Editor, The Herald:

Well, the election of 2012 is indeed over, and as Barack Hussein Obama is fond of saying, “elections have consequences.” Indeed they do. Many middle-class Americans will see their taxes go up as much as 35% between now and 2014. Medicare payments will be cut sharply. The military will face drastic funding reductions. The IRS will hire 16,000 new agents to monitor your compliance with the far-reaching Obamacare. Consequences. Many and painful consequences. And yet, we are asked to accept that over 50 percent of the voters approve of this. Who are these voters, and were they all voting legally? Sadly, we will never know. The Federal Election commission will accept and investigate complaints of vote fraud, but the results of their investigations won't be known for many months, if ever.

Prior to the election, many groups were said to be opposed to Obama's re-election. Catholics were outraged because their health-care agencies were compelled to prescribe birth-control medications. Hispanics were unhappy about the Obama administration's embrace of homosexual marriage. Middle-class Americans of every sort were angry about Obamacare being rammed down their throats. Jews were upset about Obama's lack of support for Israel. The outlook for Obama's re-election was grim. And yet, on election night, the nation got a big surprise.

Vote fraud has probably been around since the Greeks invented democracy, but it fell to the latter-day Democrats to turn it into an art form. From Boss Tweed in New York to the Daley machine in Chicago to the George Soros-funded organizations of today, democrats have continued to find better and better ways to fraudulently multiply their numbers. Some will remember Chicago mayor Richard Daley exhorting his followers to “vote early, vote often” in the 1960 election. In California, as Bill Clinton was campaigning for his second term, democratic operatives sent out letters to resident aliens, legal and illegal, congratulating them on their decision to vote in the upcoming election. Attached to the bottom of the letter was a voter ID card made out to the addressee. In California, it is illegal for a poll worker to ask for a second form of ID if the voter possesses a voter ID card. Consequently, many thousands of illegal votes were cast, most if not all of them for Clinton.

What can be done to clean up the electoral process?

First, we should take a hint from our British cousins and limit the time of campaigns. Suppose we limit the presidential campaign to six months, and congressional elections to three months? The British do this and they limit how much can be spent as well. Certainly, the two billion dollars spent on the recent campaign-one that stretched over more than two years- could have been better spent on disaster relief and improvements to the nation's infrastructure.

Second, raise the voting age to 21-or, even better, 25. The push to lower the voting age to 18 had some validity when the country had a draft that required 18-year-olds to serve in the military. However, today's young men and women enter military service voluntarily, so the slogan, “old enough to fight, old enough to vote” is no longer applicable. In this nation's first election, males age 21 or older were allowed to vote, but the life expectancy back then was somewhere south of 50, and most 21-year-old men were married and embarked of their life's work. In today's society, 21-year-olds are either still in college or have just graduated, and have not yet come up against the reality of earning a living. By the time they're 25, they have had a few years to understand what it is to be a wage-earner and a taxpayer, and they are aware of the differing political philosophies that compete to run their country.

Who came up with idea to let out-of-state college students vote where they go to school? How do we know that they didn't get an absentee ballot from the home state, and vote twice? They may have been assured by a political operative that doing so is no big deal, but in fact vote fraud is a felony, and conviction will impact everything they do for the rest of their lives. This procedure sounds like a solution in search of a problem, and should be discontinued.

Next, let's look at absentee balloting and early voting. Absentee ballots are available to any U. S. citizen who, for a variety of reasons, cannot be at their polling place on Election Day. The primary users of absentee ballots are serving in our military. For the past several elections, a number of states have been late in mailing these ballots out, with the result that many military voters did not receive their ballots in time to return them in time to be counted. This form of vote suppression was abetted by the George Soros-funded “Secretary of State project”, which attempted to elect liberal-leaning individuals to that office in every state, with the assumption that these officials would, once in office, continue to delay the mailing of absentee ballots, thus keeping those ballots, which are primarily conservative, out of the final tally. Fortunately, the project was ultimately unsuccessful, and seems to have been abandoned. Early voting seems like a good idea. As more and more people are voting, congestion at the polls is admittedly a problem. But, how early should voting be allowed? Who maintains security over these votes? During the recent election season, it appeared that different states, and even different cities, had varying rules about how early people could cast their votes. Why not standardize “early voting” as one week before Election Day? Certainly, even the busiest citizens could find time in seven days to cast their votes.

Now for the real hot-button issue-voter ID cards. As mentioned earlier in this piece, one state wants everybody to vote so badly that they passed a law making it illegal for poll workers to ask for a second form of ID if the person has a voter ID card in their possession. Of course, in many cases the card was provided them by a political organization without any knowledge that the recipient was in fact eligible to vote. In that state, you can show up at the polls with a voter ID card in the name of Mickey Mouse, Robin Hood, King Tut or any other name and be able to vote without challenge. This is not just wrong, it's criminal. Absent the denizens of the loony left, who doesn't think that everybody should have to have a picture ID to vote? According to the census bureau, over 80% of eligible voters already possess a driver's license with their picture on it. For the other 20%, the DMV, for ten dollars, will provide a picture ID, good for eight years. It seems self-evident that any person who can get to the polling place once a year can get to the DMV once every eight years.

Some of the ideas proposed above may seem radical, and maybe some are. However, reform of our electoral process has to start someplace before our system becomes as corrupted as those in third-world countries like Venezuela. After all, this is America. We're better than that. Aren't we?

John Jamieson

Prince Edward