, is the legal precedent that will be set – namely, that our soldiers cannot constitutionally be given a break, a few extra days, to get their votes in.Friends, you can’t obtain “reasonable results” through abominable means and then call it good. (That would be like me robbing a bank and then going home and saying, “Dear, I made a lot of money today.”) The price America will pay to obtain in Ohio a totally unnecessary “three extra days for everybody to vote” (if the judge rules the way Obama for America is asking it to rule) is the creation of a new legal precedent that it is unconstitutional to give any special consideration to military voters. After all, that is precisely the plaintiffs’ legal argument.
But as the Ohio defendants’ legal response points out so eloquently, America has always made special concessions for its soldiers to assure their opportunity to vote, going back to the Revolutionary War.
In fact, even right-wing voting rights activist Hans von Spakovsky agrees that there is no massive problem with voter fraud in American elections, so that argument falls flat. Further, Ohio is apparently the only state that has such a two-tiered system.
But Kupelian's not done misleading yet:
Then in 2010, ex-DOJ attorney M. Eric Eversole spoke out against the Obama Justice Department for its failure to safeguard the military vote.
Although Congress had passed in 2009 a law mandating that military personnel overseas be given sufficient time to participate in U.S. elections, the DOJ’s Voting Section was ignoring the new laws, potentially allowing thousands of uncounted ballots to fall through the cracks, said Eversole, a former litigation attorney for the DOJ Voting Section.
Eversole was hired by DOJ under the Bush administration during the period the Justice Department's inspector general and Office of Professional Responsibility said that Schlozman was improperly considering political affiliation when hiring career attorneys. What he and Kupelian portray as the DOJ purportedly "ignoring the law laws" -- for which Eversole provided no substantial evidence -- was actually the DOJ working with states that had not changed their primary voting deadlines for to preserve the intent of the law.
If WND's managing editor is promoting such lies and dishonesty, is it any wonder that the rest of WND reads the same way?
