The Department of Justice informed the Washington-based Campaign Legal Center (CLC) that it would no longer be joining in a lawsuit against the state of Texas. The CLC had originally brought the lawsuit against the Lone Star State claiming that its voter ID law discriminated against minorities and the poor. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals had last year ruled that the law was indeed discriminatory and ordered that it be changed before the November election.

The law, which had required a voter to establish proof of identification with any one of seven forms of ID, was expanded to allow the signing of an affidavit declaring an impediment to obtaining the required identification which then permitted voting. The Fifth Circuit will soon rule on whether the law was designed in order to discriminate against minority voters.

Meanwhile last Friday, Virginia Democrat Governor Terry McAuliffe vetoed a bill that would have required “the local electoral boards to direct the general registrars to investigate the list of persons voting at an election whenever the number of persons voting at any election in a country or city exceeds the number of persons registered to vote in that county or city.” McAuliffe’s justification was that the bill would have imposed too much of a burden on local elections officials.

The motive for creating the bill was due to the unintentional discovery of over 1,000 people having illegally registered to vote in eight Virginia counties. It was not generated out of a merely reasonable yet hypothetical fear of voter fraud, but out of a genuinely verifiable one. And yet McAuliffe found the potential for over-burdening elections officials of greater concern than combatting the real threat of voter fraud. Talk about misplaced priorities.

An elected official’s job is to do the will of the people, and that will is most clearly voiced via the ballot box. Any elected official unconcerned with protecting the integrity of the vote displays a profound contempt for democratic processes to which they owe their privileged position of leadership.

A poll released by Gallup last August revealed that a vast majority of Americans favor some form of voter ID laws — this included majorities in both parties and both whites and non-whites. Opposing voter ID laws is not a winning issue for Democrats and is ironically un-democratic. All it does is continue to expose just how invested they are in opposing the sensible Rule of Law and the democratic process.