The Daily Caller went to former Congressman Artur Davis, a Democrat from Alabama who ran unsuccessfully for governor last year, and got an interesting rundown of how voter fraud works in the South (and, one supposes, in a lot of other places).

(Link in case the embed doesn’t load)

I can corroborate this to a substantial extent, because in January 2004, the night before LSU beat Oklahoma in the national championship game, I ran into a guy I went to high school with in a New Orleans establishment where adult beverages were served. Said high school acquaintance had been a functionary of sorts in the successful campaign for Attorney General of Charles Foti, a Democrat machine politician from the Big Easy who had ingratiated himself within many of the alphabet soup left-wing organizations in Orleans Parish which had a well-deserved reputation for turning out ungodly numbers of voters there.

In his cups, this acquaintance bragged to me that Republicans in Louisiana would never emerge as the state’s dominant party because “you don’t know how to win elections.” When I protested that the outgoing governor was a two-term Republican, at least in name, and that the GOP had carried Louisiana in the majority of recent presidential elections, he laughed. “Your boy Jindal couldn’t win, could he? You can’t beat Mary Landrieu, can you?”

He then told me that the vote in Orleans alone would always be enough to carry a Democrat candidate “who knows what he’s doing” into office in a statewide race. And then he told me how. He said every election cycle, the abovementioned alphabet soup organizations would conduct voter registration drives and sign up all kinds of people – black, white, live, dead, real and fictional, plus lots and lots of felons – in precincts where no Republicans existed.

But unlike Davis’ description, my rather soused acquaintance made no mention of absentee ballots. He said on Election Day all those thousands and thousands of sketchy registrations would be a gold mine. Because, he said, buses and vans would descend on the housing projects early in the morning with machine operatives in tow, and cash money on hand. And there were always lots of folks willing to ride in exchange for a few $20 bills in cash. Those buses and vans would then hit “key” precincts where pre-cooked voter registrations and friendly election workers awaited, and when the bus arrived there would be a list of folks who hadn’t voted (largely because they were dead or fictional, I assume) from which the riders could vote.

He said this system would persist forever, because “those nice white ladies from the suburbs you Republicans use as poll-watchers aren’t going to Central City or the Lower Nine” on Election Day. Meaning that for lack of physical courage the GOP couldn’t put a stop to Democrat voter fraud.

Of course, my acquaintance was sorry to see Hurricane Katrina strike New Orleans some 20 months later, because not only did Katrina destroy the old-line Democrat brand in Louisiana but the migration out of Orleans Parish which resulted led to a restructuring of the state’s voter rolls. And that was the end of the wholesale voter fraud which had made Election Night such a tragicomedy in Louisiana – wherein Orleans Parish was always the last to report, and the vote totals there had always been both disproportionately Democrat and somehow always just large enough to carry the favored candidate home if the race was close.

Democrats like to say voter fraud is so rare that might as well not exist. That’s simply not true. It happens, and furthermore it’s easily done with the right machine to make it happen.

And that’s why requiring an official photo ID at the ballot box is not only a small inconvenience for voters to undergo – particularly when there are almost always more registered drivers than registered voters around the country – but a reasonable safeguard for honest elections. That Democrats regard voter ID laws as racism is as much a stain on that party’s honor as it is circumstantial proof they regard voter fraud as a vital part of their electoral strategy.