Posted on 12/20/2011 7:42:24 AM PST by Kaslin
Is it racist to require people to show a photo ID when they vote?
You need a photo ID for nearly any meaningful transaction, such as cashing checks, including government checks. If this simple requirement “suppresses” the vote, maybe we need to ask why it’s such a great idea to push for universal suffrage for every adult who is merely breathing.
Of course, even this latter requirement would suppress the vote in Chicago and New Orleans, where dead people get to vote all the time – and do so cheerfully!
In a speech Tuesday at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, Attorney General Eric H. Holder, Jr. warned that recent state reforms, such as requiring photo IDs, might repress the minority vote. He said the Justice Department was reviewing photo ID laws just enacted in Texas and South Carolina, and early voting procedures in Florida.
The overall implication of his otherwise elegant speech commemorating passage of the 1965 Voting Rights Act is that tightening voter requirements is more of a threat to the integrity of the system than voter fraud.
Recently, 115 Democratic House members signed a letter urging Mr. Holder to use his office to oppose new voter ID laws. The rhetoric has been, to put it mildly, over the top.
Rep. G.K. Butterfield of North Carolina called the new laws “a cynical and malicious Republican attempt to suppress minority and elderly voters who turned out in historical numbers for the ’08 elections.”
Rep. Marcia Fudge, Ohio Democrat, unabashedly played the race card, charging that “these efforts have an all-too familiar stench of the Jim Crow era.”
Democratic National Committee Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz said that “Republicans across the country have engaged in a full-scale attack on the right to vote.” She also later insisted with a straight face that unemployment has not increased since President Obama took office.
The Democrats’ contempt for the minorities that they woo with government booty is neon bright: “You need us to tell you how to eat, sleep, raise your kids, use poisoned light bulbs, and vote!”
Naturally, the media go along with the fiction that making sure that voters are who they say they are is racist and partisan.
Washington Post columnist Robert McCartney wrote a piece on Thursday citing a report by New York University School of Law’s Brennan Center for Justice that warns, “these new restrictions fall most heavily on young, minority and low-income voters, as well as voters with disabilities.”
The report claims that 25 percent of African Americans and 16 percent of Latinos do not possess valid photo IDs. Really? How do they shop or drive? They can’t all be children, illegal aliens or Occupy Wall Street squatters.
The Brennan report, which laments recent reforms that have “disenfranchised millions who have past criminal convictions,” was funded in part by George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Tides Foundation and other sources of leftwing philanthropy such as the Ford and Rockefeller foundations.
With a few exceptions, such as the Republican consultant convicted of making misleading “robocalls” during last year’s Maryland gubernatorial election, the real threat of voter fraud is from the Left.
Liberal innovations such as motor voter (1993), relaxing of absentee ballot rules and same-day registration all contribute to voter fraud. Eight states now have some form of Election Day registration: Wisconsin, Idaho, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Carolina and Wyoming.
Absentee balloting is a major source of worry.
“Coercion and chicanery are made much easier by the excessive use of absentee ballots,” John Fund, author of Stealing Elections: How Voter Fraud Threatens Our Democracy (2008), wrote in an April article in the Wall Street Journal. “Most of the elections thrown out by courts—Miami, Florida's mayoral election in 1998, the East Chicago, Indiana's mayor's race in 2005—involved fraudulent absentee votes. Three decades ago absentee and early ballots were only 5% of all votes cast nationwide. In 2008, they exceeded 25%.”
Wisconsin Democrats this year tried unsuccessfully to ram through an election law that would have given “community organizers” (read: ACORN and its successors) access to the driver's license database, make absentee ballot requests permanent, and have ballots mailed out automatically in future elections. This is a perfect recipe for voter fraud.
In Milwaukee, a police inquiry found that about 5,000 more votes were counted in the city in 2004 than the number of recorded votes cast. Keep this in mind as Wisconsin public employee unions collect signatures to recall reformist Republican Gov. Scott Walker. They need 540,000 by Jan. 17. If they succeed, imagine what the recall election next summer would look like had they managed to get the Voter Fraud Enablement Act (not real title) passed.
Meanwhile, the ACLU, which has sued several states over photo ID laws, sued Wisconsin on Tuesday.
Thirty-one states have adopted photo ID laws, from Alabama to liberal Rhode Island. All but 13 states in 2011 had voting legislation introduced, with five – Florida, Georgia, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia – reducing early voting and seven – Alabama, Kansas, Rhode Island, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin – enacting photo ID laws. In five more states – Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire and North Carolina, Democratic governors vetoed photo ID bills that passed.
With legislators tightening the process, Democrats are stepping up the pressure on the Obama administration to intervene. As Politico reports, “Holder’s speech followed a private meeting he held recently where civil rights leaders expressed a growing impatience with the Justice Department’s failure to act against the new laws.”
It would help their case if states were acting illegally, but they aren’t. Apart from minimal requirements, Article I, Section 4 of the U.S. Constitution leaves voting procedures largely to the states. The Voting Rights Act requires stricter scrutiny of some states, but the case for voter suppression has yet to be made.
During his remarks in Texas, Mr. Holder said, “We need election systems that are free from fraud, discrimination, and partisan influence.” He urged the audience to “Speak out. Raise awareness about what’s at stake”
Amen to that.
This one is so clear and obvious that it could be used as a test.
Anyone who says that requiring ID is racist, or whatever is a liar. There is no way they are anything else.
The voting rights act is also a gross violation of the 10th amendment.
If it was up me I’d have sheriff sitting right next to the poll worker running IDs for wants and warrants. A deputy at the Harris County jail made over 100 arrests at the jail a few years ago running vistor’s IDs as they waited for their visitation. Now that’s efficient.
“It’s racist!” has been the constantly repeated squawl of Black people for more than thirty years now - anytime something, anything, doesn’t go their way.
It’s long since lost its power to sway the intelligent; alas, it remains a potent bleat when utilized on the legions of spineless Caucasians afflicted with White Guilt.
Her name is racist.
It runs deeper than the race card:
There is a growing group who have been conditioned to believe that they are exempt from being held accountable for their behavior.
That is why Holder did not prosecute the Black Panthers and why he ignores Congress.
Absolutely amazing this guy could ever become AG...
Holder is an alleged murderer.
Holder is an idiot. Bad thing about the race card is that we all know you out of chips.
"You guys have been practicing discrimination for years. Now it is our turn." - Justice Thurgood Marshall.
Actually pretty good odds of that.
Nearly fifty percent of black males between the ages of 18-35 in the District of Columbia are under Criminal Justice supervision according to a study by the National Center on Institutions and Alternatives-
-Eric R. Lotke, "Hobbling a Generation," National Center on Institutions and Alternatives, August 1997
And for all you Paulistinians, according to Ron Paul:
Given the inefficiencies of what D.C. laughingly calls the “criminal justice system,” I think we can safely assume that 95% of the black males in that city are semi-criminal or entirely criminal.
That may be true, but apply Sturgeon's Revelation: probably 95% of all the people in the District are semi-criminal or entirely criminal, especially given how loosely the former term might be defined.
Why is requiring a photo ID racist? While it may be true that it will suppress the votes of the nitwits in the Congressional Black Caucus I see no such rampant stupidity in the general black population.
Hey Kaslin,
These very stupid Republicans have Colonel Allen West as the V.P. nominee the Democrat plantation will forever be freed.
It’s racist because the liberals can not steal elections if they are requires to show a photo ID
Exactly!
They have actually gotten to the point where they think being deprived of stealing elections is racist.
The race card is just the smoke and mirrors fall back position to deflect attention from the actual events at hand.
Fast and Furious is just an up to date and version of Eric Holder’s standard incite the public with a catastrophe method.
Holder did the same thing in 1995 by supplying McVeigh and Nichols with explosives and know how to build a large bomb.
http://www.coachisright.com/ag-eric-holder-responsible-for-168-deaths-in-1995-oklahoma-city-bombing%e2%80%a6and-more/
It looks like Holder even made a deal with Nichols after the Oklahoma City Bombing by offering Nichols a non-death prison term if he helped Holder’s henchmen retrieve the left over explosives and other evidence.
Holder would put the average crime family to shame.
How do those 25% African Americans collect their Welfare? Use Food stamps? Get free medical care if they do no have ID?
Who does Holder think he is kidding????
How do those ‘underpriviledged’ blacks get into the NBA or the NFL if they didn’t get a good start with Pop Warner football or Little League?
How do they get registered in school???
They MUST show ID there.
The ‘unprecedented turnout “ in 2008 was at the hands of ACORN & others who signed up millions of illegals to vote & they were not challenged at the polls.
Early voting also gives such people willing to cheat a longer time to go to a number of places & vote under different names.
Knowingly give an illegal a driver’s license & then hand them a voter registration card at the DMV.
What a joke.
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