Saturday, July 05, 2008

Courting the Immigrant Vote

It’s a well-established pattern in the United States that the Democrats repeatedly push to ease barriers to immigration, institute “motor-voter” registration, reduce or eliminate the identification requirements for voters at the polls, and hasten the naturalization of immigrants.

All of these strategies are aimed at increasing the number of Mexican voters, which in practice means (surprise, surprise!) more people voting for the Democrats.

Spain evidently has a similar situation. According to ANSAmed:

Spain: Socialists’ Congress to Propose Vote to Immigrants

Rome, July 3 — The congress of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), which will be held from tomorrow until Sunday in Madrid, will approve a motion to propose voting rights to immigrants in the local elections, organisation secretary and second in the ranks of PSOE, Jose Blanco, said in an interview today with the public television, El Pais and El Mundo wrote online.

Blanco stated that the proposal aimed to allow immigrants to vote as of 2011. Some requirements, such as being a permanent resident in Spain for “two or three years” will be necessary.

Here’s my favorite part, though:
- - - - - - - - -
Moreover, only immigrants from countries that have concluded “reciprocity accords” with Spain — that is where Spaniards residing abroad are or will be allowed to vote — will be able to go to the polls.

OK, reciprocity sounds like a good idea. But many of Spain’s immigrants come from countries where voting is neither held in high esteem nor practiced frequently. How many times do Spanish citizens in Chad, Morocco, and Mali get the opportunity to vote locally? Perhaps these countries have thriving democratic institutions that I am unaware of…?

But never mind that. How many votes do the Spanish Socialists stand to gain from this deal?

According to PSOE’s calculations, quoted by El Pais, the measure will concern 1,300,000 immigrants coming above all from Morocco, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru. The new voters might change the political equilibriums in cities where they are most present, like Madrid and Barcelona.

Yes, and presumably they will tilt the scales permanently towards the Socialists.


Hat tip: insubria.

6 comments:

Afonso Henriques said...

Aren't we used to this?

The prostitution of the Western leaders goes even further, seems a good title to this.

Anonymous said...

I'm pretty sure that "sanctuary cities" like San Francisco already have a significant number of aliens illegally voting. Obvious cases of voting fraud like the election of Governor Gregoire in Washington State, and the revelations from various investigations of ACORN, still haven't resulted in any prosecutions. If the opposition party won't nail the Democrats to the wall on this issue, and to date they haven't, the integrity of our elections is already spoiled.

In Spain, though, I would be more worried about Muslim immigrants voting themselves into power and bypassing the Socialists (useful idiots) entirely. Installing Sharia and eliminating the last vestiges of immigration control could be accomplished by political fiat, advancing the reconquest of Spain by decades.

Conservative Swede said...

Spain has soon surpassed Sweden in maniac multicultural policies. And that's not to say a little. Spain is already more obnoxious than Sweden. I used to love Spain.

Diamed said...

Democracy has been cracked as a system. Nowadays rulers just import their voters in whatever numbers they need to keep power. The natives have no further say in their government since there's always teeming masses of billions of foreigners eager to move to your rich, peaceful corner of the earth. The idea that we're all equal and therefore everyone should get one vote obviously leads to this kind of chicanery.

Teach said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Baron Bodissey said...

Teach --

Please don't paste long URLs into the comments; they make the post page too wide and mess up the appearance of the permalink page.

Use link tags; the instructions are at the top of the full post's comment section.

--------------------------

Teach said...

I think that voting by non-citizens is a bad idea, and the concept used in Germany of "Guest Workers" is a good one. I think that there should be a requirement for citizens to vote, as in Belgium where people are fined for not voting. Also, exclusively voting by mail is a bad idea because of the potential for families influencing votes, potentially selling of vote and other fraud and chicanery.

Contrary to the earlier comment, in Washington State in 2004 voting fraud and chicanery were perpetrated by Republicans:

- Chicanery in the election of Governor Gregoire where significant numbers of votes for Gregoire were missed in three counties (Pierce, Snohomish and King, in obvious Democratic areas) and there were extremely few missed votes for Rossi. What circumstance could lead to such a coincidence? Governor Gregoire was correct in having all 39 of Washington's counties perform hand recounts. Rossi's cowardly hiding behind his lawyers attempts to stop the counting of legitimately cast votes was repugnant. Even the Republican Secretary of State accepted the certified recount results.

- Fraud in the election of Republican Sutherland, successful candidate for Commissioner of Public Lands, where fraudulent claims of endorsement were mailed to 425,000 households (in an election that was decided by less than 25% of that number), failed to list that the mailing was paid for by companies regulated by Sutherland's department, and illegally used the Seal of the State of Washington. This was not a mistake - the group had been notified that they were fraudulently claiming endorsement by Washington Conservation Voters when in reality WCV had endorsed Sutherland's opponent. Also note that the perpetrators "The Mainstream Republicans" admitted to the offenses, and that the (Republican) head of the Public Disclosure Commission refused the PDC staff recommendation to refer the case to the Attorney General, while giving the offenders a slap on the wrist including not having to send a retraction or correcting mailing.

link (pdf)

- Fraud in the election of Republican Sam Reed, successful candidate for Secretary of State for illegal solicitation of contributions.

link (pdf)

I come on strong because my daughter was one of the uncounted that received her notification after a response was due. Don't you see this as part of a disturbing pattern that consistently made a few percentage points difference in favor of Republicans in battleground states like Washington and Ohio?