Blog: Voting Laws and the Obama Administration
It is increasingly apparent that the Obama Administration wants unrestricted access to the voting booth for all who want to vote – legally or not! In this most recent case the Department of Justice joined challenges to voting laws in Wisconsin and Ohio. Wisconsin passed a law that required showing photo ID in order to vote and in Ohio a new law reduced early voting and eliminated Golden Week, a five- or six-day period when Ohioans could both register to vote and cast a ballot. Obama’s Justice Department does not like any of these laws.
Eric Holder is using the old arguments that were used successfully in Pennsylvania when our voter ID was challenged — minorities are being discriminated against because they are less likely to have photo ID. Okay . . . let’s ask the questions: In today’s modern society how can anyone exist without photo ID? How can you cash a check, open a banking account or any other account as far as that goes, rent an apartment? You get the picture. Without photo ID how can anyone be an engaged member of society?
A 2008 study released by the Heritage Foundation provides proof that illegal aliens and immigrants with green cards are committing rampant voter fraud in the United States. Many government officials — mostly liberals — claim that illegal aliens voting is not a major problem, conservative activists respond that while the potential number identified may be small, an election can be decided by a few votes. In 2000, the presidential race between Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush was decided by a few hundred votes in Florida.
The fraud “denialists” also must have missed the news coverage of the double voters a couple years ago in North Carolina and the fraudster in Tunica County, Miss. — a member of the NAACP’s local executive committee — who was sentenced in 2012 to five years in prison for voting in the names of ten voters, including four who were deceased. (NOTE: The NAACP is listed as a plaintiff in the Ohio lawsuit.)
And then there’s the story of the former deputy chief of staff for Washington mayor Vincent Gray, who was forced to resign after news broke that she had voted illegally in the District of Columbia even though she was a Maryland resident. Perhaps they would like a copy of an order from a federal immigration court in Florida on a Cuban immigrant who came to the U.S. in April 2004 and promptly registered and voted in the November election.
On the early voting issue, this from Eugene Kontorovich of the Washington Post: “For all its conveniences, early voting threatens the basic nature of citizen choice in democratic, republican government. In elections, candidates make competing appeals to the people and provide them with the information necessary to be able to make a choice. Citizens also engage with one another, debating and deliberating about the best options for the country. Especially in an age of so many nonpolitical distractions, it is important to preserve the space of a general election campaign — from the early kickoff rallies to the last debates in October — to allow voters to think through, together, the serious issues that face the nation.
More fundamentally, early voting changes what it means to vote. . . Voting then becomes an incoherent summing of how various individuals feel at a series of moments, not how the nation feels at a particular moment. This weakens civic cohesiveness, and it threatens to substitute raw preferences and momentary opinion for rational deliberation. Of course, those eager to cast early will be the most ideological — but these are precisely the voters who would benefit most from taking in the full back and forth of the campaign.”
These most recent actions by the Obama Administration are but the latest since last year’s Supreme Court ruling that struck down a major provision of the Voting Rights Act used to monitor states with a history of discrimination — which, by the way, Ohio nor Wisconsin have such a history.
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