Vote fraud is no big deal, right? It hardly ever happens. It�??s so rare that it�??s not even worth discussing. Anyone who claims to take the integrity of our ballots seriously is cynically exploiting phantom fears for the purpose of suppressing the Democrat-loving minority vote.

To keep that silly narrative alive, it�??s important not to read the Sunday edition of the Columbus Dispatch, in which readers were informed that �??more than one out of every five registered Ohio voters is probably ineligible to vote.�?�

Furthermore, �??in two counties, the number of registered voters actually exceeds the voting age population: Northwestern Ohio�??s Wood County shows 109 registered voters for every 100 eligible, while in Lawrence County along the Ohio River it�??s a mere 104 registered per 100 eligible.�?�

31 more counties report over 90 percent voter registration, which is a good 20 percent higher than the national average. The Buckeye State sure is civic-minded! Well, except that 1.6 million of the 7.8 million registered voters in the state haven�??t voted in at least four years. So I guess they were civic minded, once upon a time. Never fear �?? I�??m sure plenty of those �??inactive�?� voters will reactivate themselves just in time for Barack Obama�??s re-election.

You might think these astonishing statistics indicate a crisis-level voter registration problem requiring immediate attention, particularly since this is 2012, not 1912, and modern technology gives us extremely potent tools for accurately managing massive amounts of data. But Attorney General Eric Holder disagrees. Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted sent Holder a letter back in February, warning that �??common sense says that the odds of voter fraud increase the longer these ineligible voters are allowed to populate our rolls�?� I simply cannot accept that.�?� Husted said existing federal regulations �??limit Ohio�??s ability to remove ineligible names, thereby increasing the chance for voter fraud.�?�

No one from the Justice Department ever responded. Conservative watchdog group Judicial Watch, which called Ohio�??s voter registration train wreck to Husted�??s attention, is now suing him for failing to take action, beyond issuing a �??directive�?� to remove ineligible voters that Judicial Watch describes as �??all bark and no bite,�?� since there is no evidence that anything was actually done.

Judicial Watch has already filed a similar lawsuit against the State of Indiana, and says other states with disturbing levels of ineligible registered voters include Mississippi, Iowa, Missouri, Texas, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Florida, Alabama, California, and Colorado. Florida�??s struggle to clean up its rolls, in the face of active hostility from Eric Holder�??s Justice Department, has already made headlines.

Nationwide, the Pew Center for the States estimates about 24 million ineligible voter registrations, including “more than 1.8 million dead people listed as voters; about 2.75�??million with voter registrations in more than one state; and about 12 million voter records with incorrect addresses, meaning either the voters moved or errors in the information make it unlikely any mailings can reach them.”

The National Voter Registration Act includes provisions “to ensure that accurate and current voter registration rolls are maintained,” but somehow that part of the NVRA doesn’t seem to count. It’s painfully obvious that we don’t have accurate and current voter registration – not even by the standards of the early Twentieth Century, let alone the early Twenty-First – but the only parts of the NVRA we ever hear cited are the passages that can be used as roadblocks against cleaning up the rolls, or keeping fraudsters away from the polls.

Without solid voter identification laws, every one of these phony registered voters presents an opportunity for fraud �?? and of course, Eric Holder is dedicated, above almost every other consideration, to blocking voter ID laws. And vote fraud on this scale is not a mess that can be cleaned up after the election. If a candidate wins a tough swing state like Ohio by, let us say, 5000 votes, and it is later discovered that 6000 false votes were cast in the election, the Presidency is not going to be taken away and given to the defrauded opponent. It�??s not even like one of those sports scores that picks up an asterisk due to questionable circumstances. It won�??t matter at all�?� except as another data point to be erased from the public mind, when vote fraud defenders crank up the machinery of fear and ignorance for the 2014 midterms and 2016 presidential campaign. And no one on the Left will express a single moment�??s remorse for the legal voters who were disenfranchised by stolen ballots. They won�??t have names and faces; no one will be paraded through media interviews to complain about the theft of his or her vote in a historic election.

Vote fraud must be prevented, not investigated after the fact. There is absolutely no logical reason for a computerized society to tolerate thousands of ineligible voters on its rolls. The state of Ohio is not a third-world banana republic. At least, it�??s not supposed to be one. The sacrifice of national pride, and even self-respect, required to meekly accept counties with 110 percent voter registration is astonishing.