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.
I would suspect that voter registration lists are not purged often enough.
I would advocate a system whereby the list is purged regularly and you have to re-register to vote if you skip a November election.
Most precincts know who has voted — their names are checked off — so it would be very easy for a computer to identify voters who haven’t voted in the last x elections and automatically purge them from the rolls and send them a notice telling them they need to re-register.
It would do a lot of good as the deceased would drop off fairly quickly while those who have moved away would have their names dropped.
My wife and I moved from Virginia to Texas, my parents a few years earlier. I bet my name is still on a few voter rolls in Fairfax and Loudoun counties, possibly still on Faquier county.
I also support having to register by going to an actual voter registration office. I do not like the register at the motor vehicle department as an afterthought to registering your driving license.
Ya need to look at your SS card. See your photo on it? NO! It is not a recognize form of ID anywhere.
Besides that....illegal aliens have SSI cards.
Raise the voting age to 35 and even more atrocities would be eliminated!
If this isn't selective and completely inconsistent interpretation of all our laws out there, nothing is.
What would be the reaction if states got together with ballot initiatives to prohibit the feds or anyone else from requiring photo ids for air travel, or for credit card purchases, or any other commerce transaction? If the anonymous voters could vote in such initiatives, what would holder do?
Would the public understand the issue better once individuals suffer from the inevitable and massive fraud that would result?
If the government enforces laws against fraud in the marketplace, how can anyone accept that the potential for voter fraud is actually more important to us as a society than preventing fraud in transactions of commerce?
I live in Ohio, and last time I voted they checked my photo ID first. I thanked them.
Illegal aliens are much more liable to vote if it is easy, requires no identity verification or potential scrutiny of their immigration status in the US.
An illegal getting caught voting illegally is both a felony and a cause for deportation. It is hard to induce the vast number of illegals to vote if they have to put themselves up for scrutiny and risk getting caught voting illegally.
In areas where there is a large number of illegals voting is really easy for poll watchers to follow up on suspicious voters who they suspect of voter fraud if they ID to document residence and other issues.
Obama is absolutely counting on inducing large numbers of illegals to vote illegally for him.
Obama can't win re election without the illegal alien vote which is why he has been pandering to the illegal alien voters and his Justice Department is trying so hard to prevent any immigration law enforcement.
How can you hold a meaningful election if voters need not prove who they are and that they are eligible to vote. Sounds like something a third world country would sanction, Pardon me””
That is exactly the point, you can’t have valid elections without voter id. And those who count the votes decide the winners. Bo’s intentions rest with taking down the US. Name one positive thing he has done, just one?
Our precinct does too but they cannot require you to produce one in Ohio. A utility that you found in someone’s garbage can is good enough, though.
Well of course they’re scared. They know it is one of their major avenues to stealing elections. If Voter ID is allowed to stand, then they’ve lost probably 10-20% of the votes they usually get through falsification of voting records.
Know how the Dems always have those yellow school buses picking up THEIR voters at the local subsidized housing? I was just wondering who pays for those school buses and are they fair in the way that they pick up voters who do not drive. In other words, when the Dems control a city and are in control of the city housing as well as the school buses, who is to say that the Dems will only allow school buses to pick up voters that they know vote their way. Republican voters should protest if the buses are not allowed to go to elderly housing in more Republican parts of town.
How can you have a meaningful election if you have no clue whether the people voting have the right to vote. By your standards you just need to be in the country to vote. What have you got against voter ID? You almost need a picture ID to take a bowel movement but not to elect someone. The only reason Dems don’t want picture ID is so that Illegals, most of whom will surely vote Democrat, can vote, it’s not too hard to figure out. Why would you be afraid to prove who you are? do you have something to hide? Your third world comment is cover for your desire to condone illegal voting.
Please Mr. greyfox, you misinterpret. I was implying that voting without an id takes the US down the road to 3rd world status. Degrading the country to 3rd world status is bo’s deepest desire.
Of course they’re afraid. There was so much fraud, same day registration and people bused in from other states and Walker still won by 7%.
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