ELMHURST – Catherine Engelbrecht started organizing a voter registration about the same time that the Tea Party movement launched in 2009, and it wasn't long before the Obama Administration's Internal Revenue Service targeted Engelbrecht and her efforts. Before she knew it, she was testifying before Congress about the legal mud through which the IRS and then-chief Lois Lerner was dragging her and her "True the Vote" efforts.
In the meantime, the Texas native became more and more educated on the dark side of voter registration – and became more and more aware of vote corruption nationwide.
Englebrecht was in Elmhurst recently, sharing her experiences with Illinois conservatives. The timing was perfect to ask her opinion about Illinois and issues with which election authorities and the governor are dealing.
Governor Rauner signed into law Monday a measure that will make it legal in Illinois to automatically register anyone to vote that obtains an Illinois drivers' license or requests assistance from several designated state agencies.
Chicago's shady voter rolls have always been the brunt of political corruption jokes, but recent allegations of over 16,000 more Chicago voters in the 2016 elections than the number of persons registered to vote made the integrity of Illinois' voter rolls even more questionable.
A new study released in June by Just Facts, a libertarian/conservative think tank, used data from a large Harvard/You.Gov study that every two years samples tens of thousands of voters, including some who admit they are noncitizens and thus can't vote legally.
The findings are eye-opening, Investor's Business Daily reported. In 2008, as many as 5.7 million noncitizens voted in the election. Four years later, as many as 3.6 million voted, the study said.
In 2016, the U.S. Census Bureau estimated that there were 21.0 million adult noncitizens in the U.S., up from 19.4 million in 2008. It is therefore highly likely that millions of noncitizens cast votes in 2016, IBD speculated.
Why aggravate the already confused system by automatically registering people to vote in Illinois when they fill out forms at a public agency?
Englebrecht said that idea of automatic voter registration is misguided and opens Illinois' voter rolls to an even more negative reputation for corruption. "It is beyond maddening to know that this is where we are," she said.
Bowing to these manipulations of the system in order to prevent being called racists and to take on these issues of political correctness is the problem, she told Illinois Review.
"All you can do is get the word out about what's going on," she said.
More to come …
