Eric Holder Plays Texas Hold 'Em In Voter ID Suit
IBDEditorials.com
Voting Rights: The most politicized attorney general in American history takes on Texas' Voter ID law as discriminatory and intimidating to minorities, and tries to make American elections safe for vote fraud.
The Justice Department's civil rights division, the same group that dropped the case of a group of New Black Panthers wearing military garb and carrying billy clubs as they stood outside a Philadelphia polling place in 2008, has filed an objection in U.S. District Court to Texas' voter identification law on the grounds it intimidates minorities and suppresses minority voter turnout.
Photo IDs and the requirement that they be shown are ever present in our society — from cashing a check to boarding a plane to entering Eric Holder's own Department of Justice. Yet Holder, who once said criticism of him and his boss, President Obama, was due to their skin color, sees racism in Texas' move to guarantee the sanctity of the ballot box.
Requiring some kind of identification to prove you are who you say you are when voting was one of the proposals in 2005 by the Commission on Federal Election Reform chaired by Jimmy Carter and James Baker, two individuals not known for racist inclinations.
In the objection, Thomas Perez, chief of Justice's civil rights division who exonerated the New Black Panther thugs, said that Texas data showed that anywhere from 6% to 10% of Hispanics don't have one of the seven acceptable photo IDs issued by the state or federal government. It completely ignores the fact that the state's election-identification certificates are free.
The empirical evidence shows that voter ID laws do not suppress minority voting. In Georgia, black voter turnout for the 2006 midterm elections was 42.9%. After passage of photo ID laws, black turnout in the 2010 midterm rose to 50.4%. Black voter turnout also rose in Indiana and Mississippi after those two states enacted their voter ID laws.
Hans von Spakovsky of the Heritage Foundation points out that black voter turnout increased in Georgia in the presidential election of 2008, the first election under its voter ID law, by a greater percentage than in Mississippi, a state without such a requirement.
"There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of a state's interest in counting only eligible voters' votes," wrote liberal Justice John Paul Stevens for the 6-3 majority in the Supreme Court's 2008 decision upholding Indiana's ID law, the toughest in the nation.
The Supreme Court justices said "we cannot conclude that the statute imposes 'excessively burdensome requirements' on any class of voters." The decision cited the finding of a district judge that plaintiffs had "not introduced evidence of a single, individual Indiana resident who will be unable to vote as a result of the law."
A study by the University of Delaware and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln found that "concerns about voter identification laws affecting turnout are much ado about nothing." Not unless you are an administration willing to play the race card to secure re-election.
Texas is one of 16 states or parts of states that under Section 5 of the 1965 Voting Rights Act must obtain permission from DOJ or a federal court in Washington, D.C., before redrawing district lines or revising election procedures because of voting rights violations in the past. Yet there is no evidence that a voter ID requirement constitutes a voting- or civil-rights violation.
So now we have a "war on voting rights" to join the "war on women" the administration is complaining about, even though photo IDs are as easily obtainable in these states as are contraceptives by Georgetown coeds.
We suspect the DOJ action against Texas and other states has more to do in revving up the Democratic base than in correcting any injustice, real or imagined.