Why did Democrats applaud the loathsome community organizer Melowese Richardson, a freshly released, unrepentant voter fraud felon, at a recent "voting rights" rally in Ohio?

Because, like Richardson, they believe they are entitled to vote more than once against a system they see as unjust.  Some serial voters do what they do in order to exact revenge against a society they feel did them or their ancestors wrong.  Richardson is far from alone.  Double-voting is distressingly common.

Many leftists have contempt for the electoral process because they don’t believe in the electoral system as it is constituted in capitalist America.  To them, elections are already a fraud – an instrument of the rich, or as Saul Alinsky prefers to call them, the Haves.  If the electoral system doesn’t serve “the people,” but is only an instrument of the Haves, then election fraud is justified as the path to a future that will serve the Have-Nots, as David Horowitz has explained.

This belief helps Democrats and the rest of the left rationalize their habitual efforts to suppress and cancel out lawfully cast votes.  It helps to explain the strenuous efforts of leftists like former Congressman Jesse Jackson, Jr. (D-Ill.), now federal prisoner number 32451-016, to assure the public that voter registration fraud is no big deal and that fraudulent registrations almost never turn into fraudulent votes.

This is why liberal fascists inside and outside government routinely excuse electoral fraud – in all its manifestations – arguing in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary that such fraud is merely a Republican invention created to keep minorities and the poor down.

This is why these enemies of democracy tried with fanatical zeal to silence the heroic Catherine Engelbrecht and her good government group True the Vote.

This is why grandstanding Congressman Elijah Cummings (D-Md.) – as we just learned – apparently conspired with former IRS mandarin Lois Lerner to sabotage Engelbrecht's organization, which is America's leading grassroots electoral integrity group.

This is why the 58-year-old Richardson bragged about voting twice for President Obama in 2012.  The well-spoken, seemingly intelligent poll worker clearly knew what she was doing.  She didn't think it was wrong. 

When charged, Richardson was indignant as she vowed to battle the accusations in court.  "Absolutely, absolutely, I'll fight it for Mr. Obama and for Mr. Obama's right to sit as president of the United States."

Richardson told Tom McKee of WCPO-TV on camera that she repeatedly voted in the names of others.  Her unlawfully cast ballots canceled out lawfully voted ballots and effectively deprived other citizens of their right to vote.  In the past, Ku Klux Klansmen and other Democratic Party operatives accomplished the same results by using the threat of violence to prevent votes from being cast.

Nowadays the Democratic Party outsources its voter fraud business to community organizers like Richardson.

At the rally in Cincinnati, Richardson was called to the stage to be honored after Al Sharpton's National Action Network campaigned to free her.  The community organizing group helped to win her early release from her five-year prison term by arguing that she received an inappropriately harsh sentence because she was black.

Democrat Sharpton energetically lunged at Republicans, theoretically the party victimized by Richardson's crimes.  Sharpton, recently outed as an FBI informant (he claims his life was threatened by fellow gangsters from a different crime family), accused Republicans of trying to suppress the vote, saying it "is all a scheme to disempower and disenfranchise the vote in Ohio."

Displaying his characteristically tortured diction, the tinfoil hat-wearing Obama confidant and racial arsonist said, "Nobody gave us the right to vote and nobody is going to give it to us now.  We fought for it and we're going to fight for our right to keep it." 

Sharpton received standing ovations from the crowd of close to 500, who shared his paranoid delusion that someone out there was actually trying to take the right to vote away from American citizens.  If my friend Andrew Breitbart were still among the living, there is a good chance he would offer a sizable reward to anyone who could identify an American trying to deprive citizens of their voting rights.

Like Sharpton and the other socialists, President Obama himself no doubt shares the belief that election fraud is justifiable because in a sense it compensates the poor for (allegedly) having little political power.

Left-wingers commit these distressingly common atrocities daily because they believe it is their moral right – perhaps even their duty – to commit voter fraud and to facilitate its commission by their comrades and community organizations.

They care about one thing and one thing only – power – because without power, they cannot bring about a fundamental transformation of America.

It is no coincidence that Obama's role model, the small-c communist Saul Alinsky, used the word power 191 times in his fairly slim magnum opus, Rules for Radicals.  (In case you were wondering, the figure of 191 excludes variants of the word power, such as powerful.)

Again, power is everything to these people.  Groups like ACORN and Sharpton's National Action Network help them get it.

Alinsky saw his mission as redeeming America by creating “mass organizations to seize power and give it to the people,” as if the people did not already rule America.  And it was certainly an odd choice of words for Alinsky, a holier-than-thou, self-professed champion of democracy, to say that these organizations must “seize power.”

Such groups, which he called “People’s Organizations,” must be dedicated "to an eternal war ... against poverty, misery, delinquency, disease, injustice, hopelessness, despair, and unhappiness.” 

Alinsky intoned ominously that failing to use “power for a more equitable distribution of the means of life for all people signals the end of the revolution and the start of the counterrevolution.”

No tactic is beyond the pale, Alinsky wrote.  In this war “against the social menaces of mankind there can be no compromise.  It is life or death.”

This antisocial, Machiavellian attitude dominated the leadership of the now-defunct Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), a group that in 2011 was convicted in Nevada in a massive electoral fraud conspiracy. 

ACORN employees have said the group didn't make much of an effort to remove bogus voter registrations.  “There’s no quality control on purpose, no checks and balances,” said Nate Toler, who worked on an ACORN voter effort in Missouri.  “The internal motto is, ‘We don’t care if it’s a lie, just so long as it stirs up the conversation.'"

Zach Polett, who was executive director of ACORN-affiliated Project Vote, dismissed public concern about voter fraud and is contemptuous of the rule of the law:

Progressives should speak out clearly against efforts to maintain the status quo by excluding voters through illegal restrictions, intimidation, manipulation or misinformation.  We have to take a stand for fair and accessible elections, and recognize that efforts to curb so-called ‘voter fraud’ are in reality attempts to disenfranchise and silence our least powerful citizens.

Polett is channeling the Marxist academic-activists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven here.  His statement translates thus: all efforts to ensure electoral integrity and the rule of law are illegitimate and aimed at bolstering the oppressive capitalist system. 

Cloward didn’t worry about fraud, either.  “It’s better to have a little bit of fraud than to leave people off the rolls who belong there,” he said.

As everyone knows by now, Obama worked for and represented ACORN in court.  He supports their ugly values wholeheartedly.  In 2007, Obama told an ACORN audience:

I’ve been fighting alongside ACORN on issues you care about my entire career.  Even before I was an elected official, when I ran Project Vote voter registration drives in Illinois, ACORN was smack dab in the middle of it, and we appreciate your work.

Richardson is associated with an ACORN-like Cincinnati-based pressure group called Communities United for Action.  Since President Obama was inaugurated, the group has taken in a $25,000 grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to educate children about "environmental justice."

Communities United for Action is an affiliate of an anti-capitalist organizing network called National People’s Action (NPA).  Radical financier George Soros has given $1 million to NPA since 2010 through his tax-exempt Foundation to Promote Open Society.  The Woods Fund of Chicago, known for its famous former board members Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, has funneled $90,000 to NPA since 2009.

Soros also helped to underwrite Richardson's legal defense by contributing to the left-wing public interest law firm known as the Ohio Justice and Policy Center.  That organization, which took on Richardson's criminal case, received funding through one of Soros's philanthropies, the Foundation to Promote Open Society, which has given the group at least $125,000 since 2009.

Soros and the rest of the left-wing activist community will keep on funding groups that claim that voter fraud isn't a problem about which any reasonable person should be concerned.

This guarantees many more Melowese Richardsons in the future.

Matthew Vadum (website) is an investigative journalist in Washington, D.C., and author of the ACORN/Obama expose, Subversion Inc.: How Obama's ACORN Red Shirts are Still Ripping Off and Terrorizing American Taxpayers.  Follow him on Twitter.  Email him at matthewvadum [at] gmail.com.