President Barack Obama delivered a fiery speech against Republicans on Friday, charging that the GOP is threatening voting rights in America.
Appearing at Al Sharpton's National Action Network conference, Obama cited a 2006 DOJ analysis showing that out of 197,000,000 votes cast for federal elections between 2002 and 2005, only 40 voters were indicted for fraud.
"For those of you who are math majors, that is a percentage that is 0.00002 percent," Obama said, drawing cheers from the crowd.
Obama then pointed to who he considers to be the real perpetrators: the people behind these "bogus" claims.
"Let's be clear," Obama said. "The real voter fraud is people who try to deny our rights by making bogus arguments about voter fraud."
More from the Associated Press below:
The election-year warning comes as Obama seeks to mobilize Democratic voters to fight back against state voting requirements and early balloting restrictions that many in his party fear will curb turnout in November. The president vowed that he would not let the attacks on voting rights go unchallenged, but offered no new announcements of specific actions his administration planned to take.
The president pinned efforts to curb access to the ballot box directly on the GOP, declaring that the effort "has not been led by both parties. It's been led by the Republican Party."
For the remainder of the year, no political issue stands out more prominently for Democrats than their ability to motivate voters to turn out at the polls in November. Control of the Senate, now in the hands of Democrats, is at stake, as is Obama's already limited ability to push his agenda through Congress.
But traditionally weak midterm turnout by Democrats coupled with efforts in some states to limit early voting and to enact voter identification requirements have prompted the president and his party to raise alarms and step up their get-out-the-vote efforts.
Republicans have long argued that identification requirements and other voting controls are reasonable measures designed to safeguard the balloting process, not to suppress voter turnout. Democrats say photo identification requirements especially affect minority or low-income voters who may not drive and thus wouldn't have an official government ID.
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