Argument Against Voter ID Laws Is Itself Racist
Attorney General Eric Holder has been attempting to quell the rising tide of states opting for voter identification laws. Not even delving deeply into the issue raises the immediate question of why the top law enforcement officer in the country would be opposing efforts to maintain integrity in our election system. A government that is dependent on the electoral process should have a vested interest in ensuring electoral integrity. Contrary to the administration’s rhetoric, voter ID laws have nothing to do with racism even though their prima facie argument is entirely based on it.
This past week U.S. District Court Judge Eric Melgren ruled that Arizona and Kansas can, and have every legal right to, establish and enforce their new voter ID laws. Both states had enacted new requirements for voters to provide proof of citizenship with some form of government recognized identification. Holder’s Department of Injustice prevented the Election Assistance Commission from issuing amended federal forms in those states to reflect the change. The states sued the federal government, and have won, at least for now. After the ruling, Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach exclaimed, “This is a huge victory … for the whole cause of states’ rights.”
In their court arguments, Holder’s DOJ claimed that voter ID laws suppress voter turnout and that there is “no such thing as voter fraud.” Such a statement is nothing short of hyperbolic coming from an administration with deep roots in Chicago, which owes much of its infamy to historic voter fraud and election tampering. Holder himself hails from New York, which has its own blemished record of election tampering, as any student of Tammany Hall could attest.
Holder argues that being required to display a photo ID at a voting booth is “racist,” since it’s discriminatory to poor people who may not have one, or be intimidated at the polling station if they have to present one. From a logical perspective, at best this can be deemed fraudulent and specious. Those who Holder et al claim to be the victims of voter ID laws must have valid government identification to receive Medicaid, be issued welfare checks, to have a bank account to cash welfare checks, board planes, register at hotels, drive vehicles, and just about every point of transaction where identity must be validated. If requiring a valid form of identification is an affront to our civil rights as citizens, why are all of those institutions and establishments not charged with civil rights violation? The answer is obvious: we must be able to verify that we are who we claim to be, and it is no violation of our civil rights to be so required.
Since it’s logical to validate identity at the polling booth, which increases electoral integrity, we can only wonder at the real intent behind the opposition to voter ID legislation.
The rhetorical tool they employ to demean and minimize voter ID laws is brilliant. When logic can be suspended, allege racism. It seems to work so well with the uninformed voter and the servile mainstream media. Pathetically, though, their very argument is fundamentally based on racism itself. For their argument infers that blacks and Hispanics are not intelligent enough, or somehow incapable of procuring government-recognized photo ID! It’s not a matter of poverty, as they claim, since such valid ID is required for receipt of government services. So inherently their argument is race-based, and by definition, racist.
And let’s not be so naïve to believe that this was all accidental. Going back to LBJ’s “Great Society” programs and the “War on Poverty,” the doling of governmental “freebies” and goodies was intended to buy fealty from the impoverished voter base. This was validated by LBJ’s own words when he said, “I’ll have those n****** voting Democratic for the next 200 years.”
Even the resistance efforts against voter ID laws is corrupt. Just this past week, according to the Associated Press, “Pennsylvania Democrats were caught on surveillance tape reportedly accepting cash bribes in return for opposing voter ID in the Pennsylvania legislature. Gifts of Tiffany’s jewelry were also given to Democrat legislators from Philadelphia, reportedly in exchange for “NO” votes on a Pennsylvania voter ID bill that passed in 2012. Despite this evidence, Pennsylvania Attorney General Kathleen Kane has not charged any officials. Kane is a Democrat.”
With as much damage as Obamacare is wreaking across the country, it’s hard to imagine anything in it being more nefarious than we’ve already observed. But believe it or not, a few months ago a more sinister aspect of the “health care” law came to light. As reported by the Washington Examiner, “Gregg Phillips of Voters Trust and Catherine Engelbrecht of True the Vote discovered that an organization called Demos, which is funded by leftwing billionaire George Soros, has published a document detailing how the Obamacare law is written in such a way as to help Democrats get elected by using the healthcare law to register multimillions of low income citizens to vote. This led Phillips to declare, ‘I think it is the biggest voter registration fraud scheme in the history of the world.’”
The Demos document is titled, “Building a Healthy Democracy: Registering 68 Million People to Vote Through Health Benefit Exchanges,” and has been the topic of extensive discussion on many leftist websites, including Mother Jones, Daily Kos, Talking Points Memo, the League of Women Voters, and Project Vote.
This should be an affront to all Americans, regardless of partisan affiliation, that one major party would be so heavily invested in “gaming” the system. Perhaps we all should ponder the possibilities of why it is not.
Associated Press award winning columnist Richard Larsen is President of Larsen Financial, a brokerage and financial planning firm in Pocatello, Idaho and is a graduate of Idaho State University with degrees in Political Science and History and coursework completed toward a Master’s in Public Administration. He can be reached at rlarsenen@cableone.net.