The Bush administration’s five-year national “war on voter fraud” resulted in only 86 convictions of illegal voting out of more than 196 million votes cast. Instead conservatives are employing an old tactic: using the specter of false voting to restrict the voting rights of minorities and the poor.
ABQJOURNAL OPINION/LETTERS: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Hardly a Call To Man Ramparts
THE MARCH 16 front page Journal story states that Secretary of State Dianna Duran found 117 people who were registered to vote who were foreign nationals when they applied for their licenses, and 37 had voted between 2003 and 2010.
A scandal in the making? Hardly. Consider this: 3.8 percent, or 36,122, of registered voters in New Mexico were "New Americans" — naturalized citizens or the U.S.-born children of immigrants who were raised during the current era of immigration from Latin America and Asia that began in 1965 — according to an analysis of 2006 Census Bureau data.
Now I don’t know how many were naturalized between 2003 and 2010, but I personally have attended two very inspiring naturalization ceremonies over the last three years where more than 500 were naturalized. And, unlike many citizens born in the United States, they register to vote and take their duty to vote seriously.
RICHARD P. MASON
Rio Rancho
ABQJOURNAL OPINION/LETTERS: LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
The same people who are certain that *Democrats* are stealing elections seem unconcerned by the fact that voting machine makers support Conservatives. And let’s not even re-live Republican shenanigans of 2000 – I hate seeing red-faced Scalia’s spittle-soaked disdain.