True to form, Attorney General Eric Holder has doubled down on his racist rant last December attacking voter ID laws.
The Department of Justice has blocked the new voter ID law in Texas, on the grounds it discriminates against Hispanics:
“Even using the data most favorable to the state, Hispanics disproportionately lack either a driver’s license or a personal identification card,” wrote Thomas Perez, head of the Justice Department’s civil rights division, in a letter to Keith Ingram, director of elections for the Texas Secretary of State.
Now, I wonder why the DOJ would claim that such a large proportion of Texas Hispanics lack these things. Could it be because a substantial part of the Hispanic population of Texas are there illegally? Say, 6% of the state's population as a whole, and almost 20% of the Hispanic population in Texas, according to the latest estimates?
Holder and the DOJ used the same strategy to block a voter ID law in South Carolina, saying the law discriminates against blacks.
The loophole they're using is in Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, passed almost 50 years go. It requires 16 states or parts of states with a history of discrimination to receive federal “pre-clearance” on any changes to their voting laws. Sins of the fathers indeed.
This is the first time the Department of Justice has directly intervened to block voter-identification laws in nearly 20 years.The Texas law isn’t substantially different than the Georgia and Indiana voter ID laws, both of which have been in place more than five years.
In fact, the Supreme Court already ruled the Indiana law constitutional by a mere 6-3 majority. Texas and South Carolina are going to court to contest this, but it's uncertain whether the matter will come to trial before the 2012 elections.
Holder's assault on these laws is pretty simple to explain.President Obama is up for re-election, the Senate is at stake and for the Democrats voter fraud is the only way they have a shot at maintaining and turning out large enough 'majorities' in the large Democrat ruled urban machines like Chicago and Los Angeles to offset votes from other parts of Blue states, 'win' elections and stay in power.
Needless to say, the Democrats and their media allies aren't going to say that. So they cite two seriously flawed arguments to cover for it. The first one is that minorities, people who don't drive, are poor or whom are elderly are somehow discriminated against if they are made to obtain a photo ID.
The truth? A photo ID is free for the asking to the poor in every state, because it's a law in every state of the union that valid ID needs to be presented to any peace officer that asks to see it. In many cases, it's necessary for basic operations like obtaining a library card, opening a bank account or cashing a check at the local market. As for the elderly, most municipalities have transportation available for retirees and the elderly either in the form of taxi coupons, special buses or vans paid for by tax dollars.
Having never been working class themselves for the most part, the elites pushing this don't realize that a lot of people simply aren't interested in voting, or deliberately don't vote to keep themselves off the jury duty rolls to keep from losing a few days work they can ill afford to miss.
The second argument is that the problem of voter fraud is 'minimal', a problem that doesn't exist. There's even a demonstrably cooked 'study' or two to cite. Are they right?
First of all, 'minimal' is a subjective judgment, based on who's counting. For instance, in 2009 there were a total of 13,257 new cases of AIDS originating from heterosexual contact reported in the US. As a percentage of the US population, that works out to about .000043%, something most mathematicians would call negligible. However, the government spends millions of dollars each year promoting the safe sex message and urging condom use, and if you notice, the ads almost always feature heterosexual couples or females, who have an even lower incidence of AIDS from heterosexual contact then do males. Of course, if you or one of your loved ones is part of the statistic, it's tremendously important to you and if you were to ask someone from the Department of Health and Human Services, they'd undoubtedly tell you that even one case is too many and justifies the most stringent methods at prevention.
Since voter fraud is an infection of our democracy, shouldn't we be just as concerned about preventing it?
Actually, the incidents of voter fraud, particularly when it comes to fraudulent registration are rampant and easy to find with a simple internet search. And another item of interest is that the reported instances are a lot lower than they might be simply because elected officials and their appointees charged with enforcing the laws in these matters ( almost always Democrats) frequently refuse to investigate and prosecute.
An example I'm personally familiar with involves Bob Dornan, a long time conservative California Republican congressman whose district was redrawn by the Democrat majority in Sacramento. In 1996, Dornan was narrowly defeated for re-election by Democrat Loretta Sanchez by a mere 984 votes.
Congressman Dornan charged that there had been massive election fraud in his district involving non-citizens. He did his own investigation and was able to prove that that there were at least 1,789 illegal voters, and perhaps more. According to John Funds' book Stealing Elections, the INS did it's own investigation in 1996 into alleged voter fraud in California's Forty-sixth Congressional District and found that based on registrations that didn't match up: "4,023 illegal voters possibly cast ballots in the disputed election between Republican Robert Dornan and Democrat Loretta Sanchez." (p. 24).
The House Contested Elections Committee in the Spring of 1997 did a cursory investigation of its own and came up with proof that 547 non-citizens voted in Orange County and that 303 more had been registered to vote in the 46th District by Hermandad Nacional Mexicana, a non profit funded with government grants that actively registered non-citizens to vote and instructed them
on how to mark their absentee ballots.
So at the least, you could say that Dornan had a case and that this called for a thorough investigation by the Department of Justice.
The end result? Democrat Attorney General Janet Reno formally declined to investigate, based on her subjective judgment that 'not enough fraud occurred' to change the results and of course, possibly unseat a Democrat member of Congress.
Want more? One of the most recent well-publicized voter fraud cases occurred in the Washington State governor’s race in November 2004 in which Democrat Christine Gregoire allegedly defeated Republican Dino Rossi by just 129 votes after weeks of vote counting.
Later, the Washington State Superior Court found that 1,400 felons voted illegally, along with illegal votes cast by 53 dead people, two non-citizens and 27 double votes. Since Washington State doesn't have party voter registration, there was no way of proving exactly how they voted, so the judge ruled there was not enough proof to void the election. However, it's worth mentioning that almost all of the violations occurred in the Democrat stronghold of King County. You might remember that one,because it involved a number of voters claiming the address of the State Democrat party headquarters in Seattle their 'residence'. A similar tactic seems to have been used in this recent case in Wisconsin.
There are numerous other incidents I could cite. For instance, you could spend hours just reading about President Obama's old friends at ACORN.
The core of the problem stems from a really bad piece of legislation, passed,of course by a Democrat-dominated Congress. President Clinton's National Voter Registration Act of 1993 (NVRA) known as the Motor-Voter law makes voter registration virtually automatic when you apply for a driver's license and called for distributing registration applications in state welfare offices. Under this law, the information supplied by the applicant for a license doubles as information for voter registration unless the applicant indicates that he/she doesn't want to be registered. It also has restrictions that prevent states from culling the rolls in a timely manner to eliminate dead people and people whom may no longer be residents in the area or whom have lost their voting rights due to felony convictions.
With several states now issue driver's licenses to illegal aliens, the voter registration rolls have become contaminated with a number of people who are not legally entitled to vote. There was a move in Congress to change the law to not include voter registration for non-citizens in 1998. It was narrowly defeated, with nearly every Democrat in Congress voting against, so let there be no mistake that to Democrats, illegal aliens are a constituency.
It's also worth mentioning that for illegal aliens, a voter registration card is one of the proofs of citizenship legally allowed to be used to help establish identity for the purposes of 'legal' employment. That and a social security card are all you need.
Not only that, but theres absolutely nothing to stop indigent 'rent-a voters' , illegal aliens or even campaign workers from being trucked by interested parties with access to voter registration data to states with no photo ID requirements and same day registration to vote early and often. Yes, in more than one case the dead have been found to have risen and voted Democrat!
And then, there's my own experience. When I drove my elderly mother to the polls in California to vote I stood in line next to her. After my mom finished signing in, the poll worker asked me my name, to which I responded jokingly 'Chauffeur'. My mom told the pol worker "That's my son", after which the poll worker responded "I'll mark him down as living at the same address' and handed me a ballot. I was not even asked for an ID. And yes, I gave it back to the poll worker.
There's another side to voter fraud that's particularly odious - vote suppression. Again, the chief culprits are Democrats and the chief victims military voters stationed overseas.
It's pretty well known that Al Gore and his team used technicalities and friendly Democrat appointed officials to disqualify the ballots of almost 2,000 members of our military serving overseas in the 2000 Florida presidential election.
What's less well known is that this process wasn't limited to Florida, and was so egregious by the 2008 election that Congress passed the Federal Military and Overseas Voter Empowerment Act (the MOVE Act), which among other things mandated that ballots be in the hands of ourtroops overseas no less than 45 days prior to elections.
Eric Holder and the Obama Department of Justice prior to the 2010 midterms engaged in a systematic campaign to encourage states to seek waivers not to comply with the law and to suppress the military vote, a constituency that was perceived by them as largely Republican. Congress found out in a subsequent investigation when it was too late to do anything about it that the worst offenders were states and counties run by Democrats. In fact, the Justice Department employee who was the chief contact person in encouraging jurisdictions not to comply with the law and seek waivers was actually promoted.
Voter fraud 'minimal'? Again, I guess it depends on who's counting. And of course, who benefits.
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