Voter ID

Requiring voters to prove they are who they say they are in order to cast a ballot is a simple, common-sense measure that helps ensure honest elections.

Opponents of photo ID falsely charge that such requirements discriminate against poor and minority voters. Each time this claim has been used in the courts, plaintiffs have failed to produce evidence of any individual who was actually denied the right to vote for lack of a photo ID. Despite this fact, and that all demographic groups including African-Americans support voter ID laws, accusations of Jim Crow, the racist system that disenfranchised Southern blacks for generations, continue to be hurled with abandon.

The Supreme Court has stated that because voter ID is free, the inconveniences of going to the Bureau of Motor Vehicles, gathering applicable documents, or posing for a photograph are not substantial burdens on most voters’ right to vote. Nor do they represent a significant increase over the usual burdens of voting — registering or driving to a polling place. If people show up without an ID, they can cast a provisional ballot and bring in their ID later.

The Supreme Court found that the interests in requiring voter ID are unquestionably relevant in protecting the integrity and reliability of the electoral process as part of a nationwide effort to improve and modernize election procedures criticized as antiquated and inefficient.

In Crawford v. Marion County Election Board (2008), the Supreme Court also noted the particular interest in preventing voter fraud in response to the problem of voter registration rolls with a large number of names of persons who are either deceased or no longer live in Indiana. While the trial record contained no evidence that “in-person voter impersonation at polling places had actually occurred in Indiana, such fraud had occurred in other parts of the country, and Indiana’s own experience with voter fraud in a 2003 mayoral primary demonstrates a real risk that voter fraud could affect a close election’s outcome.”

The Supreme Court noted that there was no question that the state had a legitimate and important interest in counting only eligible voters’ ballots. Lastly the Court noted that the state interest in protecting public confidence in elections also has independent importance because such voter confidence encourages citizen participation in the democratic process.

Using a photo ID for voting is a central recommendation from the bipartisan Commission on Federal Election Reform, headed by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker. Here’s what the commission’s official report says:

“A good registration list will ensure that citizens are only registered in one place, but election officials still need to make sure that the person arriving at a polling site is the same one that is named on the registration list. In the old days and in small towns where everyone knows each other, voters did not need to identify themselves. But in the United States, where 40 million people move each year, and in urban areas where some people do not even know the people living in their own apartment building let alone their precinct, some form of identification is needed.”

“The electoral system cannot inspire public confidence if no safeguards exist to deter or detect fraud or to confirm the identity of voters. Photo IDs currently are needed to board a plane, enter federal buildings, and cash a check. Voting is equally important.”

ACRU Commentary

Destroying Your Vote

By Walter Williams Voter ID laws have been challenged because liberal Democrats deem them racist. I guess that's because they see blacks as being incapable of acquiring some kind of government-issued identification. Interesting enough is the fact that I've never heard of a challenge to other ID requirements as racist, such as those: to board a plane, open a charge account, have lab work done or cash a welfare check. Since liberal Democrats only challenge legal procedures to promote ballot-box integrity, the conclusion one reaches is that they are for vote fraud prevalent in many Democrat-controlled cities. There is another area where the attack on ballot-box integrity goes completely unappreciated. We can examine this attack by looking at the laws governing census taking. As required by law, the U.S. Census Bureau is supposed to count all persons in the U.S. Those to be counted include citizens, legal immigrants and non-citizen long-term visitors. The law also requires that illegal immigrants be a part of the decennial census. The estimated number of illegal immigrants ranges widely from 12 million to 30 million. Official estimates put the actual number closer to 12 million. Both citizens and non-citizens are included in the census and thus affect apportionment counts. Counting illegals in the census undermines one of the fundamental principles of representative democracy --- namely, that every citizen-voter has an equal voice. Through the decennial census-based process of apportionment, states with large numbers of illegal immigrants, such as California and Texas, unconstitutionally gain additional members in the U.S. House of Representatives thereby robbing the citizen-voters in other states of their rightful representation.

Carson: Voter ID Laws Not Racist

Republican presidential candidate Ben Carson dismissed the idea that restrictive anti-voter fraud requirements could be racist, echoing the position of Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach -- a champion of such measures who has called accusations of racism a personal insult. "I've made it my personal project, every time I visit a country outside the U.S., to ask what do they do to ensure the integrity of voting? There's not one single country anywhere -- first world, second world, it doesn't matter -- that doesn't have official requirements for voting," Carson said on Oct. 16. "My question to those people who say we're racist because we apply those standards: Are all the other countries of the world racist? I don't think so. Voting is an important thing. Obviously, you want to make sure that it's done by the appropriate people." Carson made the comments in an interview with The Topeka Capital-Journal ahead of a planned appearance in Topeka. Kobach, who is also a Republican, drew fire from Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who posted a tweet linking to a New York Times story on Kansas' plan to purge incomplete voter registrations older than 90 days. She commented: "We should be doing everything we can to get young people more engaged in our democracy, not putting up obstacles." The tweet was the second time Clinton has criticized Kobach in recent months. In August, Clinton called the purge of the incomplete registrations a "targeted attack on voting rights." In both cases, Kobach hit back. Last week, he said every noncitizen vote cancels out a citizen's vote. "The Hillary Clinton campaign is unhappy with the fact that Kansas has the most secure election system in the country," Kobach said.

About That Voter-ID Fracas in Alabama: Much Ado About Nothing

By Hans A. von Spakovsky Many on the left are in a ferment over Alabama's closure of some part-time Department of Motor Vehicles offices. It's being done for budgetary reasons, but liberals are claiming it's being done to raise a "barrier for poor and minority voters" in getting an ID to vote, according to the Washington Post. Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton said that "it's a blast from the Jim Crow past" and Jesse Jackson claimed that "this new Jim Crow isn't subtle." It's really a sign of how desperate critics of voter-ID laws are that they would raise such inflammatory, ridiculous claims over a budget issue that has nothing to do with race, Jim Crow, or discrimination. After all, they've been steadily losing their fight against voter ID in the courts, with only a few exceptions, and in the realm of public opinion. Alabama's new voter-ID law for both in-person and absentee voting went into effect last year. Despite the outcries that it would "suppress" votes, there have been no problems or complaints that anyone has been unable to vote because of the new requirement. It's been the same in all of the other states, such as Georgia and Indiana, that have implemented such ID laws. I've written numerous papers looking at turnout data in states after ID laws became effective -- ID laws have no discernible effect on decreasing or preventing turnout. Alabama has 44 driver's-license offices throughout the state. It apparently also had 31 satellite offices that were open only part-time and that accounted for less than 5 percent of the driver's licenses issued each year. Because of the budget passed by the state legislature, Alabama's state government had to "allocate scarce limited resources in Fiscal Year 2016," according to a letter sent by Governor Robert Bentley to Representative Terri Sewell (D., Ala). So the state government decided to close these satellite offices. Sewell is one of the critics whose "impulsive, ill-informed" comments about that decision were, Governor Bentley says, "based on irresponsible media reports." What all of the media and critics missed or deliberately ignored is that, in addition to being able to use a driver's license to meet the voter-ID requirement, you can get a free voter ID in every single county in the state. In addition to DMV offices, the secretary of state offers free voter IDs in all 67 counties through the local election registrar.

How Non-Citizens Can Swing Elections

By Hans von Spakovsky In an article in Politico, Mark Rozell, acting dean of the School of Policy, Government, and International Affairs at George Mason University, and Paul Goldman, a weekly columnist for the Washington Post, point out a fact that should greatly concern all Americans: that the presence of millions of noncitizens, both legal and illegal, could tilt the presidential election toward the Democrat Party and decide the election in favor of the eventual Democratic nominee. Voter Fraud Happens As I have outlined in many different articles and a recent book on voter fraud, illegal voting by noncitizens is a growing problem. Most election officials are not taking the steps necessary to detect or stop it, and many prosecutors including the current Justice Department seem reluctant to prosecute it. A study released in 2014 by three professors at Old Dominion and George Mason Universities in Virginia concluded that 6.4 percent of the noncitizen population voted illegally in the 2008 election, enough to have changed the outcome of various contests in a number of states. That includes the winner of North Carolina's electoral votes, which went to Barack Obama by a relatively small margin, since a majority of foreign-born residents favor the Democratic Party. That may also be why Virginia Gov. Terry McAuliffe, the governor of a battleground state, vetoed a bill that would have required jury commissioners to provide local election officials with the names of individuals called for jury duty from the state's voter registration list who were excused for not being U.S. citizens. Some States Have Congressional Districts They Shouldn't Have But as Rozel and Goldman accurately point out, noncitizens may be changing the outcome of presidential elections even without voting illegally. This is related to the problem of some states having more representatives in Congress than they should, and others being shortchanged unfairly due to the huge--and growing--population of illegal aliens whom the Obama administration and its political allies want to provide permanent amnesty. All of this stems from the way apportionment is conducted. There are 435 members of the U.S. House of Representatives. Under Sec. 2 of Article I of the Constitution and Sec. 2 of the Fourteenth Amendment, every ten years, after the "Enumeration" (the Census), we redistribute those 435 seats based on the "whole number of persons in each State." In other words, the number of members of the House that each state gets is based on the total population of each state relative to the total population of the U.S., which includes noncitizens. Thus, the upwards of 12 million illegal aliens present in the U.S., combined with other aliens who are here legally but are not citizens and have no right to vote, distort representation in the House.

Former AG Mukasey Hits Obama Justice Department Voting Section

Former Attorney General Michael Mukasey delivered a sharp criticism of the Obama Justice Department, particularly the DOJ Voting Section in a speech republished in Hillsdale College's Imprimis. In a broadside aimed at the Obama-era DOJ, Mukasey hits the Department's biased and partisan law enforcement policies. Mukasey's speech should be required reading for every Presidential campaign. Mukasey revisits the dismissal of the voter intimidation case against the New Black Panther Party by Eric Holder and other political appointees shortly after the 2009 inauguration: During the 2008 election, two members of the New Black Panther Party showed up at a polling place in Philadelphia dressed in black battle fatigues . . . In the waning days of the Bush administration, the DOJ's Voting Section filed a lawsuit and won a default judgment. But in the spring of 2009, after the Obama administration took over, those handling the case were directed to drop it. The only penalty left in place was a limited injunction that barred the person with the nightstick from repeating that conduct for a period of time in Philadelphia. And when the Office of Professional Responsibility looked into the matter, their finding criticized the bringing of the case more than the dropping of it. As one "handling the case," the benefit of hindsight has revealed the New Black Panther dismissal as a sign of things to come. By 2015, we've grown used to outcome-driven law enforcement from the Justice Department. Laws are mere suggestions, not commands to this administration. If the Obama administration disagrees with a law, they simply refuse to enforce it. In the New Black Panther case, the incoming Obama administration found it reprehensible that the civil rights laws would be used to protect anyone other than Democrat party constituencies. While the Office of Professional Responsibility behaved as General Mukasey described, the Justice Department Inspector General issued a report that documented the pervasive hostility inside the Voting Section to equal enforcement of the law to protect all Americans. Simply, if the victims of civil rights violations are white, they don't receive protection. This outcome is no accident. It is a result of beliefs held by civil servants working inside the Justice Department. If a Republican wins the Presidency, he or she would be well advised to listen to General Mukasey and implement fundamental changes to the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, particularly the Voting Section. Step One may well be remedial training on what the Rule of Law means. (PJ Media coverage of the New Black Panther dismissal can be found here, here and here.)

Obama Is Importing a New Electorate

By Robert Knight The White House has doubled down on its efforts to use massive immigration for political advantage. On September 17, traditionally known as Constitution Day, the White House chose to highlight it as Citizenship Day, announcing a national campaign by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to naturalize legal immigrants and turn them into millions of new voters by 2016. That's right. Tax dollars allotted to the agency responsible for safeguarding our borders and ensuring national security are being spent to facilitate a permanent political sea change next year. Reporting on the campaign, The New York Times noted that "about 60 percent of immigrants eligible to naturalize are Latino and about 20 percent are Asian, both groups that voted overwhelmingly for President Obama. Nearly a third of legal permanent residents eligible to naturalize are Mexican." Since 1980, the Hispanic vote differential for Democratic presidential candidates has never been less than 18 percent (Democrat John Kerry v. President George W. Bush in 2004) and has averaged 33 percent. With Hispanics making up more than 10 percent of the electorate and growing fast, this is no small advantage. Asian voters, who once were typically anti-communist, Southeast Asian refugees who voted overwhelmingly Republican, now heavily favor Democrats. In 2012, nearly three-quarters of Asian-American voters, who represent 3 percent of the electorate, voted for President Obama. These demographic trends bode well for Democrats, but for a White House looking to establish permanent, one-party rule, it is never enough. Hence, Homeland Security's campaign to naturalize 8.8 million green card holders as fast as possible. Last November, President Obama created the White House Task Force on New Americans "as part of a series of executive actions to fix our broken immigration system." J. Christian Adams, a former Justice Department Voting Section attorney and a Policy Board member of the , wrote on April 23rd in PJMedia.com that, "DHS sources report that racial interest groups such as La Raza (translated to "The Race") and the American Immigration Lawyers Association have been playing a central and influential role in rewriting the administration's immigration policies - both the public policies as well as internal and largely unseen guidelines." The National Council of La Raza's former Senior Vice President for the Office of Research, Advocacy and Legislation, Cecilia Munoz, an assistant to the president and director of the Domestic Policy Council, co-chairs the Task Force on New Americans. "Her particular area of expertise is immigration policy, which she covered at NCLR [La Raza] for twenty years," says her White House web page. Her co-chair is Leon Rodriguez, who Mr. Adams said was "a central player in the radicalization of Eric Holder's Civil Rights Division." With the country divided almost equally between the two major parties, a massive voter infusion of newly coined citizens could easily tip the balance, which is why Democrats relentlessly press for immigration amnesty while their media allies label any resistance to unlimited immigration as "hate," "bigotry" and "xenophobia." DHS is funneling millions of tax dollars to groups that back amnesty and naturalization. The agency's Citizenship and Integration Grant Program has awarded $53 million through 262 competitive grants since 2009 to organizations in 35 states and the District of Columbia, according to its website. Major grant recipients include Catholic Charities in several cities as well as various ethnic pressure groups in major urban areas all over the country. One perennial $250,000 grantee, Make the Road New York, recently sponsored the Fourth Annual TransLatina March to protest "Homotransphobia." Over the past week, DHS's United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) offered practice tests on cellphones for citizenship tests, 70 workshops and 200 naturalization ceremonies. America is a land of immigrants. Even Native Americans probably emigrated from Asia. And America has benefited from millions of legal immigrants who play by the rules and seek better lives. Mr. Obama is importing and bribing a new electorate with government largesse in order to fundamentally transform the United States. Immigration per se is not the issue. The combination of lawless immigration with ruthless political calculation, is. * Robert Knight is a senior fellow for the and a Washington Times contributor.