Edinburg, Texas is a city of about 77,000 in the Rio Grande Valley and is located a short distance from McAllen (population of about 142,000) and a few miles closer to the Mexican border. In a conversation, a resident of Edinburg mentioned that voter fraud is not that unusual down here; he added it is unusual that anyone is prosecuted. Following the 2017 mayoral election 8,400 votes were cast with winner Richard Molina winning over the #2 candidate, 14-year incumbent Richard Garcia. Local and state officials have been concerned with the election outcome with Mayor Molina and his wife being indicted along with 19 arrests related to suspected voter fraud.
According to The Heritage Foundation their voter fraud database discloses that nationally more than 60 incidents of voter fraud were uncovered related to the 2017 election and more than 50 findings in the 2018 election. According to officials at The Heritage Foundation many of the violations were in small towns. According to the non-partisan Pew Center their research shows that more than 24 million registration records are out-of-date, inaccurate or duplicates exist. Their research also points out that 2.8 million voters are registered in two or more states and 1.8 million registered voters are deceased. Nine states have cancelled 1,500 registrations because they were determined to be held by non-citizens. Over the last four years, Virginia has cancelled 3,398 registrations due to non-citizen status according to the non-profit ‘Judicial Watch.’
Perhaps some of us remember the statement made by then President Obama in October 2016, “There is no serious person out there who would suggest that you could even rig America’s elections, in part because they are so decentralized. There is no evidence that that has happened in the past, or that there are instances that that could happen this time.” Did he really believe that statement or was he just ‘blowing smoke?’Following every election, there are valid reports and rumors of voter fraud; apparently those of us who are honest voters fail to realize how easy it is to vote multiple times in several jurisdictions and perform other illegal acts of voter fraud.
Since qualified voters who are natural born or naturalized citizens have the right to vote, we all have an obligation to vote for the simple reason that the United States is a ‘federal republic’ meaning that citizens vote for all prime political offices such as president, governors etc. This being the case we should all be careful to vote for the person we think is most qualified for the position of leadership; we should gather evidence that the candidate of our choice is trustworthy.
Many current presidential candidates are offering ‘free’ college, ‘free’ government income, increased pay and other benefits if and when elected. The reasons politicians offer free stuff is the assumption that they will garner favorable votes in exchange. Remember that the value of anything you receive from government has to first be taken from someone else. That ‘someone else’ is specifically you and the millions of other U.S. taxpayers that number approximately 140 million or 42% of our total population of about 330 million. If our government paid off (liquidated) $1.6 trillion of current student debt, each taxpayer would pay $11,000 for a program that was planned by the developers of the student loan program in 2010 to save billions of dollars for taxpayers.
The offer of ‘free stuff’ by government is sophistry which means clever but fallacious, deceptive and misleading. Taking from the rich and giving to the poor is ‘wealth redistribution’ but government is a highly inefficient transfer agent of monetary assets. Inefficient government workers collect taxes and distribute those funds. Due to this government ‘overhead’, the cost of collection and distribution is about double the value of the total of all transfer transactions.
Voter fraud in Edinburg, Texas may be a microcosm of tax fraud throughout our nation. But equally important are the words of false wisdom and misleading promises of those politicians who would have us believe their sophistry of grandeur. With current national debt of $22 trillion and federal and state agencies on the brink of failure in future years, we must not allow ourselves to follow politician’s scheming dreams that become nightmares for our nation and its people.