Posted on 01/04/2012 5:59:43 AM PST by Kaslin
The most consequential election in our lifetime is still 11 months away, but it’s clear from the Obama administration’s order halting South Carolina’s new photo ID law that the Democrats have already brought a gun to the knife fight.
How else to describe this naked assault on the right of a state to create minimal requirements to curb voter fraud?
On Dec. 23, Assistant Attorney General Thomas E. Perez sent a letter ordering South Carolina to stop enforcing its photo ID law. Perez, who heads the Civil Rights division that booted charges against the New Black Panther Party for intimidating voters in Philadelphia in 2008, alleged that South Carolina’s law would disenfranchise thousands of minority voters.
South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson rejected Perez’s math and explained on Fox News why the law is necessary. The state Department of Motor Vehicles audited a state Election Commission report that said 239,333 people were registered to vote but had no photo ID. The DMV found that 37,000 were deceased, more than 90,000 had moved to other states, and others had names not matched to IDs. That left only 27,000 people registered without a photo ID but who could vote by signing an affidavit as to their identity.
Wilson told me by phone on Thursday that he would file a challenge to the order in federal district court in January. Asked whether he felt South Carolina was being singled out, he declined to speculate on motives. However, citing the National Labor Relations Board’s orders to invalidate the voter-approved union card check amendment and to stop a new Boeing plant, and the Justice Department’s suit to halt the immigration law, he said, “there certainly is a pattern of the federal government overreaching into South Carolina.”
Leading Democrats loudly equate recently enacted photo ID legislation as updated versions of Jim Crow laws that once robbed people of their constitutional right to vote simply because of their race. But photo ID laws and other voter integrity measures cover everyone. Like other states, South Carolina provides photo IDs if a person cannot afford one.
The U.S. Constitution empowers the states to enact voting procedures with minimal input from the national government, such as setting the voting age and election days for federal offices. The Fifteenth and Nineteenth amendments ensure that no one is denied the right to vote based on race or sex.
In 1965, Congress passed the Voting Rights Act, which authorizes the U.S. Attorney General or a three-judge panel of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia to review changes to voting procedures or redistricting in nine states (Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Texas and Virginia), some counties in California, Florida, New York, North Carolina and South Dakota, and some townships in Michigan and New Hampshire.
Congress did so to counter clearly established patterns of voter intimidation of blacks. Now, the Justice Department, which, under Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. could be renamed the Retribution Department, looks the other way depending on the race of the parties involved.
In 2008, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s 2005 photo ID law, which the Democratic Party and several interest groups had challenged as a “severe burden.” But, as American Civil Rights Union attorney Peter Ferrara noted in the ACRU’s friend of the court brief:
“No one has been denied the right to vote by the Indiana Voter ID Law. The record clearly establishes without challenge that 99% of the Voting Age Population in Indiana already has the required ID, in the form of driver’s licenses, passports, or other identification. Of the remaining 1%, senior citizens and the disabled are automatically eligible to vote by absentee ballot, and such absentee voting is exempt from the Voter ID Law.”
Does that sound “severe” to you? As Ferrara notes, “the slight burden of additional paperwork for a fraction of 1%, to show who they are and thereby prove their eligibility to vote, cannot come close to outweighing the interests of all legitimate legal voters in maintaining their effective vote.”
In 2005, a bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former U.S. Secretary of State James Baker III found no evidence that requiring photo IDs would suppress the minority vote. The panel recommended a national photo ID system and a campaign to register voters.
In a 2008 column, Mssrs. Carter and Baker cited a study by American University's Center for Democracy and Election Management that echoed the election commission. Among other things, researchers found that in three states— Indiana, Mississippi and Maryland — about 1.2 percent of registered voters had no photo ID.
The Obama Administration is playing the same race card that Democrats have played for decades. But this is not about race; it’s about whether legitimately cast votes will be wiped out by illegally cast votes.
In Chicago, a federal investigation of the 1982 gubernatorial election estimated that at least 100,000 illegal votes had been cast and that voter fraud had been routine for many years. In 1960, Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Chicago Democrat machine almost certainly sealed John F. Kennedy’s presidential election by delaying reporting by Democratically-controlled precincts and counting them for Kennedy.
Republican Richard Nixon had a compelling case for a challenge, but chose not to do so. The media would have crucified him as a sore loser without seriously investigating fraud allegations.
Conversely, in 2000, when Democrat Al Gore challenged George W. Bush’s razor-thin victory in Florida, the media flogged Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris because she refused to overlook “hanging chads” and other questionable vote-counting.
Since the GOP took a majority of governorships and legislatures in 2010 and continued enacting voting safeguards, you can feel the panic in Democratic strongholds.
The stakes are enormous, and the Obama Administration is quite aware of the danger posed by an aroused electorate on a level playing field.
With the economy in a ditch, their only hope of stemming the conservative tide might be to rig the returns, especially where political machines still prevail.
Had argument with recent college grads who didn’t believe it was possible to vote without photo ID, so they didn’t see anything wrong with fraudulent voter registration.....thought it was just another form of protest.....
At that time there were 17 states not requiring photo ID.
The morally evil depraved democrats hate fair elections as all conservatives know.
Voter ID IS a big step toward real democracy and decency !
Some, the RATS and RINOS, don’t want it....It’s about time to make that step !
You betcha! Without massive voter fraud, they can't get elected.
ping
[recent college grads who didn’t believe it was possible to vote without photo ID, so they didn’t see anything wrong with fraudulent voter registration.....thought it was just another form of protest.....]
You see the results of evil NEA teachers and unions destroying and twisting the minds of mushminded children in the depraved communist run public school systems then?
You can vote in Ohio without a photo ID. Even the GOP Secretary of State fought the state legislature to not require it in state elections.
the TRAITORS known as Deomcrats cannot win an election without voter fraud and they know it.
The Dems can then not order you to pay for their union scams where some of the money goes back to the Dem Party.
The Dems can then not control the EPA to shut down coal powered electric plants and drive your rates through the roof.
The Dems can then not load up the social welfare rolls so they have more Dem voters.
The CHIEF DEM playing socialist black liberation crap can not continue to load Muslims into this country. Our first Muslim President wants sharia law just like he helped bring on in Libya and Egypt. And it’s important to continue to attack Israel at every opportunity.
But you can’t understand what and WHY is happening until you understand Obama’s Muslim roots and his supporters. You don’t really believe Wall Street gave this clown $Hundreds of Millions, do you?
Texas law took effect this year, photo ID required for voting.
Free ID is available for those poor people, yet the democRATS will still complain.
I say bring it on Holder, we in TX await the challenge!
Have them show a valid Sosha Security card. Everyone should have one one those.
meanwhile..South of the Border...
The Mexicans don’t mess around with “voter fraud”
.here’s how they deal with voter fraud issues south of the border....and ..its all you need to know about the treasonous, malignant American Left....
“...the Mexican Voter I.D. card has NINE security characteristics, including a fingerprint, a photograph, watermarks and holograms. What is more, in Mexico, the lists of electors that are distributed to political parties include the photo and the full name and address of the electors.”
http://www.electionsquebec.qc.ca/english/news-detail.php?id=609
Reason #3866 to ensure Obama is defeated in 2012!!!!
While the accessory to murder suspect, Eric Holder, will block many states this cycle, a GOP DOJ will support such efforts at the SCOTUS.
Once Voter ID is in place, we can minimize liberal malfeasance in future elections.
I want to know how often voter lists are purged. Are they created from tax lists? Only voter registration? I notified my original place of registration that I had moved, and I was the first one to ever do that. How many district lists are current?
The two big problems with Voter ID (from the left POV) is that their target population signs up with Motor Voter, then moves frequently, so the address on the ID does not match the voter registration. When this guy shows up, he can’t vote. A transient population does not keep up with matching ID with voter registration.
The other problem is the college student vote. The kids have ID from their home state and might vote by absentee, but if we apply the picture ID strictly, can’t vote in their college town because they have no ID there. All the stuff the profs stuff into those mushy skulls would be wasted.
If the kids update their ID, the car insurance folks step in and whack them with increased fees, since the car is not in Lomita, CA after all, but is in downtown Cambridge, MA.
If voter ID became the law of the land, the commie ‘RATS would never win another election. It Takes Voter Fraud to Elect A ‘RAT.
How?...exactly? I read that South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson rejected Perez’s math but what exactly is the math that Perez is using? How does he come to a logical conclusion that a voter ID law will disenfranchise thousands of minority voters but not a single white voter? I'd really like to know. Is this asshat's written decision available online?
Wrong, wrong, wrong.....
The potential existed for 239,333 fraudulent ballots to be cast. Dunno how many people vote in SC, but that's easily enough to swing most elections.
Just the fact that most Dems are against voter fraud, says to me that it's probably a good idea.
Mexico’s laws go further than that. Foreign nationals are prohibited from becoming involved in political activities (including protests); such activities result in deportation.
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