Protecting the integrity of the ballot box is essential to our democracy. Laws requiring voters to show identification at the polls are commonsense measures to prevent fraud and corruption, and ensure that each year's election returns accurately reflect the will of the people.
Yet President Obama's administration and political allies are pursuing a dual-track approach to vilify such tools, in a crass political ploy to aid the president's reelection.
In 2008, the Supreme Court held in Crawford v. Marion County Election Board that Indiana's voter ID law is constitutional. The Court noted that the challengers could not produce a single voter disenfranchised by that law. Now 32 states have voter ID laws to protect their electoral process.
Nonetheless, when southern states have passed these laws, Attorney General Eric Holder has invoked Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act to block these measures as having the effect of disparately impacting racial minorities. Mr. Holder has blocked laws in Texas and South Carolina, and litigation is now underway.
Section 5 specifies that certain southern states that suppressed minority voting half a century ago must obtain preclearance from the Justice Department or the federal district court in Washington, D.C., before changing their voting laws. Even the liberal Warren Court upheld Section 5 in the 1966 case South Carolina v. Katzenbach only because endemic racial hostility at that time justified extraordinary federal power under the Fifteenth Amendment, and indicated that if American society progressed, such continued federal supervision over this quintessential state function would no longer be constitutional.
Today an African-American can be elected president of the United States, or serve in top Cabinet posts, congressional leadership, or the Supreme Court. So in 2009 the Supreme Court signaled that it was ready to reconsider Section 5's validity. A case currently before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, Shelby County v. Holder, may provide that opportunity next year.
But while Mr. Holder is abusing Section 5 to block laws that do not go as far as Indiana's law upheld in Crawford, Mr. Obama's longtime political allies at the NAACP have gone to the United Nations Human Rights Council to protest voter ID laws -- a council comprised of the likes of Cuba, Russia and China, with no jurisdiction over American elections. This thus becomes a dual-track approach to gin up a political issue to help Mr. Obama in his reelection efforts, invoking an outdated law and an international body whose members include notorious violators of voting rights.
Voting is unique as a constitutional right. First, the right to cast a ballot includes a corollary right not to have your legal vote canceled by someone else's fraud. You have the right to have your undiluted vote counted.
Second, this fundamental right is also a citizen's duty. Part of that duty requires you to register, and to appear at a certain place on a certain day to vote. Complying with those requirements is doing your civic duty to ensure a free and fair election.
Voter ID laws both protect this corollary right, while also augmenting a reasonable aspect of your civic duty to make sure the electoral machinery functions properly on Election Day. The fact that states make special accommodations for people in nursing homes or with special circumstances, and can even provide identification free of charge to those who cannot afford it, strikes the proper balance to ensure that every qualified voter can reasonably cast a ballot that will not be tainted by anyone's fraud or misdeeds.
America's focus on having free and fair elections is one of the reasons the United States is the oldest democratic republic on earth. Failing to ensure the integrity of the democratic process in elections is a mistake a free people often makes only once.
Mr. Blackwell was Ohio secretary of state and U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Commission. Mr. Klukowski is a fellow with the American Civil Rights Union and on faculty at Liberty University School of Law.
 |
 |
|
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Electoral Votes (270 to win) |
332 | 206 |
| Obama | Romney | |
|---|---|---|
| Total | 65,899,660 | 60,932,152 |
| Percent | 51.1% | 47.2% |
| Democrats* | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Current Senate | 53 | 47 |
| Seats gained or lost | +2 | -2 |
| New Total | 55 | 45 |
| Democrats | Republicans | |
|---|---|---|
| Seats won | 201 | 234 |
A poll tax has had two historical meanings. The older is that of a fee that had to be paid to satisfy taxpayer requirements in voting laws. In some places, only people who could demonstrate a financial tie to a community were permitted to vote in that community. For those who did not otherwise own property or pay taxes, this sort of poll tax was sufficient to allow voting. More recently, however, a poll tax is a tax that must be paid by anyone wishing to cast a vote. Poll taxes of this sort were generally low, perhaps a dollar or two, but high enough to make voting uneconomical for poor people. The 24th Amendment bars both of these types of poll tax.
repeat this to everyone who says it's only a small inconvienience to get a photo ID
Some folks can't even walk home from the store with Skittles, without getting shot, and killed.
This is disingenuous, at the very least.
There's a damn good reason the South doesn't get to obstruct voting in any way, shape, or form.
It wasn't that long ago they still had Confederate Flags on their state emblems.
Pretend all you want, oh emperor of the new duds.
Bain put you up to this?
You have our support Mr. Blackwell!!
The Brotherhood for Republican Organization. (The Bro from BRO)
http://springvalley.patch.com/articles/election-director-no-proof-of-dead-voters
They found that the number of people who used a dead person's identity to vote illegally was exactly the same as the number of human-looking androids who travel back in time from an apocalyptic future to vote illegally.
It was also the same as the number of:
- demons who possess human bodies in order to vote illegally
- replicant humans who are grown in plant pods from outer space who vote illegally
- space alien-created clones who vote illegally
- people who drink polyjuice potion to assume other people's identity in oder to vote illegally
- slimy slug-like creatures from outer space who control humans by attaching tendrils to their spinal cord and vote illegally
It looks to me like we need to focus on more pressing issues than non-existent voting fraud -- like unicorn meat in public school meatloaf.
Voter Fraud Is A Normal Political Tactic In NY According to Some Democratic Politicians
January 17, 2012 By Desiree Moore
Anthony De Figlio is one of eight Democrats involved in the voter fraud scheme (with ACORN envolvement) in Troy, NY.
He pleaded guilty to voter fraud (felony along with three other Democrats), telling police that faking absentee ballots was a commonplace and accepted practice in political circles, all intended to swing an election.
He casually explained “…to political insiders in the county, what appears as a huge conspiracy to non-political persons is really a normal political tactic.”
“This is an on-going scheme and it occurs on both sides of the aisle,” he told police. “The people who are targeted live in low-income housing and there is a sense that they are a lot less likely to ask any questions.”
I guess Mr. De Figlio didn't get the memo from Liberal Supreme HQ that there is NO ELECTION FRAUD in the US!
Liberal position? We have to protect the peoples' right to vote illegally!
Disingenuous and misleading...How many examples of voter fraud were produced as proof that this law was needed? Yeah...that's what I thought!
Not a privilege for some, to be denied others at the will or mercy of a chosen few.
The attacks on voting registration requirements are well-timed and well-aimed.
The GOP knows they are becoming the minority party. They are frightened by the prospect of losing ground, so they are doing everything they can to foment suspicion, to claim the vote in this country is not valid or secure.
A legislator in MN, arguing in favor of a constitutional amendment in the state, said it is better to deny the vote to many to ensure the validity of one vote.
Can you even imagine????
Deny many access to the polls because you suspect one???
With ZERO PROOF of large scale voter fraud.
Election Systems & Software, the firm whose machines were involved in the 2002 flubbed Florida primary election — and the company that now makes the voting machines for most of America — is a private company that does not like to tell the public who owns it. But at least one major shareholder is Michael R. McCarthy, who runs the McCarthy Group. The McCarthy Group has been a primary owner of Election Systems & Software, including its predecessor, American Information Systems for more than a decade. Michael R. McCarthy is the current campaign Treasurer for Republican senator Chuck Hagel. [See Hagel and McCarthy Documents] Prior to his election, Republican Senator Hagel was president of McCarthy & Company. In fact, he was first elected while his own company was making the vote-counting machines!
http://usacoup.scoop.co.nz/?p=7
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/27/opinion/27wed1.html?_r=1
You do not get to judge whose votes should be counted and whose should not, no matter how much more superior you feel.
This is a solution to an election outcome that did not go the way the GOP wanted.
Not like a Harvard, Columbia, Penn State or NYU degree.
Just saying.
These new laws could make it significantly harder for more than five million eligible voters to cast ballots in 2012.
The states that have already cut back on voting rights will provide 171 electoral votes in 2012 – 63 percent of the 270 needed to win the presidency.
Of the 12 likely battleground states, as assessed by an August Los Angeles Times analysis of Gallup polling, five have already cut back on voting rights (and may pass additional restrictive legislation), and two more are currently considering new restrictions.
http://www.brennancenter.org/content/resource/voting_law_changes_in_2012
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Lincoln_Bronzeville_v._Blackwell
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore#Equal_Protection_Clause_2
Equal Protection Clause
The Supreme Court, in a per curiam opinion, ruled that the Florida Supreme Court's decision, calling for a statewide recount, violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. This ruling was by a 7-2 vote, but (as discussed more fully in the next subsection below) two of the seven disagreed with the Court's remedy for the Equal Protection violation.[30] The Court held that the Equal Protection Clause guarantees to individuals that their ballots cannot be devalued by "later arbitrary and disparate treatment". Even if the recount was fair in theory, it was unfair in practice. The record, as weighed by the Florida Supreme Court, suggested that different standards were seemingly applied to the recount from ballot to ballot, precinct to precinct, and county to county, even when identical types of ballots and machines were used.[34].
TRANSLATION: SCOFL (controlled by liberals appointed by Democratic Governors) with the support of Gore and the Democratic Party had violated the Equal Protection rights of the people of FL!
"On the eve of the election Sandra Day O'Connor had made a public statement that a Gore victory would be a personal disaster for her. Clarence Thomas' wife was so intimately involved in the Bush campaign that she was helping to draw up a list of Bush appointees more or less at the same time as her husband was adjudicating on whether the same man would become the next President. Finally, Antonin Scalia's son was working for the firm appointed by Bush to argue his case before the Supreme Court, the head of which was subsequently appointed as Solictor-General.[57]"
The 2000 Presidential election was,is and always will be "tainted".