The Truth About Voter ID Law

After failing to pass a voter photo ID law in 2007 and 2009, the Texas State Legislature was finally successful in passing an ID law in the 2011 82nd session of the State Legislature, making Texas the 32nd State to pass such a law. According to a number of polls, over three-fourths of Americans don't believe it's a hardship to ask voters to produce a photo ID before casting their vote. Huge majorities of Hispanic voters were found to support photo ID laws. The Democratic Party and the NAACP disagree with this majority. The NAACP has even asked the United Nations to intervene to block State voter ID laws.

Democrats claim that there is little evidence of voter fraud and that the laws prevent minorities from voting. However, a former Democratic Representative from Alabama, Arthur Davis, revealed evidence of rampant fraud in Alabama African-American districts. "The most aggressive contemporary voter suppression in the African-American community is the wholesale manufacture of ballots at the polls and absentee, in parts of the Black Belt," Mr. Davis said. "Voting the names of the dead, and the nonexistent, and the too mentally impaired to function, cancels out the votes of citizens who are exercising their rights." The State Chairman of Indiana's Democratic Party recently resigned as a result of an investigation of election fraud in the 2008 Democratic Primary election. Investigators believe 150 of the 534 signatures the Obama campaign turned in for St. Joseph County may have been forged. Jack Kelly of REAL CLEAR POLITICS recently wrote: "This year (2011) there have been investigations, indictments or convictions for vote fraud in California, Texas, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Georgia, North Carolina and Maryland. In all but one case, the alleged fraudsters were Democrats."

Contrary to Democratic Party spokesperson's claims, laws requiring photo IDs do not suppress minority voting. In Georgia, African-American voter turnout for the midterm election in 2006 was 42.9%. After Georgia passed the ID law, African-American turnout in the 2010 midterm election was 50.4%. Minority voter turnout also rose in Indiana and Mississippi after IDs were required. According to REAL CLEAR POLITICS, researchers at the universities of Delaware and Nebraska after examining election data from 2000 through 2006 concluded: "Concerns about voter identification laws affecting turnout are much ado about nothing." In the 2008 U. S. Supreme Court's decision upholding Indiana's ID law, liberal Justice John Paul Stevens wrote for the 6-3 majority: "There is no question about the legitimacy or importance of a state's interest in counting only eligible voter's vote."

Still Democrats charge that measures to prevent voter fraud are racist Republican plots aimed at preventing minorities from voting. U. S. Representative Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, D-Florida, Chair of the Democratic National Committee, recently said: "Republicans want to literally drag us back to Jim Crow laws." Adrienne Cadik, Chair of the Montgomery County Democratic Party, when asked by the COURIER about the Texas photo ID law replied: "I think it's a disgrace to try to deny people the right to vote." In a speech at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library, Attorney General Eric Holder recently announced a full scale assault on the state voter ID laws upheld by the Supreme Court.

When Democrats are losing an argument, they resort to playing the race card. However, history does not treat the Democrats favorably with regard to race relations. The national Republican Party was founded in 1854 by mid-western abolitionists opposed to the spread of slavery. By the time of the 1860 presidential election won by Abraham Lincoln, the majority of Americans opposed to slavery had become Republicans, and the Democrat Party had become controlled by those favoring slavery. In the infamous 1857 U. S. Supreme Court Dred Scott decision that denied African-Americans the right to citizenship and the right to sue in Court, seven Democrat Justices voted for the ruling, while the two Republican Justices dissented.

The Jim Crow laws mentioned by Representative Wasserman-Schultz were passed and enforced by Democrats with the assistance of the KKK. It was the Democrats in the early 1900s that used the poll tax to suppress African-American voter turnout. And in Texas, African-Americans were prohibited from voting in the Democratic Primary election until 1944, when the U. S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that declared the Texas Democratic Party was not a white-only, private organization that could prohibit African-Americans from voting in the Democrat Primary election.

The photo ID law, similar to the one upheld by the U. S. Supreme Court and overwhelmingly approved by the Texas Legislature, should be allowed to be enforced. Only eligible voters should be allowed to vote.