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Count Liberal Votes, But Not Military Votes, New York Democrats Say
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New York Democrats are hypocritically preaching about the need to "count every vote" while making sure that few military absentee ballots, which lean conservative, are ever counted. By excluding overseas military ballots, Democrats have obtained a narrow lead in a special election to choose a Congressman in New York's 20th district, where Scott Murphy (D) leads James Tedisco (R) by just 86 votes.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D) now proclaims "Let My Vote and Every Vote Be Counted." She wants her own absentee ballot counted, even though she was actually in the district campaigning on election day, and thus should have voted in person, not absentee.
But thanks to Democrats, hundreds of overseas military ballots will apparently never be counted, in violation of federal law.
Democrats on the state elections board blocked GOP attempts to allow overseas military voting in the special election. Overseas ballots take perhaps 45 days to reach voters and be returned unless special measures are taken to speed things up. But the elections officials refused to do anything to speed things up, or mail the ballots out early enough. The result is that most of the overseas military ballots in the New York race will never be counted. (Military ballots are cast mostly for Republican candidates).
The exclusion of these ballots violates a federal law known as UOCAVA, but the Justice Department filed only a “Potemkin Village” lawsuit in response, seeking a brief, cosmetic extension of time for returning the ballots — an extension that will result in only a handful of the wrongfully-excluded military ballots being counted. The Justice Department could easily have sought and obtained broader, more meaningful relief, as it did on several occasions during the Bush Administration. But it didn’t want to, for partisan political reasons.
So much for Obama’s campaign promise to defend “the right of every American to vote.” (Obama’s Justice Department is also not interested in protecting the voting rights of people denied the right to vote by black political bosses in predominantly-black counties).
This is just one facet of the continuing politicization of the Justice Department, which is now blessing unconstitutional bills that even liberal legal scholars admit violate the plain language of the Constitution.
And it is reflects just one broken promise in a long line of broken promises from Obama. Obama has violated his campaign pledge of a “net spending cut” through an unprecedentedly-large federal budget that will generate $4.8 trillion in increased deficits, a trillion-dollar toxic-asset program, and an $800 billion stimulus package that the Congressional Budget Office admits will shrink the economy in the long run.
And Obama’s promise not to raise taxes in “any form” on anyone making less than $250,000 per year has been broken by his SCHIP excise tax increase and his proposed $2 trillion cap-and-trade carbon tax.
