Sometimes voter-fraud deniers are forced to discuss the truth of voter fraud. This happened today at the Washington Post (“Fairfax officials say some people may have crossed Va.-Md. line to vote twice in 2012“). While the Post deserves credit from emerging from its cocoon of voter-fraud denial, it deserves scorn for bungling the emergence.

Reporter Susan Svrluga notes that “tens of thousands of voters” were registered to cast ballots in both Virginia and Maryland. That’s true, and it is a big problem nationwide. Hundreds of thousands of people are registered to vote in multiple states, and many of them have voted.

It wasn’t Eric Holder’s Justice Department that discovered the problem. That won’t happen because as I reported at PJ Media in 2010, Obama political appointees expressly shut down the efforts at DOJ to detect this sort of fraud and inadequate voter-roll maintenance.

Hans von Spakovsky notes who deserves the credit for detecting the problem:

It was the VVA — along with another citizens’ group dedicated to election integrity, Election Integrity Maryland (EIM) — that did the research on the voter files in Virginia and Maryland to find these illegal voters. And this may be only the tip of the iceberg: VVA and EIM turned the names of 43,893 individuals who appear to be registered in both states over to the State Boards of Elections in Virginia and Maryland. Fairfax County alone has more than 10,000 such duplicate registrations. These 17 voters are only a subset of at least 164 voters their research showed voted in both states in the 2012 election.

Naturally the Washington Post makes no inquiry as to why the Eric Holder Department of Justice has failed to do anything about the scourge of double registration. It’s in DOJ’s job description. DOJ isn’t doing the job. Instead, groups like the American Civil Rights Union, Judicial Watch and True the Vote have had to bring the cases Eric Holder has refused to bring to clean up voter rolls.

Those who create and manage the left-of-center election narrative ignore entirely this DOJ history, as does the Washington Post.

The other key fact ignored by the Washington Post is that in 2013 Virginia Democrats sued to stop election officials from trying to detect and cure this problem! I know because I, along with Judicial Watch, defended Virginia’s use of the cross-state check program to detect double registrations. The Post should not have omitted this fact when tracing out the partisan battle lines of the issue. The Democrats have gone all-in on the side of corrupted voter rolls.

Some newspapers fully informed their readers of this fact, unlike the Post. The Richmond Times Dispatch:

Purging voter rolls, however, can. Yet when the State Board of Elections took steps last year to clean up the voter rolls and asked localities to remove names of those no longer eligible from the rolls, the state Democratic Party sought an injunction to stop the process, and Chesterfield’s registrar, Lawrence Haake, declined to participate, citing inaccuracies. Haake might have been justified, and the board might have pushed too hard to execute what should be a painstaking process. But when those particular concerns are set aside, the general point stands: Localities should keep their voting rolls as up to date as reasonably possible.

Finally, the Post reporter downsizes the reason states are on the front lines of this issue:

It’s a federalist, states’-rights tradition that leaves a confusing mishmash of laws, rules and records, he said.

The reason states are in charge of their own elections is a “federalist, states-rights tradition that leaves a confusing mishmash of laws”? Really?

The reason states are in charge of their own elections is the United States Constitution (Article 1, Sec. 4). The Constitution gives states power over their own elections because it promotes liberty. The federal government does not have control over state election laws because centralization of power is unhealthy for liberty.

It’s good to see the Washington Post finally report on voter fraud. It’s not so good to see the predictable sanctuary given to the Democrat Party’s attempted facilitation of the fraud, and the usual criticism of our Constitutional arrangement for running elections.