The illegal immigrant advocates at CASA de Maryland have really called in the big guns with their lawsuit in Maryland aimed at thwarting a popular voter referendum on the so-called Maryland DREAM Act, which provides for in-state tuition for illegal immigrants.
The law firm for which former Democratic National Committee (DNC) general counsel Joseph Sandler works has taken up the case, the Washington Post's Aaron Davis reported this morning.
Davis quoted Sandler's concerns about fraud in the petition-gathering process whereby a large number of petitions were generated from a website linked to a database of registered voters:
“There’s no safeguard. If someone knows your name, Zip code and date of birth, which might be on your Facebook page, the computer will print out that information exactly,” said Joseph E. Sandler, a top election-law lawyer and former general counsel for the Democratic National Committee, whose firm is litigating the case pro bono for the plaintiffs. “There is no way to make sure the voter whose name appears on the petition is the one who printed it out and signed it.
“Maryland law makes this deliberately difficult,” Sandler added. “We live in a representative democracy. We don’t live by mob rule; not every law is supposed to go to the voters.”
Of course, Sandler seems to be selectively concerned about voter fraud. After all, he represented the Democratic Party of Indiana when it sought to overturn the state's law requiring photo identification for voting. That law was passed to prevent voter fraud, to very the identity of those going to the polls.
That case, Indiana Democratic Party v. Rokita was consolidated with Crawford v. Marion County Election Board and decided in April 2008. Liberal Associate Justice John Paul Stevens delivered the opinion of the court in the 6-3 decision that upheld upheld the Hoosier State's photo ID law.
