According to Matthew Vadum’s American Thinker article “Registering the Poor to Vote is Un-American”, “It is profoundly antisocial and un-American to empower the nonproductive segments of the population to destroy the country — which is precisely why Barack Obama zealously supports registering welfare recipients to vote.”

Vadum goes on to explain that it’s all part of an elaborate plot “to destroy the American system.”

Responding to criticism, Vadum later emphasized that he wasn’t questioning the right of poor people to vote, he was just saying it’s wrong an un-American to help them register or vote, because it “could lead to the destruction of the republic.” While it’s bad enough when anybody helps them, he says, “It is even worse that our tax dollars are used to register welfare recipients at welfare offices. It is a policy that would cause the Founding Fathers to roll over in their graves.”

“Of course,” adds Vadum, “those who are legally qualified to vote should be allowed to vote but our tax dollars shouldn’t be used to underwrite the destruction of the republic.”

Since the evidence is that it’s extremely rarer for anyone to try to vote under someone else’s name (and there are far easier and far more effective ways to commit election fraud), the voter-ID laws passed lately by a number of Republican-controlled legislatures are really intended to discourage turnout by people least likely to have a government-issued voter ID — students, the poor, the elderly, and so on — who also just happen to have a somewhat greater tendency to vote Democratic.

What distinguishes Vadum is that he’s explicit about wanting to make it harder for the less-well-off to vote.

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