If there’s a phrase anywhere in the language that fills the supporter of election integrity with less optimism than “Democrat”, it’s “New Jersey”.   They’re a little better than Chicago – or maybe they just hide their crimes better.

At any rate – Chris Christie is giving incumbent Democrat John Corzine a run for his vast amounts of money in the New Jersey gubernatorial race, which is being decided in elections today.  The polls show it as too close to call; the conventional wisdom shows this as a bellwether for the first year of the Obama Ascenscion administration.

And so the Dems will have the whole army of lawyers and professional spin mercenaries – the same crowd that won them the Minnesota Senate race last year – esconced in every Best Western from Fort Lee to Cape May, ready to duke it out over every single vote ballot to try to retain control of a state the Dems regard as marginally less “theirs” than Saint Paul or Berkeley.

And that’s just the good news; John Fund notes that ACORN has taken time off from moonlighting as a real estate agent for pimps to go back to their main mission – debasing our electoral system (emphasis added):

Victor Negron, a campaign adviser for independent mayoral candidate Roberto Feliz, a former director of Camden’s public works department, says he’s shocked that more than fifteen times the normal number of voters are casting absentee ballots in Camden this year. In the 2005, when the city’s voters voted for both governor and mayor on the same day, only 200 absentee ballots were cast. This year, some 3,700 have already been received. At least four voters have approached the Feliz campaign to complain that an absentee ballot was sent to them without their permission or cast for them without their understanding the documents they were signing. I spoke with Uremia Rojas who reports that “a man with a clipboard knocked on my door and had me sign something so I could vote by mail. I was skeptical but signed and got a ballot. I never really wanted one.” Says Mr. Negron: “We believe this to be underhanded and a possibly illegal strategy by the Democratic Party to undermine the civil rights of the residents of Camden.”

 Just a few bad apples? 

Probably not:

Plenty of reasons exist for suspecting absentee fraud may play a significant role in [today’s] Garden State contests. Groups associated with Acorn in neighboring Pennsylvania and New York appear to have moved into the state. An independent candidate for mayor in Camden has already leveled charges that voter fraud is occurring in his city. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party in New Jersey is taking advantage of a new loosely written vote-by-mail law to pressure county clerks not to vigorously use signature checks to evaluate the authenticity of absentee ballots, the only verification procedure allowed.

The grounds?  Making sure the system has integrity “disenfranchises”…

…er, someone.   Not honest people, or people cognizant enough to actually belong at the polling station or anything:

The state has received a flood of 180,000 absentee ballot requests. On some 3,000 forms the signature doesn’t match the one on file with county clerks. Yet citing concerns that voters would be disenfranchised, Democratic Party lawyer Paul Josephson wrote New Jersey’s secretary of state asking her “to instruct County Clerks not to deny applications on the basis of signature comparison alone.” Mr. Josephson maintained that county clerks “may be overworked and are likely not trained in handwriting analysis” and insisted that voters with suspect applications should be allowed to cast provisional ballots.

The shorter Democrat case:  “Integrity is haaaaaaard“.

Fund:

Absentee voter fraud is in danger of becoming a hardy perennial in New Jersey. Atlantic City Councilman Marty Small and 13 campaign workers were indicted in September on charges of conspiring to commit election fraud using absentee ballots. One worker pleaded guilty last month. In Newark, five campaign workers were indicted in August on charges involving absentee ballot fraud…There are additional reports from Camden that Hispanic voters have been misled into voting absentee ballots.

Read the whole, depressing thing.

And then answer this question: if people cease to have faith in their electoral system (where “faith” means “a reasonable belief that the electoral system gives each legal voter one vote, and counts those votes once each”), what future can democracy have?

It’s a rhetorical question: the answer is “none”.   So since debasing our electoral system to gain and hold power kills democracy, then the only real goal of the left is to gain and hold power.  By any means necessary.

Right?

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