New Law Requires Democrats, Independents to Have National Security Clearance Before Voting

News From 2016 – Reported Now!

[Editor’s Note:  This is part of a series of news reports from the year 2016 based on Mitt Romney winning the Presidency and Republicans Taking control of the Senate and retaining control of the House.  These stories are not a predictions of what will happen, but they are indications of what could happen.  That in itself should be scary enough.]

Non Republican Voters Must Have Security Clearance to Register and Vote

Washington (AP.) June 17, 2016.   President Romney signed into law a requirement that any individual who is not a registered Republican and who has not voted Republican in the last two elections must obtain a security clearance in order to vote in the 2016 elections.  The law was passed by the Republican controlled Congress to combat massive voter fraud, which the Republicans defined as anyone not voting Republican.

Under the provisions of the law, a person who was not a registered Republican and whose voting record indicated they had not voted the straight Republican ticket would have to undergo the same security background check that individuals working with classified information have to undergo.  The cost of the process was expected to be set at $2,745.00.  To accommodate the large number of expected requests the government has contracted with a private security firm. 

While individuals will have to pay for the process themselves, President Romney said that the cost was minimal compared to the benefits of elimination of voter fraud.  Furthermore the President added that exemptions would be granted for real Americans, those whose names were standard Anglo-Saxon varieties and where the person was not Asian, African American, Jewish, Irish Catholic or gay.  “A Caucasian couple with the name of Smith or Jones is not who we are after” the President said, “its those people whose names are Asian, or Mexican, or sound foreign, because we know they are not real Americans.”

The private security firm, Bain Industries, will be given complete access to voter records, including voting history and which candidates individual voters have voted for in past elections.  This information is available under the secret provisions of the Patriot Act, which allows the government to electronically determine the candidates a person voted for even when the ballot was supposed to be secret.  The existence of the provision was made public during the trial of Alfredo Espinosa, a U. S. citizens arrested in Alabama for driving without papers. 

Mr. Espinosa was convicted after the prosecutors, using the secret data, revealed he had voted for a Democratic city council candidate in Mobile.  Mr. Espinosa’s defense, that the election was non-partisan failed to convince the jury and he was convicted and sent to jail for three years.  His conviction was upheld by the Supreme Court that ruled the government had a national security interest in tracking who people voted for, and that Mr. Espinosa’s actions in driving without papers warranted his incarceration.

The decision to use a private security firm to do the security clearances has been controversial.  However the President defended the action saying the firm would create private sector jobs and that the fact that his blind trust had invested in the firm had no bearing on its selection in a non bid process.  Democratic protests about the action were largely ignored because, as one Republican legislator put it, “there ain’t gonna be no Democrats around in 2017 anyway.”