Is Healthcare.gov Designed To Register Dem Voters?

Michael Ramirez, Editorial Cartoon

Andrew Malcolm, IBD Editorial: Corruption: The crash-prone government health-care site asks applicants if they want to register to vote as they try to sign up for ObamaCare. By sheer coincidence, a plurality of the uninsured are likely Democratic voters.

Call it Motor Voter on steroids — the piggybacking of voter registration to an otherwise unrelated government function.

Those trying to navigate Healthcare.gov, a website that looks and functions as if designed by the department of motor vehicles, are being asked if they want to register to vote just in time for crucial 2014 midterm elections that are likely to be a referendum on ObamaCare.

Indeed, Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services spokesman Brian Cook cites the Motor Voter law, also known as the National Voter Registration Act of 1993, as justification.

The law, he said, "requires states to offer voter registration (at) all offices that provide 'public assistance' (including Medicaid applications). Because people applying on Healthcare.gov could be eligible for either Medicaid or Marketplace coverage, we will be providing info on voter registration to people who request it."

It perhaps has not escaped the attention of an administration that used another government agency, the IRS, to harass and intimidate potential political opponents in the Tea Party and other conservative groups that the uninsured are a potential treasure trove of Democratic voters, according to an August 2012 Washington Post-Kaiser Family Foundation poll.

It found that uninsured Americans supported Barack Obama over Republican Mitt Romney more than 2-to-1 (62% to 27%).

"The (website) launch has not gone well," observed Nick Novak, a spokesman for the John K. MacIver Institute for Public Policy, who noticed the voter-registration question on the Wisconsin site. "Why are they cluttering up the site?"

And why, he further wondered, weren't applicants asked to register to vote only after they successfully signed up for ObamaCare?

We'd suggest it makes perfect sense to register people to vote at the same time they are being forced to become permanently dependent on government for their health care. We've already seen how those most dependent on government services, such as food stamps, tend to vote for bigger, and more Democratic, government.

Thirty-six states are using the federal site and at least five others — California, Connecticut, New York, Vermont and Wisconsin — also are asking or intend to ask customers if they want to register to vote.

Deep-blue California was the first to decide to enforce voter registration requirements through the Affordable Care Act.

"Nearly 5.8 million Californians who are otherwise eligible to vote are not currently registered," said Democratic state Sen. Alex Padilla, who authored the bill enforcing voter registration.

Interestingly, many of the ObamaCare "navigators," who are supposed to guide you through the enrollment process, are affiliated with partisan Democratic-affiliated voter registration groups, at least one with a record of outright vote fraud.

In March, Republicans on the House Ways and Means Committee worried about how Obama-friendly "associations like the now-defunct Acorn" — such as FamiliesUSA and AARP that the administration will fund to help sign up the uninsured — would use applicants' voting information.

We recently noted that United Labor Unions (ULU) Local 100 in New Orleans, which is run by Acorn founder Wade Rathke, announced on its Facebook page that it's gearing up "to do mass enrollment and help navigate people into the marketplaces in Arkansas, Louisiana and Texas under the Affordable Care Act!"

While the health care law requires that government agencies collect vast information about Americans' personal lives, it does not give your Department an interest in whether individual Americans choose to vote," Rep. Charles Boustany, R-La., wrote in a letter to Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius.

Or, we would add, in how they might vote.

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