A drive to protect vote fraud

Faced with multiple reports of early-voting irregularities and election shenanigans across the country, left-wing groups are playing dumb, deaf and blind.

More cunningly, these organizations are seeking to marginalize complaints about election integrity by casting citizen-watchdog efforts as racist "scare tactics." Echoing President Obama's message to the Democratic faithful on the campaign trail, they are accusing political opponents of suppressing the votes of minorities and the poor. Yesterday, The New York Times quoted a liberal voting-rights advocate, Wendy R. Weiser, wringing her hands over individual Americans taking clean elections seriously:

"Private efforts to police the polls create a real risk of vote suppression, regardless of their intent," said Weiser.

Weiser also turned up in a similar story minimizing voter fraud that was published yesterday by National Public Radio. The NPR report asserted that "most election experts" believe that fears of voter fraud are "overblown." Overblown?

* In North Carolina and Nevada, early voters have encountered ballot-machine glitches that favor Democrats in hotly contested races.

* In Troy, NY, and Daytona Beach, Fla., police investigations into suspected absentee-ballot fraud by elected government officials are underway.

* In Harris County, Texas, the voter registrar admitted that 20 percent of voter-registration forms submitted by liberal activist Houston Votes had problems. Election whistleblowers there are now being investigated by the Obama Justice Department and have been slapped with an ethics complaint by the Texas Democratic Party and a left-wing group called Texans for Public Justice.

* In Yuma County, Ariz., election officials denied any fraud associated with thousands of requests for "permanent early voter list" status submitted en masse by open-borders group Mi Familia Vota (a social-justice satellite of the Service Employees International Union). But election officials admitted that some 6,000 out of 14,000 requests fielded by the Yuma County Recorder's Office "were reviewed and rejected, under Arizona law, either due to the fact the request was a duplicate or the requestor was not eligible to vote in this election or within the jurisdiction."

Liberals shrugged their shoulders at reports of illegal-alien canvassers trolling for votes in Washington state. Never mind the radical goals spelled out by SEIU International Secretary-Treasurer and Mi Familia Vota founder Eliseo Medina, who views illegal-alien amnesty as a powerful Democratic recruitment tool to capture millions of new progressive voters.

And for the last two years, Democratic leaders have had nothing to say about the militant New Black Panther Party goons who took it upon themselves to police a Philadelphia voting booth in 2008 wielding billy clubs and shouting anti-white slurs to suppress votes. Now, they're treating citizen election monitors as if they are the jack-booted thugs.

Silence dissent. Criminalize watchdogs. Whitewash fraud. These are the signature tactics of the left. On Nov. 2, Americans get their chance to say: Enough.