The Democrats have a plan to get reelected despite sinking poll numbers. It is called universal voter registration.

Have you been wondering why they are pushing so many unpopular bills all at once, as though they didn’t care what the voters wanted? Ruining our health care system, sacrificing our national sovereignty, pandering to terrorists, increasing our energy costs, plunging the nation into hopeless debt, and trampling on individual rights? Have you been wondering why the Democrats are so unconcerned that they lost two governorships in landslide votes in Virginia and New Jersey?

They plan to change the electoral landscape before voters can retaliate. Here’s how, as described by Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund, speaking at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Restoration Weekend this past November:

Transcript:

Democrats were very rattled by the November 3rd election results. What do liberals do when they lose elections? They change the rules. In January, Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank will propose universal voter registration.

What is universal voter registration? It means all of the state laws on elections will be overridden by a federal mandate. The feds will tell the states, “Take everyone on every list of welfare recipients you have, take everyone on every list of unemployed you have, take everyone on every list of property owners, take everyone on every list of driver’s license holders, and register them to vote regardless of whether they want to be.”

By the way, there’ll be felon reinfranchisement too. At that point, you have destroyed the integrity of the registration process.

Now they will sell this very cleverly. They will say, “Well, OK, ACORN did have some problems with voter registration. We shouldn’t have these third party rogue groups out there. So let’s put ACORN out of business. Let’s register everybody.”

Now the problem, of course, is there are a lot of duplicates. And there are a lot of people on those rolls who are illegal aliens. It’s not a clean list. They don’t care. So, this is the issue you haven’t heard about. There’s a reason you haven’t heard about it. They don’t want you to hear about it.

The path between the day this bill is introduced and the day it hits the House floor will probably be less than two weeks. Get ready for it. You can stop it. Don’t get me wrong. But this is their stealth bill that is even more sneaky than the health care bill.

From Democrats’ suicide strategy; do they know something we don’t? by Jim Simpson (12/29/09):

Much has been made about how Democrats are committing political suicide with the healthcare bill and all the other onerous legislation they have proposed and/or passed this year. There is no mistaking that these actions are extremely unpopular….

But those who believe in this “Democrat suicide” model implicitly assume next November’s elections will be free and fair….

From Dems positioning to rig November elections? by Allan Erickson (1/04/10):

Can falsified registrations become votes? If the feds push universal voter registration by overriding state elections procedures, you bet, says John Fund of the WSJ….

If you think ACORN voter registration and fraud threaten the integrity of the American electoral process, just wait until Chuck Schumer and Barney Frank get their way.

For many years, John Fund has been warning about Democrat efforts to redesign the electoral process. These ‘reforms’ are sold as ways of improving the process. Fund insists they are designed to manage favorable outcomes for Democrats, going so far as to say last November that the Democrats are working to subvert and corrupt the voter registration process….

We have always held to the tradition that individuals register themselves. This is a built-in system to maintain integrity. Allowing the federal government to jam universal voter registration opens the process to corruption, but that is the purpose.

Democrats know full well they’ll reap millions of votes in the process, once the process is corrupted in this way.

From What the Dems know that we don’t by Jim Simpson (1/4/10):

Many are puzzled that Democrats persist in ramming unpopular and destructive legislation down our collective throats while seemingly unconcerned by their plummeting poll numbers. A widespread belief is that the Democrats are committing political suicide and will be swept from one or both houses of Congress with unprecedented electoral losses next November. But since Democrat politicians rarely do things that will not ultimately benefit themselves, this column asked two weeks ago: “what do they know that we don’t?”

We may have found out. It’s called universal voter registration….

The problems with universal voter registration are numerous and obvious. Many state lists include vast numbers of illegals, including some states which allow illegals to obtain driver’s licenses; because many homeowners have more than one home there will be duplicates; because so many people are on so many separate federal and state government agency lists, there will be duplicates, and because so many lists exist with little or no cross-checking capability these duplicates are likely to go uncorrected. Add to this the fact that Dems hope to extend voting rights to felons and the whole thing begins to look like a nationwide Democrat voter registration drive facilitated by taxpayers….

UPDATE, January 21, 2010: Jim Simpson reports a correction to the remarks made by John Fund last year:

The issue was John Fund’s naming of Congressman Barney Frank (D-MA) as pushing universal voter registration legislation along with point man, Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY). Fund said this in a recorded panel discussion at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend last November. I cited Fund’s remarks in an article published in early January. Now there is no dispute that universal voter registration legislation is being contemplated and that Chuck Schumer has been its main instigator, but when Frank subsequently objected to being identified with it, Fund corrected himself that he had meant to say “John Conyers.”

UPDATE, February 3, 2010: U.S. Rep. Barney Frank has posted a press release on his government website specifically denying this story:

…John Fund, a writer for the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal, claimed that Congressman Barney Frank and Senator Chuck Schumer had hatched a plan to game the election system by registering felons, illegal aliens and others to vote…. Congressman Frank has never worked on any such legislation and in fact heard about it for the first time after the story was launched in the conservative media….

Here is video of Barney Frank speaking about this subject on the floor of the House of Representatives: