The Patriot Post® · The Real Racists Oppose Voter ID

There is no intellectually sound argument against having proper ID to vote – which is quite predictably why the American Left must resort to emotional demagoguery to fight it. Equally unsurprising, playing the race card is their most reliable vehicle for doing so. Yet stunning testimony against North Carolina’s election laws reveal that it is leftists themselves who are willing to disparage black Americans and Hispanics to pursue their agenda.

According to expert witnesses retained by the Justice Department (DOJ) and, yes, the NAACP, it is racist to assume minorities can be treated like everyone else – because they are “less sophisticated.”

Political scientist Charles Stewart was retained by the DOJ, and when asked if the elimination of same-day registration and voting in North Carolina affected black Americans disproportionately, he didn’t hesitate:

> “[I]t would empirically more likely affect African Americans. Also, understanding within political science, that people who register to vote the closer and closer one gets to Election Day tend to be less sophisticated voters, tend to be less educated voters, tend to be voters who are less attuned to public affairs. That also tells me from the literature of political science that there are likely to be people who will end up not registering and not voting. People who correspond to those factors tend to be African Americans, and, therefore, that’s another vehicle through which African Americans would be disproportionately affected by this law.”

The rest of Stewart’s testimony can be found here, but it should be abundantly clear the soft bigotry of low expectations is alive and well at the DOJ. That would be the same DOJ run by our execrable Attorney General Eric Holder, who once admonished America for being a “nation of cowards” when it comes to discussing race. Can anyone imagine what Holder’s reaction would be if that discussion began with the assumption that black Americans have inferior levels of education, sophistication and awareness? And even if one assumes that one of those elements, namely education, is legitimate, would it be indelicate to point out that millions of black Americans are being educationally shortchanged in cities like New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Detroit and Philadelphia – everyone of which are longtime Democrat strongholds?

One might be forgiven for wondering why Stewart constitutes an expert witness. He was called by the DOJ in 2012 to make the same argument about “disparate impact” in South Carolina. When a federal court didn’t buy it, the law in that state was implemented without any problems. Stewart admitted under cross examination that his prediction regarding the same argument he made in Florida also proved to be wrong.

That such machinations continue in any state is a travesty. In 2008, the United States Supreme Court upheld Indiana’s voter ID law. Liberal Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, insisted that the “risk of voter fraud” was “real,” and there was “no question about the legitimacy or importance of the state’s interest in counting only the votes of eligible voters.”

If a Washington Post exposé is accurate, “risk” is no longer the operative word. Vote fraud is a reality. In a piece entitled, “Could non-citizens decide the November election?” the paper cites data from the Cooperative Congressional Election Study (CCES). The data revealed that more than 14% of non-citizens found in the samplings conducted by the CCES showed they were registered to vote in the 2008 and 2010 elections. The paper notes, “Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections.”

It cited Sen. Al Franken’s 2008 victory in Minnesota and Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina as two possible examples. Franken’s victory gave Democrats a 60-seat filibuster-proof majority in the Senate – leading directly to the passage of ObamaCare.

And even as Holder and the NAACP lead the fight against voter ID in North Carolina, at least 145 people in that state belong to an ineligible voting category, as in immigrants granted deferred status by Obama’s unilaterally enacted Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) plan. Regardless, they are on voter rolls kept by the State Board of Elections. This was discovered last Tuesday after the state’s DMV ran a specific search for drivers with DACA licenses. Early voting began last Thursday in a tight race between Democrat Kay Hagan and Republican Thom Tillis that could ultimately decide which party controls the Senate.

Democrat contentions that vote fraud is “non-existent” are nonsense. But worse, vote fraud decides major issues and the course of our nation.

Yet they soldier on, even in the face of another Supreme Court decision undermining their pernicious cause. In 2013, the Supreme Court struck down Section 4 of the Voting Rights Act. That section required states with a history of discrimination to seek federal approval before changing election laws. “Our country has changed,” Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the majority. “While any racial discrimination in voting is too much, Congress must ensure that the legislation it passes to remedy that problem speaks to current conditions.”

So why does this Kabuki theater continue? Because Eric Holder remains determined to litigate against these rulings on a state-by-state basis, utterly irrespective of these Court rulings.

Irrespective of inconvenient reality as well. As Judicial Watch revealed, minority voter turnout increased following the passage of North Carolina’s election laws. Judicial Watch compared results of a May 4, 2010, primary election with those of a May 14, 2014, primary election, the first major election in North Carolina since the passage of the law. They found that black voter turnout increased a whopping 29.5%, greater than any other group. As they rightly note, this is “devastating to the plaintiff’s case because they contradict all of their experts’ basis for asserting harm.”

Nonetheless, the NAACP’s expert witness, University of Wisconsin political scientist Dr. Barry Burden, testified along the same lines as Stewart. He insisted blacks and Hispanics are less able “to pay the costs of voting” because of the “stark differences between whites, on the one hand, in North Carolina and those of blacks and Latinos in North Carolina.” Those costs included “the time and effort that a voter has to put in in order to participate,” as well as “locating the polling place, getting the right paperwork, understanding who the candidates are, becoming informed.”

Thus, Burden’s contention is clear: If it takes any effort to do something, blacks and Hispanics aren’t up for it. Pathetically, by hiring him as a witness, the NAACP stands behind the soft bigotry of low expectations.

Such nonsense doesn’t fly – on either side of the color line. A 2012 Pew Research Center survey reveals that 79% of white registered voters and 62% of black Americans said voters should be required to show an official photo ID prior to casting a ballot. The oh-so reliably leftist Washington Post tries to downplay the effectiveness of ID, saying it won’t stop “vote buying, coercion, fake registrations, voting from the wrong address or ballot box stuffing.”

Perhaps not. But the bet here is making vote fraud a felony punishable by up to 10 years in prison would be an equally useful tool in protecting the integrity of our elections. Without that integrity, our democratic Republic will cease to exist.