“If you early voted, go vote again tomorrow. One more time’s not going to hurt.” So said Opelousas, Louisiana, mayor Don Cravins, Sr. (shown) in a video now making the rounds. In the footage, shot November 3 at a private event, the Democrat politician can also be heard reassuring the audience he was addressing, “Tomorrow we’re gonna elect Earl Taylor as the D.A., so he won’t prosecute you if you vote twice.” Taylor is a fellow Democrat who did, in fact, win reelection on November 4.
Cravins, along with embattled Senator Mary Landrieu, faces a Louisiana run-off election November 6; he goes up against another Democrat in his contest, unlike Landrieu, who is polling well behind Republican opponent Representative Bill Cassidy. She certainly is polling well in the Cravins household, however: The mayor’s son, Don Cravins, Jr., is Landrieu’s chief of staff.
And Cravins certainly was not craven about issuing his get-out-the-(illegal)vote appeal. Writes the Daily Mail:
Video … [shows] him telling a crowd in his home town that “if you ‘early voted,’ go vote again tomorrow. One more time’s not going to hurt.”
… “Tomorrow we’re gonna elect Earl Taylor as the D.A. so he won’t prosecute you if you vote twice,” Cravins said.
… Cravins’ remarks were met first by laughs and then by wild cheers as he told the crowd to “vote number 99” — Mary Landrieu’s ballot-line number.
While the Mail reports that Landrieu “did not respond to multiple requests for comment,” some would no doubt claim the mayor was joking. And that would likely be his defense. But not many people are laughing, least of all the members of the Black Conservatives Fund. They put out a video narrated by Lousiana state senator Elbert Guillory — who made news last year by joining the GOP, thereby becoming the first black Republican to serve in the Lousiana Senate since the Reconstruction era — in which Guillory called Cravins’ appeal for fraud “shocking, even for the sad swamp of Democrat politics here in Louisiana.”
But while it may be shocking, it’s certainly not unprecedented. In another edition of Mayors Behaving Badly, Bridgeport, Connecticut, mayor Bill Finch was caught on tape joking about vote fraud in 2012, telling then-U.S. Senate candidate Christopher Murphy that “even if it takes a couples of days to get the results, ‘You can be guaranteed you’re going to get the vote,’” wrote the Weekly Standard. And given Finch’s history, his quip could bring to mind the saying “A joke is truth wrapped in a smile.” As the Standard also reported:
Bridgeport provided a crucial and dubious margin of victory to Democratic and Working Families Governor Dannel P. Malloy in 2010 amidst unprecedented chaos at the city’s polling places. The 2010 Bridgeport assault on democracy included photocopied ballots, altered hours at polling places, a mysterious bag of votes and Finch’s abuse of the city’s emergency notification system to increase turnout on Election Day.
Chris Murphy would go on to win the 2012 Senate race over his Republican opponent, wrestling magnate Linda McMahon.
And many wonder how many races vote fraudsters have wrestled away from popular will. While Democrat opponents of voter-identification measures have claimed that electoral fraud “hardly every occurs,” even one of the Left’s longtime spokesmen disagrees. Commenting on the practice of illegally voting in others’ names, Chris Matthews, liberal pundit and former chief of staff for late Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, admitted in 2011:
I know this goes on. It has gone on in old-time politics. It has gone on since the ’50s that I know about. People call up, see if you voted or you’re not going to vote. Then, all of a sudden, somebody does come and vote for you. This is an old strategy in big city politics.
… I know all about it in North Philly. It’s what went on. And I believe it still goes on.
I reported on this topic in-depth in my 2005 piece “Democrats and Deep Vote Fraud.”
Then, Townhall introduced the Cravins story by putting it in further historical context, writing, “Who’s up for a fresh addition to the ever-expanding ‘voter fraud is a Republican myth’ file? Democratic officials and campaign operatives have been caught on tape encouraging illegal voting on several occasions in recent election cycles, and anti-voter ID activists have literally cheered a swing-state poll worker who was convicted of the practice.”
Just as the crowd cheered Cravins when he issued his call to fraud.
But it will take more than cheers and a little creative vote tallying to put Senator Landrieu over the top on Saturday. The Louisiana Democrat, who votes with Barack Obama 97 percent of the time, cannot even manage half that figure in the polls and trails opponent Bill Cassidy by double digits.
So sugar and spice and supporters voting twice? Perhaps Louisianans have concluded, that’s what Mary Landrieu is made of.
