I'll bet you never thought about it this way before, but in America, we have an election fraud lobby.

"What do you mean by that, Farah?" you might ask. "Election fraud is illegal. How can you have a lobby to promote illegality?"

And that's really the point of this column. It's true that we have an election fraud lobby. It's a big one. It's a heavily funded one. And it extends from ACORN-style grass-roots activist types all the way to the man sitting in the Oval Office.

What this lobby is all about is ensuring that the party behind it never loses an election again — winning, as the old Marxist slogan went, "by any means necessary."

The most important activity and initiative for this election fraud lobby is to open polling places to anyone who shows up, regardless of their citizenship status, their residency, their registration, their age, and any other qualifications. And the way they do this is to fight against all voter-identification requirements — labeling any attempt at standards of fairness and propriety as racist efforts equivalent to Jim Crow poll taxes.

What possible legitimate reason could anyone have to oppose voter-ID laws? Can you think of any?

There is only one reason to oppose them — because you want to commit massive voter fraud without any chance of getting caught, without any enforcement mechanism.

What's astonishing to me about this is that even some Republicans are going along with the program. Don't they understand where this leads — to the extinction of their party? Don't they realize that's the goal? Are they too intimidated to stand up against bogus accusations of racism, even to protect their own political self-interest and survival? This is just unbelievable to me.

My guess is if you asked Americans whether voters should have to produce identification before voting, about 99 percent would say yes. Yet Democrats are having their way on this issue through litigation, coercion, legislation and intimidation.

By the way, this is an issue that will "fundamentally transform America" just as Barack Obama promised to do on the eve of the 2008 presidential election.

If "open voting" becomes a national reality, you might as well call off elections altogether. They will no longer have any meaning. The outcomes will have been decided in advance like they are in Third-World banana republics.

Think about this: Can you drive without identification? No. Can you register for school without identification? No. Can you play Little League sports without identification? No. Can you withdraw cash from a bank without identification? No. Can you even open a bank account without identification? No.

In a society like that, carrying identification is not burdensome. We all do it all the time. So why would it be a problem to bring ID to the polling place for what is the most important civic duty Americans perform? There is no other reason for opposing voter-ID laws other than the desire to promote voter fraud.

Democrats have been playing this game for a long time. In 1960, the first Chicago Mayor Richard Daley ran an impressive get-out-the-vote program for presidential candidate John F. Kennedy. Boss Daley did such a good job persuading people to vote in that election that thousands of people rose from the dead to vote.

That effort was decisive in Kennedy winning the election. The story goes that Richard Nixon didn't protest because he believed doing so would cause Americans to lose faith in their electoral system. No kidding.

That's exactly what should happen — every time you hear a cry of protest against voter ID. What could be crazier than allowing people to vote without an ID?

To find out more about Joseph Farah and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.